The decision has been made to renovate and reconfigure your existing space to rearrange the team, reconfigure departments, accommodate new personnel and shake off Covid cobwebs. Your first thought is: ‘I need a fail-proof game plan.’
Proper early planning is the key to ensuring that a potential mountain of problems gets reduced to a few small bumps or even better a smooth road.
1. Make sure that your Construction Vendor is an expert in renovations of occupied spaces. This vendor is usually the best and the most knowledgeable partner you will have when it comes to planning a phased construction project in your facility. Those projects mostly involve IT, Audio-Visual, Security, and/or Furniture components. Construction firms that specialize in renovations of occupied spaces, true experts in this field, know what needs to happen from every vendor’s standpoint to run a seamless project, and will advise you on each milestone from planning stages to post-construction.
2. Share your organization’s operations with your Construction Vendor: the flow of your workspace, areas of most sensitivity and importance to your organization’s day-to-day functionality, areas of no access. Your construction partner should be prepared to dig deep to understand your challenges and to account for them as you prepare for your project. We, at Horgan, spend hours getting to know and interviewing our clients in order to understand how their operations function from department to department, from team to team. How their people use the space, how they would like to improve the use of the space. What is the Number 1 thing that they would love to add to their environment? DO share that information freely and without holding back. It will help with early planning and expose/resolve potential red flags.
Often, the reason behind facility reconfiguration and renovation is functional and/or aesthetic. However, this may also be the right time to address important mechanical, electrical, and IT components that present a problem and plague the performance of your facility on a daily basis.
Your Construction Vendor has to uncover those hot button issues, be it HVAC, IT, or A/V, and help you address them during the project. Omitting it could cost dearly down the road.
3. Rely on your trusted construction services vendor to come up with a detailed project plan that integrates your entire team, even vendors not under their contract. It is a must. Professionals in the field of renovation of occupied spaces do this as a given. Here at Horgan, we either provide those services under our contract roof or work with your other vendors to shape the project at hand. Share your IT, Audio-Visual, Security, Furniture vendor information early on, at the very inception of the project. Construction vendor-initiated integration and collaboration will not only build a cohesive relationship that will carry your project through its entire duration but help your bottom line as well. It will leave less room for errors and changes, and it will condense the schedule.
When you hire a construction firm that specializes in renovations of occupied spaces, when the expectations are set early on, when your entire team collaborates from the get-go, you, the Owner/Facility/Operations Manager, win. You win on know-how, effectiveness, diminished disruption, and increased safety for your employees, and ultimately end up with the most successful project you have ever managed.
Leyla Salehli
Horgan General Contractor Inc.
Plan – Construct – Maintain
Greater Philadelphia Area
Specializing in Renovations of Occupied Facilities
lsalehli@horgangc.com
www.horgangc.com
