Robert Merry is an independent Stone Consultant and Project Manager who also runs training courses on project management. He continues this series of his thoughts on successful estimating and project management with a discussion of: Handovers – this time from the Estimator to the Contract Manager.

Last month I talked about the importance of handovers from Contracts Director to Contracts Team.

This month I want to discuss the most important handover meeting in the contract race – from estimator to the contracts manager/team.

Never underestimate the importance of this meeting (sorry for the pun).

The estimator has poured over a set of bills, specifications and drawings, succeeding where others have miserably failed. Making sense of a huge jigsaw puzzle of information and carving the results into a compliant tender. They may have been to site, certainly talked to suppliers and probably the main contractor’s estimator. They will understand the project more than anyone else (on paper at least).

If you are called to a pre-contract meeting to present your tender, the presence of the estimator could be vital. When the contractor asks those probing questions about the unidentifiable room with the unrecognisable stone specified in it, your estimator will save the day – hopefully.

An encyclopaedic knowledge of the job will generate the answer, which will simply role off your estimator’s tongue. And when the project is won and the ink has dried on the contract, you need all that knowledge transferred as smoothly and as swiftly as possible to the contracts team.

Time needs to be given to this task. Whatever the size of the project, don’t try to rush the process. Expect the estimator and the contracts manager/team to go back over the same ground several times.

They can’t ask all the questions and hope to relay all the information in one meeting. Make sure the estimator has time to discuss the project when needed and is part of the contracts team, at least in the initial stages. It’s an on-going process.

Create an environment in the office where the two departments respect their differences, but also understand they are both part of the overall delivery team.

It’s important that the physical environment encourages co-operation too. We all like to create departments – the estimating department, the contracts department, the accounts department… The open plan office sounds like a good alternative but the raucous argument emanating from contracts over the provision of labour on-site will upset the quiet concentration of the estimators, who will be deciphering conflicting information from architect, designer and builder in the tender documents. So, to have separate departments makes sense, but they will need to come together somewhere, sometime, and often at pretty short notice for variable amounts of time.

One company I know has estimating on one floor and contracting on another. Strangely, estimating below contracting – which I say only because the flow of information feels more natural downward from the source and anything flowing uphill usually takes some pushing.

Another has estimating and contracting in separate buildings a mile or so apart. I know companies sometimes develop in haphazard ways, shaped by successes and failures (I used to call it organic growth, which was my excuse for haphazard). But the right environment, both physical and psychological will help make the handover, and ultimately the job, successful.

The estimator will be anxious to move on to the next tender, burning a proverbial hole in their drawers (desk, that is). The contracts team will have fitters, delivery drivers and main contractors breathing down their necks. But however much the next deadline beckons, in my book, there’s no point worrying about the next job if we can’t make a profit on this one.

The currency of profit in this instance is information. To relay information and, more importantly, to absorb it properly, takes time. Make sure you have enough of it.

Robert Merry ran his own stone company for 17 years and is now an independent Stone Consultant and Project Manager. He also delivers training programmes on all aspects of Estimating and Project Management – details and dates on the website.

Tel: 0207 502 6353 / 07771 997621