Surveying challenges in the UK
Yet challenge comes with potential. The difficulty for the quantity surveyor working in the United States is knowing how to best demonstrate their importance, particularly when they often work with parties who do not fully understand what the role of quantity surveyor entails. Others think of quantity surveyors as invoice clerks or project managers and misunderstand their duties, such as paying suppliers or authorizing change orders – known in the UK as contract variations.
The biggest problems tend to emerge in US construction projects when a company budget does not contain provisions for items such as provisional amounts. This has got to change. To make financial sense, construction value engineering, continuous cost control, and general contractor management a concept used more frequently in the UK are important for a project.
Allowing a quantity surveyor to start work on the project at an early stage and adding more preliminary amounts ensures that the budget is more precise and there is a greater chance for the project to make savings and complete on time.
Nevertheless, the fact that many UK firms with quantity survey experience are opening offices in the UK promotes awareness of the country’s quantity survey role: many bidding packages now contain allowances or provisional amounts for a quantity surveyor, claiming that this is the ‘way it is done internationally. Such allowances cover a quantity surveyor ‘s main duties, including setting up a project, determining the company expenditure, choosing procurement and contract approaches, defining cost-control steps, and closing the final account.
Read More: quantity-surveying-practices.com
Scope of the role
Turner & Townsend carried out the research, which had deployed me as a cost manager on the project. I was initially reviewing fee invoices and attending weekly company meetings to ensure that the project process was followed without any costly problems. The job centered on contract terms, completing orders with the general contractor, clarifying work scope, monitoring payments, and closing final accounts. I ensured that capital payments if requested were valid, then ensured they were deemed fair by the general contractor. The procedure was very similar to that in the United Kingdom and so my experience as a quantity surveyor in the UK proved very useful.
Commercial management tends to be more common than in the UK. For this position, banks like the Bank of New York Mellon and JPMorgan Chase & Co have enlisted CBRE’s quantity surveying services. A well-trained quantity surveyor working in a commercial management position may use their building and estimating expertise and knowledge to develop best practice practices, streamline construction processes, and create portfolio management.
When it comes to portfolio management, quantity surveyors are often hired in the USA to use their data skills to create customer-specific resources, such as developing databases and spreadsheets that can easily allow a customer to budget.