Home | How City Governments Can Benefit From a One-Stop Solution for Pre-Construction

How City Governments Can Benefit From a One-Stop Solution for Pre-Construction

California’s City governments/municipalities and their departments are required to plan and navigate an increasing number of construction or renovation projects. These projects come in a variety of scopes including inspections, infrastructure, public works, housing, offices, schools, medical facilities, seismic/soft-story retrofits, and more. Furthermore, the increased demand from housing and the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic isn’t making this task any easier. Hence, the need for Cities to identify a proven and agile partner for end-to-end architecture and engineering services. The question is how would a City select the right partner? Here are the key guidelines.

4 Key Benefits of an Ideal Pre-Construction Partner

1. A Dependable Single Point of Contact

The ideal partner supports the City with a single, trustworthy point of contact or Project Manager who helps to understand the budget and schedule upfront, then deliver on them. This involves a deep understanding of the City’s needs and objectives followed by effective collaboration with all stakeholders to deliver projects as they were planned.

Ideally, the pre-construction partner is readily available to address any queries during construction as well.

2. Ability to Scale

The ideal partner understands that the City works on a range of projects and that some of them come up on relatively short notice. Therefore, the ability to take on any type of project at any time becomes critical to the partnership and the needs of the citizens.

3. Saves Overall Costs

The ideal partner specializes in managing resources to deliver maximum cost predictability and transparency in a fixed-fee pricing model. The right balance of these attributes leads to cost-effectiveness in the design phase.

4. Saves Time

Few pre-construction firms are able to evolve from traditional processes that lead to outdated turnaround times. The ideal partner is an effective single point of contact that streamlines and innovates architecture and engineering processes to help the City move much faster to construction without coordinating with multiple stakeholders.

5. Delivers projects safely during the coronavirus pandemic

Here’s a bonus point for you.

Safety first. The ideal partner recognizes the City’s need to safely deliver new and existing projects on time. Therefore, it’s able to adapt effortlessly and keep the pre-construction phase moving. In some cases, even run on modern or online processes that are already equipped to safely work in-line with social distancing and lockdowns.

How to Identify the Right Pre-construction Partner?

Now that you’re aware of the benefits, you ought to know what to look for in a company to manage your architecture and engineering deliverables. Four high-impact attributes are:

Responsiveness

This attribute is often overlooked in the selection process but it is a major factor that influences the timelines and quality of the project. Wouldn’t you prefer to smoothly connect with your project manager or better yet, have real-time and transparent access to the progress of your project?

Support with approvals

Government projects often go through multiple levels of buy-ins and approvals, including that of City Councils. Hence, the agency/department driving a project should look for a partner that is equipped and willing to address design or engineering concerns along the way to make the City’s job easier.

An innovative delivery method

Overall, the construction industry has been slower to innovate despite the speed of the Tech industry, especially in California. City projects often cover multiple locations and buildings so the impact is much worse for them! The need of the hour is technology-enabled or online services to cut down turnaround times and cost inefficiencies.

Ability to take on a project any time

Considering the demands of pandemics, earthquakes, wildfires on top of traditional requirements, the modern architecture and engineering supplier needs to be more agile and scalable than ever before. This helps Cities deliver development or renovation projects much faster to the community.

Experience and Superior Quality

This attribute may seem obvious. However, when it comes to Cities, they need access to a partner that consistently delivers superior quality with width and depth of experience in pre-construction service categories, namely:

Architecture
Civil engineering
Structural engineering
Energy permit calculations for Title 24 & CALGreen
Engineering for Mechanical, Electrical, and Plumbing

How to Get Started

Design Everest brings experience from 14 years and 4500+ projects across California. Our excellent customer satisfaction ratings are a testament to the tailored and one-stop solution approach to projects.