The Most Expensive Administrator On The Project

Ask anyone who has run a few construction projects what separates a job that runs from one that limps and you tend to get the same answer, the site manager. Not the programme, not the procurement strategy and not whichever system the business has just rolled out. What matters is whether the person holding the site together knows what they're doing and is actually there to do it.

That isn't a sentimental view of the role, it's close to industry consensus, which is why the good ones get moved onto the difficult jobs and why losing one halfway through a project is treated as a genuine problem rather than a staffing inconvenience.

Then look at what the role has actually become.

Inductions and site access, the daily diary, delivery records and dockets, subcontractor compliance paperwork covering licences, safe work method statements and insurances, photographs filed somewhere they can be found again, timesheets, toolbox talks and plant checks, plus whatever the client, the head contractor and the project manager each want by Friday, usually in three different formats.

Every one of those exists for a reason and most were added after something went wrong somewhere on another job years ago, so individually none of it is unreasonable and none of it was anybody's bad decision. Nobody sat down and designed the role this way. It accumulated.

Nobody interviews a site manager on their filing

Here's the part that rarely gets said out loud, which is that none of that administration is what the person was actually hired for.

Site managers are appointed for judgement, for knowing which trade needs to be in which area on Tuesday so that Thursday works, for reading a site well enough to notice that a crew is about to lose half a day and stepping in before it happens rather than writing it up afterwards and for being the person a foreman will actually listen to at seven in the morning when something has already gone wrong.

That's a scarce skill, it takes years to build and it's the reason the job exists at all.

The record keeping is a second job handed to somebody who was recruited, assessed and paid for the first one. Most of them do it perfectly well, since capable people usually do, though it's worth saying plainly that it isn't their trade and was never what anyone appointed them for. The hours it takes come out of the same day as everything else, which means the work only they can do waits while the work almost anybody could do gets done.

You can tell from outside the gate

Deliver into enough construction sites and you learn to read them from the outside, where the tell has very little to do with the signage or the hoarding or how tidy the compound is. It's how long a decision takes.

On some sites a question that needs the site manager gets answered in about two minutes. Somebody gets them on the radio, they're up on the deck somewhere, they give you an answer and the day carries on. On others you sit at the gate while somebody walks over to the office to find them, then waits by the door while they finish what they're doing, then comes back out and asks you to repeat the question.

Same job title on both sites and very often the same level of competence behind it, so the difference comes down to where that person happened to be standing when the question arrived.

Anyone managing a project has had the same wait from the other end. Ringing a site manager who doesn't pick up and getting a call back forty minutes later is the identical problem, seen from an office instead of a gate.

The industry already solved this once

The answer that works is putting somebody on the project whose actual trade is administration, whether that's a site administrator, a document controller or a project coordinator. Where it happens it works well, since the paperwork gets done properly by a person who is good at it while the site manager goes back outside where the value is.

It also costs money on a job that was priced without it, which is why on most projects it didn't happen and the paperwork went to whoever was already standing there.

The other answer

The alternative isn't another system for the site manager to update in the evening. That's the same problem wearing different clothes and most site managers have been handed three of those already.

What changes it is when the recording happens and who does it. A delivery recorded at the gate by the person taking the delivery is thirty seconds at the moment it occurs. A task marked off by the people who did the work, with the reason picked from a list on the occasions it didn't happen, is a few taps spread across the day. Neither of those is a form to be filled in later and neither of them lands on one person when they should be going home.

The diary then gets built out of what everybody already entered rather than written from recollection after the site has closed.

Where SiteVector fits

SiteVector records deliveries at the gate and logs task outcomes with the reason picked from a fixed list rather than typed out as a sentence, since free text can be read but it can't be counted. Each day locks and seals when the site closes, then the shift diary, the weekly reports and the supplier performance view are all built out of what the team entered, so nobody sits down to compile any of it.

It isn't a programme tool, a cost system or a document register and it doesn't replace Procore, Aconex, Jobpac, Cheops or P6. It sits underneath whatever is already running and hands the ground level detail back in a form those systems can use.

Somebody else gets the bill

Here's why this should matter to the people upstream rather than only to the person sat in the shed.

The hour isn't paid for by the site manager. They absorb it the way they absorb everything else and by and large they don't complain about it. It gets paid months later by the project manager who didn't hear about something until it had already become a problem, since the person who noticed it was inside writing up the last three days. It gets paid again by the contract administrator reconstructing a Tuesday from four people's recollections, since the record made that evening was written from memory by somebody at the end of a ten hour day.

None of that is a failure by the site manager, it's simply what you get when the recording is done last, by the busiest person on the project, about events that happened up to ten hours earlier.

So the question isn't really whether site managers should do less paperwork. It's whether the most experienced person on the site is the right one to be doing it at all. It's also whether the answer that lands on your desk in March would look different if they hadn't been.