The Benefits of Consultants for Construction Projects

A construction consultant is a seasoned professional with deep knowledge and experience in managing engineering and construction projects.

Project owners, general contractors, or subcontractors might engage a construction consultant to provide guidance and support throughout the project’s execution. These consultants offer specialized advice across all stages of the engineering and construction process, including early planning (such as business plan development, conceptual scope creation, and front-end engineering design (FEED)), execution (covering detailed engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC)), and project closeout (including pre-commissioning, commissioning, and startup).

Construction consultants assist both owners and contractors involved in engineering and construction projects by identifying potential risks, preventing issues before they arise, and resolving problems fairly and efficiently when they do occur. This approach significantly enhances the chances of a project’s success. Further benefits of consultants include fostering an open and collaborative environment where the owner and contractor work as partners rather than opponents, contributing to the project’s overall success.

Construction consultants can assist with project management, cost and schedule risk analysis and avoidance, schedule quality assurance and optimization, and claims prevention and dispute resolution. Long International provides all these services and more, as detailed on our Services web page. This blog post is the second in a two-part series on the role and benefits of a consultant for engineering and construction projects. This post focuses on construction schedule consultants and claims prevention services, while the first post addresses the role of a construction consultant, particularly in project management and risk analysis services.

Schedule quality assurance services are helpful because poorly prepared schedules do not provide reliable tools to quantify and allocate responsibility for project delays. Front-end schedule optimization services are beneficial because poor planning and scheduling during front-end planning phases, including during front-end engineering design (FEED), are significant factors that often lead to project failure. A construction schedule consultant may provide the following quality assurance, optimization services, and more.

• Review the critical path method (CPM) schedule vs. the project scope of work to ensure that all activities are included for all phases of the project, including engineering, procurement, construction, pre-commissioning, and startup.
• Evaluate schedule metrics to verify that the schedule integrity is compliant with standard industry practices.
• Review schedule logic, including verification of the proper use of activity successors and predecessors, logic relationships including lags, and constraints.
• Evaluate the reasonableness and completeness of the critical path and any near-critical path activity chains.
• Compare schedule updates to the baseline/rebaseline schedule to identify changes made to the current schedule, including the addition and/or deletion of activities, activity start and finish delays, activity duration changes, added constraints, and changes to the critical and near-critical paths.
• Assist with schedule optimization during front-end planning, including the development and optimization of the business plan level 1 master schedule, the conceptual plan level 2 project milestone schedule, and the FEED plan level 3 summary schedule.

A construction consultant providing claims prevention services can help a client avoid the costly consequences of resolving adversarial claims. Benefits of a consultant’s claims prevention services may include, but not be limited to, the following.

• Increase the client’s knowledge of contracts to facilitate the analysis of potential contract risks prior to signing contracts.
• Increase the client’s knowledge of basic claim entitlements and how to avoid them.
• Perform independent biddability and constructability reviews.
• Assist with the development and implementation of an integrated cost and schedule control system.
• Assist with adherence to the contractual change management system.
• Assist with the generation and preservation of appropriate project documentation, including contract correspondence.
• Provide or assist with the development of checklists for bid preparation, review and approval of as-planned schedules and schedule updates, site inspections prior to bidding, project documentation, problem identification and analysis, and contractor’s risk analysis to facilitate improved management and control of projects.
• Implement periodic reviews by senior management.
• Identify potential problems that may result in delays and cost overruns, assist with the determination and documentation of the cause and effects of delays and cost overruns, and recommend and implement mitigation procedures before problems escalate into disputes.
• Implement an effective dispute resolution process.

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