What a fee-based project manager optimises for

A conventional project manager is measured against cost, programme and quality through practical completion. Those are the right measures for the job they have been given. The owner, however, carries the operating consequences beyond it. Our role is to bring that longer view into the development process.

So the decisions that trade a little capex today for a lot of operating cost later tend to go one way. Cheaper fan coil units that need a room out of service twice a year. A back of house layout that adds two minutes to every plate leaving the kitchen. A laundry contract that looked keen and left no room for a linen change.

An owner weighs those decisions differently because an owner holds them. When we sit on the development side we are still doing the operator's arithmetic in our heads, because we will be the ones running the building, or advising the person who does.

So it is worth asking, early and openly, how each decision will read in the year-three operating account. Good consultants welcome that question. It is simply not the measure their appointment was written around.