A successful project is much more than just finishing on time; it’s also about finishing the job in a professional way and making clients happy. With a follow-through strategy, you build your company’s reputation.

Consider following up with a client/GC final walkthrough, and if you can’t get them to do the walkthrough, meet them for coffee within 30 days. It is a great use of everyone’s time to use a prepared set of questions to help guide you through this meeting. Gather their comments for lessons-learned.

Capture before, during, and after photos to illustrate successes, good points and failures or items that need to be addressed in the future. Similar to the pre-construction meeting, it’s time now to have your “Lessons Learned” meeting internally. You want to gather your field leaders, hopefully a few of the field crew, estimator, project manager, administrators, etc.

Agenda

You will pull your agenda from your SOP and use that to review all the pertinent aspects of the project, such as:

• Bid to final cost
• Bid time hours to final crew hours
• Bid material costs per phase or floor to final costs
• Schedule: do the semi deep dive on bid schedule vs.
• final schedule
• Change orders: “Did we collect effectively?” “Did we make a profit on each change?” “Did we document each change effectively for the field?”
• Make sure you let the field team feel comfortable during this conversation so you can really understand the issues with tools, equipment, scope clarity, etc.
• Update your master lessons learned sheet in your SOP
• Distribute the end results to other projects so they can gain from the lessons learned

Sponsor a project barbecue celebration for a friendly lookback. Because you started the punch list before the project completion, now you can show the completed document with actions and completion dates. Include photos from your smartphone.

Using digital pictures and notes from your team lead about your project, produce a top 10 strengths story for future bids and marketing materials. Use their top 10 weaknesses to fix for next time.

Check into automating your construction management processes with the latest construction software. There is a contractor suite on the market that automates workflows from the bid, to build, through production management to completion, with features to handle change orders and alternates. Highlight, measure, record, assemble, summarize, price, submit, track, and manage all of your projects on a laptop screen and send PDFs of plans to the tablets at the job site.

You may be familiar with On-Screen Takeoff or Quick Bid. These trusted software products work together with the company’s Digital Production Control. These integrated applications speed up the process and improve accuracy for material takeoff, estimating, and project tracking. The contractor suite compiles a digital, historical record of jobs for a jump start on the next bid and provides time-stamped approvals of changes in scope and completions.

The digital transformation has made great advances in project management to every business and industry. Keep up with new technology that makes your job easier.