A-Z of Self Build Guides Project Manager: Hire Or DIY?

Date Published:

02/06/2008

To be frank, project management quite simply isn't something an amateur can do with any sort of proficiency. Even professional project managers with years of experience make mistakes, so don't assume you'll take to it like a duck to water. The biggest risk is of course that if the wrong tradespeople are booked, or if the right building materials don't show up, or the windows don't quite fit then the buck stops with you. There's nowhere to run and every decision rests on your head. And if you get it wrong, it's going to cost you money.

Real project management is about getting a group of individuals who may not know each other into one place and working together as a team, producing something really rather exceptional and you need very good management skills for this. The tricky thing about the final stages of a build is that you've often got four or five different subcontractors; plumbers and electricians, heating engineers and so on.

Increasingly there are a wider range of specialists on site together, working around, under and over each other. So the single biggest skill you can possess is organisation. Every single stage of the build should be meticulously planned, from where you're getting materials to exactly who gets paid, how much and when.

A good project manager will bring in all the necessary skills and trades at exactly the right time, and they'll massage the egos of each of these contractors to make sure that a busy site can still be a happy site.