Support services consultants for building projects
stimations and scheduling are among the core functions of building contractors, as surely as moving earth or erecting walls. Yet smaller companies might choose to outsource those tasks, or large and complex projects might need extra support. Companies providing that support are in the construction business for sure, but they are not builders themselves.
“The easy way to describe it is that we’re there to remove obstacles for the project,” says Mike Kruse, Alaska location leader for Arcadis, a global full-service engineering consulting firm. Services beyond engineering include Kruse’s specialties: project management and construction management.
“Our bread-and-butter project is a client building new construction or remodeling an existing facility, something outside of their normal wheelhouse,” he says. “We come in and provide staff augmentation and expertise on project delivery. We help them from inception to close-out completion, into the warranty phase, and even getting them operationally moved in.” Post-construction activation and pre-construction preparation are, in his view, trickier than the relatively straightforward execution of a building plan.
Management could cover everything from permits through inspections. Brite Niezek, owner and lead consultant at Niezek Consulting, describes her role as assisting with planning, then providing monitoring and control, services that are central to effective project management.
Niezek says, “Once contracts are awarded, I help track actual costs against what’s been awarded, monitor spend rates compared to production rates—what they’ve actually accomplished in the field.” She can recommend changes to keep the project in line.
Critical notes are Kruse’s job too. “We can typically make three or four recommendations that lead to a decision that saves the project more than our fee,” he says. “If we can save the project that amount of money, we end up paying for ourselves.”
“Accounting tracks the money you’re burning that’s behind you. It’s sixty days behind you, and it won’t give you the information you need in time. It will tell you that you have run over budget after you’ve run over budget,” says Thad Phillips, vice president of Integrated Project Services (IPS) in Anchorage.
Phillips prefers to be involved in the early stages of preliminary budgeting and estimation. Then he applies the methodology of earned value management. “You’re looking at that amount of budget that you originally sanctioned or approved and you’re going, ‘How’re we doing? Are we still going to get this project for that budget?’ And through the process of earned value management, you keep tracking that,” he explains. “With this process, you can see where you are at any given time, and when you’re starting to run off the rails.”
He adds that consultants are usually more fluent in project management software. “People have a learning curve around using things like Microsoft Project or Primavera scheduling,” Lovelace says, so “having somebody who does it every day, all day, who is more proficient in it” can be more efficient.
Niezek agrees that in-house managers have a different focus. “They spend a lot more time in the field, not behind a desk. They often don’t have critical path scheduling experience using, like, Primavera P6 and Microsoft Project,” she says. Primavera P6 is an Oracle product, considered more robust than Microsoft’s project management platform.
Not that Niezek is afraid of getting her boots dirty. “I go to job sites to verify work in the field compared to what they’re invoicing,” she says. “There’s usually a construction manager onsite that verifies that kind of thing, but every now and then I like to go see for myself.” Niezek has a master’s degree in construction management and has worked in the industry for twenty-five years, so she knows what to look for.
Having an outsider’s view lets contractors focus on other tasks, according to Lovelace. “Most construction companies do have the skillset within the project manager role. But, like many other duties those people perform, it takes a long time. Part of outsourcing may be to free up their ability to do other things on the project,” he says.
“We help facilitate construction schedules from the shipyards,” Lovelace says, “coordinating all of efforts for reporting to the National Science Foundation.”
The science sector brought Lovelace into contact with nuclear reactors and cosmic telescopes. He says, “Do I know anything about particle accelerators? No. But do I understand critical path methodology and sequencing? Sure. So pair me up with a scientist and boom! We’ve got a plan.”
Whether an atom smasher, mine, or manufacturing plant, project managers have no end of potential customers. Lovelace says, “The skill set applies in different industries. You don’t have to be an expert in every aspect. I think that’s true in general contracting too: you outsource things like fire protection, mechanical, plumbing, and all those different subsets.”
At IPS, Phillips interfaces with a range of clients, including general contractors and engineering firms. “We deal a lot with corporations and larger entities that know what they need to get done or they have a structured process, and they want to get cost estimating and planning and scheduling done in accordance with industry standards or practices for large projects,” he says.
IPS can fill that niche better than organizations with ten times the staff. Phillips says, “It’s not uncommon to find large corporations that don’t necessarily have everything in place; processes, procedures, tools, organization, or structure might not be aligned right.”
Compartmentalizing project management can be an advantage for the contractor’s bottom line, as Kruse points out. “Our contract ends, and they don’t have another full-time staff running a capital projects development, always looking for the next project,” he says. “We come in, serve the project, and then depart and maintain the relationship long term without having salaries and benefits.” And that saves money on overhead costs.
“We have one customer that works on the Denali Highway: remote, don’t have cell service, building projects, and camping out,” Lovelace says. “We can do all the paperwork behind the scenes and help them submit to get paid.”
Niezek Consulting takes on smaller customers occasionally, but those aren’t Niezek’s preference. “I’m mostly working on really large projects. Those are the kind of projects that need specialized project controls and contract administration support,” she says. “If it’s a small project, a project manager or construction manager can handle it, but once it gets really big with a lot of pieces of the project—maybe a lot of years, a lot of phases—that’s when you need someone like me.”
For instance, Niezek Consulting was brought into a project in Arkansas where Walmart is adding seven buildings to a corporate campus.
Smaller contractors can still use project management consulting.Phillips says, “It’s applicable to even the small projects. You’re going to do a little remodel at your house, you go through the same fundamental process as a large company would.”
Phillips says IPS has done training for some clients, to help them become more self-sufficient. “We do have a few customers that are mom-and-pop or small contractors that recognized that they need to get a little more structure and formalized processes in place for estimating,” he says.
Kruse adds that scheduling is the most important skill that self-managers should learn. “The schedule is the live-or-die document because schedule drives cost, right? If you can reduce that duration, you reduce the overall project cost,” he says. “If you’re monitoring and controlling your schedule, you’re going to do better at monitoring and controlling your costs. And your quality is going to be there because you’re going to be able to assess where you need to prioritize your resources.”
“A lot of our team comes from a construction background, whether they were doing framing or mechanical installs or things like that. They got used to working on construction projects, and then they end up turning into really good managers because they’ve seen how the batter is made, so to speak, and they can find the pitfalls in construction,” Kruse says.
Phillips likewise worked for a major contractor, and then he became an estimations manager at BP. His colleague, IPS President Sagen Juliussen, was at ConocoPhillips, and they both learned that bigger isn’t always better. Phillips laughs as he recalls, “When we went from working for a contractor to major oil and gas company, we thought we’d be seeing this the holy grail of tools and stuff. And what we found was quite the opposite.”
Phillips and Juliussen are now certified project management professionals and estimating professionals, and they’ve worked for a gamut of companies from the North Slope to Valdez, “doesn’t matter if it’s an oil and gas producer, a refinery, the Alaska Railroad, the [US] Department of Defense, a private corporation that has XYZ as their business,” Philips says. “We’ve seen enough of it that we know how we can adapt and understand what they’re looking for pretty quick and then be able to respond and meet that in the format they want, whether it’s coding or specific training.”
Coding is a niche for Nu Solutions, where managed IT is part of the service package. Lovelace, who earned a construction management degree in Michigan, says, “I got really passionate about trying to help businesses implement technology, being able to use the tools out there to help manage projects better. In Alaska, it seemed like a lot of that was being outsourced to companies in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho.”
His goal for Nu Solutions, a “small boutique operation” with ten full-time staff, is to keep those tech-heavy contracts in Alaska.
An even smaller boutique, Niezek Consulting is a one-person shop. Niezek came to the field from the architecture side, even working an internship with a New York City developer on a high-rise. She realized that an architect’s plans must yield to budgets and schedules. “How it’s built becomes way more important, and that’s what ends up lasting, regardless of what the designer had in mind,” says Niezek. So she switched to the practical side of construction.
Sometimes engineering firms will engage support services themselves. Phillips says, “We have engineering clients that hire us, not because they don’t have that capability, but that capability may not be specialized for oil and gas, federal type stuff.” Some owners may require Primavera P6 schedules, he notes, and not every general contractor or full-service engineering firm will invest in that software.
Arcadis is an engineering firm with a project management division. Kruse notes that most of his colleagues are project managers, so the firm can offer those services separate from engineering contracts. “If there’s a need for a secondary design review, we’ve got resources that do that. We have cost estimating resources that could come in,” Kruse says. “We give a menu of options on what we’re going to provide.”
Consultations can even precede engineering. Juliussen says, “A lot of times our biggest value for customers quite often is early conceptual feasibility stages where they have done very little to no engineering, and they want us to come in and give an opinion on cost and planning of it. We are able to fill the gaps pretty easily without having to have engineering get further down the road.”
Phillips adds, “Because we’ve been kind of anchored in the construction side and our background is construction, we can work in that environment. A lot of times we can bring constructability to the conversation.”
Support services consulting almost sells itself—for clients who understand what they need. “Really what it comes down to is implementing earned value management, and that’s what the big corporations and the owners’ groups are looking for,” says Juliussen. “General contractors are realizing that if they’re not implementing earned value management principles in their daily processes, they’re starting to get left behind in the marketplace.”
He adds that distinguishing IPS from other consultants is getting easier for construction veterans like Phillips and himself. “We’re the dinosaurs that are still alive,” Juliussen says.
Robots are coming to replace the dinosaurs, however, and Lovelace is helping. “We’re working directly with Oracle as a software developer, taking previous plans as models to do predictive planning in the future,” he says, so that AI tools can shoulder some of consultants’ mental load. He compares it to computer-aided design that draftsmen have been using since the ‘80s and ‘90s.
Whenever that product is released, one feature it will not boast is the motivation that project managers have when they behold the concrete manifestation of a job well done, whether it’s a North Slope production module or a family playground. Phillips says, “Being able to go back and see your work is always a reminder to make sure that you do your best work.”