The Real Estate Regulatory Act (RERA) introduced by Indian Govt. has made it important for builders and real estate developers to set up a Project Management Office (PMO) for their projects.

RERA requires the builder or developer to submit regular progress updates and cost status for their RERA registered projects.

The information which is needed to be submitted as part of these updates may change depending on the regional RERA authorities. But, it has become important for the real estate project developers to track progress and costs for all construction activities on regular basis and report the same to local RERA website.

This brings us to the importance of a Project Manager (PMO) who can effectively monitor your construction project and prepare reports in a RERA compliant format.

But it is a widely known fact that the construction industry faces a shortage of well-trained project management professionals.

So recruiting a whole team of well experienced and well-trained project managers is going to be difficult as well as expensive.

But what if you don’t have to hire a whole team of project managers?

What if you can automate majority of progress and cost tracking activities?

You can actually use the latest cloud technology and the power of mobile apps to automate progress and cost tracking to great extent.

Then you wouldn’t need a team of project engineers. Rather one or two project managers can effectively track all projects and maintain RERA compliant reporting.

Connecting the distributed construction teams

Tracking the progress of all your construction projects in real time means you will need to get daily progress updates from the site engineers for all those projects.

A few years ago, it would have been tedious to call each site engineer, ask him about the progress till date and then record it in a spreadsheet. Imagine doing this for hundreds of activities for multiple projects.

It is challenging for one project manager to monitor multiple construction sites at once.

But now, having mobile devices available with site engineers can help you do this fairly easily.

A mobile app for project-based communication and progress reporting is a very handy platform to connect all site engineers who otherwise find it difficult to connect to a central forum.

Tracking actual work

But a construction project is not limited only to the work on site.

You have to coordinate with architects and consultant producing the final plans, government authorities who approve those plans, suppliers for different materials, buyers and accountants from your own team who manage purchase.

What these different stakeholders are doing is also important from a project manager’s point of view. Their actions will impact the project schedule as well as the overall costs.

So it is important to track these different activities in addition to the actual brick and mortar construction work.

But how would you do that? These stakeholders are even more disconnected than your site teams.

To find an answer, think of how they communicate.

Most of your communication with architects, consultants, Govt. authorities, suppliers etc. happens via emails. Moreover is happens in the form standardized documents and drawings, for example – engineering drawings, layouts, contracts, permits, purchase orders, invoices etc.

So if you can track the flow of these standard documents in emails, you can also track the work done by each of the stakeholders. For example – an email from your architect with approved construction plan, reflects the fact that the design stage of your project is complete.

For this kind of tracking, you can leverage the power of a cloud based software.

You will need a cloud based software platform which will help you to share, email, track multiple documents and drawings. Different stakeholders can easily coordinate on a cloud based platform over the internet.

Connect all the pieces

Once you are able to connect different site teams and other stakeholders on a single cloud based platform, their work gets tracked and recorded on a cloud server.

Next challenge is to make sense of all that information.

In other words, your server will record certain actions taken within a project. For example – a PO is emailed on certain date or completion of a floor ceiling on certain date.

But then the next question is – where do those actions fit into the overall project roadmap or workflow?

If your cloud based project management platform has provision for defining digital workflows, you can define the importance of these activities in terms of critical milestones for reporting to RERA office.

For example – when a buyer from your team emails a PO for some steel to a selected vendor, the total cost from that PO, should get added to the project costs (against the cost of steel).

Once this kind of workflow is defined, your cloud software will be smart enough to make sense of the progress tracking information.

In other words, it will be very helpful if you can define digital workflow within your cloud based project tracking software.

Forecast impact on project schedule

But it’s not enough to simply understand the current status of the project by tracking all these activities. It is also important to assess the impact of current status on the final project completion date.

RERA has already made stringent provisions for penalties in case the final project completion date gets delayed.

So an important purpose for project progress tracking should be to forecast the impact on final completion date based on current status and rate of progress.

For this, you will need a software solution that can also connect with your project schedule and make a forecast based on current status.

WorkPack for construction project tracking

To summarize, your project management team (PMO) will need a project management software solution that is –

• Available on mobile devices for easy use by the site engineers
• Cloud based solution for easy access by different stakeholders – architects, suppliers etc.
• Facilitates storage, sharing and tracking of different documents & drawing files
• Provides digital workflow for tracking the actions taken by your team members
• Forecasts project schedule based on current rate of progress

Consider WorkPack – an integrated document and project management platform for engineering & construction projects.

WorkPack is a central platform to connect project schedule with all project based emails, documents, spreadsheets and digital workflows.

This way WorkPack can serve as a single central platform for your teams to manage all their work.

RERA friendly reporting

WorkPack also comes with a customizable reporting module. So you can build your own report formats for tracking construction progress and costs.

More importantly, you can also configure the reporting formats mandated by your local RERA authorities. You can then export these reports to Excel sheet or PDF files to readily submit on the relevant RERA website.

Being able to connect all important components of a construction project on a single platform, WorkPack has been able to help project managers on a variety of different engineering & construction projects.

Will it be useful for your team as well? Find out by setting up a free account for your team.

Let us know in case you need any help or if you would like to schedule an online demo for your team.