Is Your Real Estate Team Still Managing Projects Like It’s 2010?
If your corporate real estate team is still juggling spreadsheets, email chains, and siloed updates, you might be stuck in a time warp—and it’s costing you.
Let’s start with the basics, project management is a structured methodology that follows a tried and tested route from start to finish along the project lifecycle to support the delivery of some change in the business world. From a CRE point of view, property projects tend to be about all things changing on the estate of a client. From transaction projects to buy, sell or renegotiate a property interest to construction, fitout and facilities projects that are more physical in nature and concern the design and build, fitout, installation and operation of a location.
Project management software tends to cover a number of aspects but mainly our experience from a real estate point of view is the following phases:
1 – Project Feasibility – 90% of all the projects we produced a feasibility upon never then went forward. The scoping and feasibility phase is key to understand if the project is worth doing and covers the creation of if the benefit can be realised, how much would it cost to deliver, what is the outcome we want and is it worth the investment. From a property point of view this is a key phase as often there is more potential work that funds so properly scoping out the project is key to ensure the biggest benefit return on investment.
2 – Project design – both initial design and complex design depend on the type of project, if you are doing a construction project then likely there will be multiple resources involved and many iterations of design however the point here is to work out what the scope of the change is and how best to approach it. Renegotiating a lease, designing a workplace, lamping an estate, the design is critical success.
3 – Project Procurement – often projects for cooperate real estate are delivered by others, brokers to help find a location, transaction managers to help the deal, construction contractors, fit out contractors, architects and so on. The procurement phase is a key stage to ensure competitiveness as well as locking down a delivery price for the work. An example here is that the feasibility study at the start of the process will have identified the outline price, the design narrows that down like a funnel to +/- 50% and by the procurement phase the skill of the project manager should be to get that down to +/- 20% with contingency.
4 – Project Implementation or Delivery – contracts in place, suppliers ready to go, the fun can begin. Often starting with a kick-off meeting on site, the works begin, and the process now is to manage the delivery of the contractors / transaction leads etc. Reporting and close monitoring of the time, budget and quality of the processes become the 3 points on the triangle to watch.
5 – Project Handover – For construction this is a huge component of the work and signifies the end of the process and return of the site with hopefully a snag free fully constructed building in place. For a transaction this is less of a fanfare however often denotes the end of the change and begins a stabilisation phase.
6 – Project Stabilisation and Close out – the dust has settled and the final thing to do is review the change for how effective it was. Compare with the original business case generated out of the feasibility and review have successful the project was, how effectively the team managed the change and learn any lessons for next time.
The above six phases are an example of a project lifecycle, and this is what a good project management system should be able to manage.
When looking at the proptech market for change tools there are several types of system that all have their pros and cons but can be categorised loosely into tools you as a client configure to your process or tools that adopt are more structured methodology as a software.
An example would be a tool like Smartsheet, designed more to be PaaS – Platform as a service, their model is to sell a landscape for you to create your own tools and forms upon.
At the other end of the scale would be an example like Tririga where the projects module is still flexible enough to bespoke but designed around a structured facilitated journey across the project lifecycle.
When looking for a system to use for Project Management in the Corporate Real Estate property market, we would recommend the following points to consider:
- What is the change you are looking to manage via a system? As there are so many choices, we recommend thinking carefully about how rigid and facilitated a system would need to be. In our experience, property projects around facilities and fitouts tend to be cookie cutter style projects whereas real estate design and builds can be voyages of discovery with no clear map of how to get to the end. This will drive you to purchase a system that works for you.
- Are you looking for a tool in more than one language? An easy one for a UK based company but let’s assume you needed a tool to span the globe. Our experience is that there are so few systems that can deliver proper multilanguage user interfaces and given the challenge that all levels of the project team will likely use this tool, you cannot rely on management level teams only for success here. We have seen many project system setups go wrong due to the lack of a multilanguage capability.
- Integrations from finance and other 3rd party tools – one of the main reasons we see project management systems fail is that they have no ability to properly integrate the financials of a project to provide proper reporting. In the generation of a project, money is a key data point and will often be related to purchase orders created in other tools, invoiced elsewhere et al. The ability for a Project Management tool to easily ingest these data points is critical for success. Often in our experience the most impressive tools on the market fail to meet even this simple point unless you shower them with money.
Project management tools tend to cover all aspects of the project process from project planning, scheduling, resource allocation and change management and reporting but what we would recommend is think beyond the core set of functionalities that they mostly all have and review how easily these tools integrate to your finance platforms, will they easily connect to your data BI tools? Do they have an app that enables onsite teams to update live? What about supported languages and most importantly how can your own teams control and adjust data reporting out of the system.
We at All Going Wrong have a long track record working with many of the markets leading Project Management systems and can advise you as a prospective user of these tools how they can help and which tools to use. Use the contact us link below to let us know how we can help you.