Over the last few years, the contracting landscape in the UK has seen considerable growth. Between the years of 2008 and 2016, contractor numbers increased by more than a third to around 1.09 million and contributed roughly £109 billion to the economy in 2015 alone.
When it comes to the world of construction, a contractor is defined as someone who directly employs or engages construction workers or manages construction work. Providing short-term access to key skills, it’s easy to see why the world of construction falls into the contracting, or self-employed world.
However, several issues can often fall upon a contractor before they’ve even begun their construction job. Below, you’ll find some mistakes you should avoid before you even start a job.
Insurance
The first thing you need to ensure you have, before anything else, is construction insurance. Helping to give you peace of mind, you know that you’ll be covered should anything go wrong during the construction process. Companies such as Arthur J. Gallagher provide dedicated services to developers and contractors in this area of expertise to ensure they can conduct jobs without worry.
Scope
Following this, you’ll need to define the scope of the work you need to do. If this isn’t done, it’ll become difficult to define the work and establish objectives and the deliverables for the project, and could result in uncompleted or abandoned jobs, which is why the job scope needs to be clearly defined in the first instant.
Execution
Following the scope, you’ll need to establish an execution plan, as not having one could have a detrimental effect on the overall project. This will be completed with the project strategy and will outline the resources, both human and material, that you’ll need to complete the overall project successfully.
Calculated risk
All construction projects are exposed to risk in some way or another, whether they can be seen or not. Because of this, you’ll need to ensure you have a full risk assessment completed before beginning the project. This will allow you to see all the potential dangers that could occur during the project, which could leave you out of pocket or with incomplete work.
Schedule
This may sound very self-explanatory, but having a complete, thorough schedule is highly important. This will allow you to see how long certain elements of the project should take, while seeing the dates expected milestones should be completed and remove the risk of work not being completed promptly, helping to eradicate the risk of unfinished work or unexpected costs this could leave you with.
Site evaluation
A lot of construction projects don’t go to plan and encounter delays, which can cost more money. Because of this uncertainty, you’ll need to create a thorough evaluation plan that allows you assess all of these issues that could become detrimental to the project, which can help to resolve any possible conflicts later on too.
While there are other issues you may encounter along the way, these six helpful steps should help you to avoid a lot of them and get the work completed in a safe and timely manner.
