One project, several contractors

Many projects are delivered by several contractors at once. A fit-out might have a main contractor for the building work, a specialist for the mechanical and electrical services, a joinery firm, an IT installer and a furniture supplier. Each has its own contract, its own programme and its own view of what it is responsible for.

Each contract can be sound on its own terms and the project can still fail. The risk sits in the gaps between the contracts: work that each contractor believes belongs to another, a sequence that nobody owns, a delay in one trade that stops three others. Running a project across several contractors is mostly the work of managing those gaps.

One programme above the contractors' programmes

Each contractor will produce a programme for its own work. These are useful, and none of them is the project programme. The project needs one master programme, owned by the project manager, that shows every contractor's work in sequence and marks where one depends on another.

Suppose the joinery cannot be measured until the walls are finished, and cannot be fitted until the floor is laid. Those links belong in the master programme, with dates. When the wall finishing slips by a week, the master programme shows at once what follows from it, and the project manager can tell the joinery firm before it arrives on site to find nothing ready.

Update the master programme on a fixed cycle from what has actually happened, not from what each contractor hopes will happen.

Write down every interface

An interface is any point where one contractor's work meets another's. The electrician's cables meet the joiner's cabinets. The IT installer's equipment needs the power and cooling the services contractor provides. The furniture supplier needs a clean, finished floor.

Keep a simple list of these interfaces. For each one, record who provides what, by when, to what standard, and who checks it. Then make sure each contract matches the list. Many disputes on multi-contractor projects start at an interface that one contract describes one way and another contract does not mention at all.

One line of instruction

Every contractor should take instructions from one place. That is the project manager, acting within the authority the sponsor has given. Contractors will often try to resolve things directly with each other, or with the sponsor, because it feels quicker. Sometimes it is. More often it produces an agreement that the programme does not reflect and that nobody records.

Encourage contractors to talk to each other about coordination. Require that anything which changes scope, cost or programme comes through the project manager and is written down. The sponsor should pass any request that occurs to them on site to the project manager, not to the person doing the work.

Coordinate in the same room, regularly

Hold a regular coordination meeting with every contractor whose work is active or about to start. Work through the next few weeks of the master programme, the open interfaces and the problems each contractor can see coming. Record the actions, with an owner and a date for each, and start the next meeting with them.

The value of the meeting is that each contractor hears the others. A services contractor who learns in the meeting that the ceiling is going up early can move its own work, where a separate conversation would have come too late.

Hold each contractor to its own contract

Contractors will sometimes ask to be excused for problems caused by others, and sometimes they will be right. The project manager's job is to know which. That depends on accurate records: what was instructed, when each interface was ready, what each contractor reported and when.

With those records, delay and cost can be placed where they belong, fairly and without heat. Without them, every problem becomes everyone's problem, and the sponsor pays for the confusion.

A single contractor would remove some of this work, and on some projects that is the right choice. Where the project needs several specialists, the coordination has to be done well by someone, and it should be planned from the first day.

We plan and run projects for owners and sponsors: scope, programme, budget, suppliers and reporting, through to handover.