Are you by any chance the assigned person to lead your new office construction?
Excited but overwhelmed at the same time? Well it should be!
Building an office space is building a home not just for you, but for everyone who works with you in your company. This is indeed a huge task and you should be proud to have this assigned to you.
Here's a quick guideline we would like to share to help you successfully ace that assignment.
1. Hire a Designer
A designer will help you put into material your visualization. When you hire a designer, you should make sure that you have your requirements ready. These requirements are what your company needs in operations. This usually includes the following--number of seats or number of employees, desk size, room divisions and room use, company branding guidelines, and for her to make a realistic design, you should also disclose your company budget.
In the Philippines, most general contractors give the design as part of their whole build package. However, if you want the bid of the contractor to be based on the final design already, you can hire the designer first and have the bidding contractors base their pricing or costing on that for a more fair approach.
2. Hire a Project Manager / Construction Manager
Unless you are the dedicated facilities personnel in your company, it is recommended that you ask approval from your management to hire a project manager who will work alongside you in overseeing and managing the project in whole. Aside from the fact that it is their expertise to manage construction, your main job will not be affected if you have a project manager with you who knows how to look over your office construction project in a professional way.
3. General Contractor Bid
Once your designer has finalized the design of your office space, you can now communicate with different general contractors so they can start with their proposals. In hiring your general contractor, it is best that you do a background check of their company and their track record.
4. Project Timeline
Now you have a project manager and a general contractor. Build should start soon as your general contractor secure the necessary permits. From here, you should be able to project a timeline that you can present to your management. The timeline should include weekly goals where you check the progress of the construction. You can ask the project manager to prepare this for you and give you an informative weekly update. In the construction site, progress updates should always be backed up with photos.
5. Handover & Punchlist
Once you've reached the final stage of the construction and everything should be in place, together with the project manager, you will do a final check of the premises to make sure each item promised to be installed are there. The usual scenario is that you schedule a day to do a cross-check with the bill of materials and the final plan with the actual build. Now, should there be missing items or should there be unacceptable works with the handover, this will form part of your punchlist. You will go through the punchlist until your contractor successfully finishes everything in here before you can issue a certificate of completion to them.
6. Maintenance
Success! You're done with the construction of your company's new office! Now, don't forget to hire your maintenance and upkeep for your new second home!
