Daily reporting is a nearly universal activity in the construction world. Yet, for all its ubiquity, it is often a practice with qualitative shortcomings and is typically underutilized as a tool for productivity and profit preservation. Contractors that understand the importance of good daily reporting and unleash its potential to enhance project earnings have significant advantages over those who merely see it as a “box checking” exercise.
Why Are Daily Reports Important
Daily reports act as a contemporaneous record of project events. They chronicle the day-to-day life of a jobsite. They are the preeminent source of contemporary, factual, project data. Comprehensive, well-written daily reports are an essential resource for the project team. They are also critically important sources of information for forensic analysis in the event of a project disruption, impact, or delay. Moreover, daily records that include data on manpower and completed work provide a cache of historical information that can assist with bidding metrics. In short, quality daily reports are the critical informational link between what the contractor has experienced in the past, the challenges to be addressed in the present, and a roadmap for resource allocation and project management attention in the future.
How Daily Reports Can Impact the “Bottom Line”
The most direct value of daily reporting is the critical link it establishes between project management and the jobsite. Coupled with regular photographic and video documentation, daily reports provide project management with a comprehensive summary of important events that have occurred during the field construction effort. Implementing strong, daily communications protocols between site supervision and project management personnel that include review and discussion of daily reports will ensure that jobsite intelligence reaches the right players in time for appropriate action. These protocols should emphasize the need for project managers to read daily reports and logs on the same dates when they are prepared. Likewise, timely communication between site supervision and project management fosters trust, provides opportunities for verification of key events and impacts, and facilitates accurate documentation of problems and issues as they arise on the jobsite.
Specifically, competent and informative daily reporting enhances the ability of project management to meet contractual notice requirements concerning changes, claims, schedule impacts, and other areas where timely written notice is essential. Such timely notice minimizes the potential for the costly forfeiture of claims and change order rights. Likewise, daily reports provide data points for schedule compliance and potential schedule conflicts, as well as support for change order pricing. Further, good daily reports that include both manpower and completed work metrics provide management with critical information concerning manpower usage, labor distribution, and productivity, enhancing the ability of management to react quickly to field conditions with necessary resource adjustments.
The Forensic Value of Daily Reports
Informative and accurate daily reports are also invaluable in the event a contractor finds itself in a claim scenario. Project claims require rigorous proof for both additional cost and delay issues. Good daily reports are a key source of data for forensic analysis concerning labor usage and work progress. Consulting experts examining schedule and cost issues universally want access to informative daily reports to verify labor and material cost accounting, to conduct appropriate modeling of as-built data for schedule analytics, and to examine labor productivity issues.
Another area where historical daily reporting data can be very useful is in the development of labor and materials estimating metrics. Daily reports that contain accurate information concerning labor expended and materials installed readily lend themselves to the creation of historical databases that can be differentiated by project type, and then further subdivided into discrete work components repetitively encountered on jobsites. As this data is derived from actual experience using a contractor’s own workforce, it provides the most accurate, realistic information set available for purposes of estimating, bidding, and project planning.
Practical Considerations
Good daily reporting is an investment in future success and profitability. However, it is only consistently possible to the extent it becomes a management priority. Many impediments to effective daily reporting exist, including old habits, time restrictions, limitations on supervisory analytical and writing skills, corporate culture, and other countervailing considerations. Overcoming these impediments and developing good daily reporting habits requires consistent focus and follow-through by management, as well as proper incentivization of supervisory personnel. Training team members, recognizing and rewarding strong work product, and investing in better tools for your supervisory and project management employees requires added time and resources. Nevertheless, the return over time on that investment will strengthen project management effectiveness, increase options and recourse in the event of jobsite impacts, foster greater bidding and estimating accuracy, and enhance the contractor’s ability to defend against allegations of deficient project performance.
