The cost of construction has gone up in the past 5 years. I could have stopped with that statement alone and you would have thought “he does a good job of stating the obvious!” In all seriousness, we have all seen the cost of everything from gas to groceries to building material costs rise over the past 5 years. I could point to many different factors that have caused these increases, but we can all agree that everything is more expensive these days for lots of different reasons.
Speaking of things being more expensive, we have been working with a client for the past 3 years that is looking to build a new manufacturing facility here in Fort Wayne. The project has been on and off about 4 times over those years, but is now back to being “on”. In the initial planning meeting we had with the client this week, they started to ask about budgets for their new building. We had talked budget 3 years ago and they are still somewhat basing todays building on those old numbers. The reality for them is that the budget from 3 years ago will not allow for the same facility today. As Dan Gagen in our office often says, “compromise is not a bad word”. It is very likely that the client will need to compromise on scope, quality or budget. We’ve done many e-bits in the past on Scope x Quality = Budget. You can control two of those variables, but someone else will control the third. This client does not have a lot of flexibility on the quality, so they will need to either increase their budget or decrease the scope (in this specific case, size of the building).
We know that building projects can be daunting, especially in this environment of increasing construction costs. One of the many things that PDMi offers is detailed upfront planning to help our clients filter the “wants” from the “needs” which can help solidify the scope of the project early on for budgeting purposes. Give us a call, we’d love to help solidify your project scope early in the process.