Chapter and verse

Ever pondered the morality of quantity surveying? A new book looks at this intriguing issue and many others.

A Practical Guide to being a main contractor’s quantity surveyor covers the sorts of issues likely to occur from the start to the finish of a project; including: tendering, Design & Build contracts, sub-contract procurement, post contract techniques (e.g. measurement, negotiation and value engineering) and disputes. The book by Colin de-Beger, both a contractor’s QS and Baptist lay preacher, claims to be the first ever manual specifically for the contractor’s QS. We have edited a few highlights below.

The morality of quantity surveying

Hell would be full of quantity surveyors, my managing surveyor once said. The reason for this lies in the fact that contractors do not return significant profit margins, and throughout a project are exposed to the errors and inabilities of the client’s professional team. These professionals invariably consider the problems only to be attributable to the errors of the contractor.

In order to pay for these errors and still return a reasonable profit in order to keep his job, the site quantity surveyor feels under pressure and may find it necessary at times to become devious in methods of recovering monies from the client. This is, however, illegal.

Too often we are pressurised into acting immorally and illegally by directors who wish to seek their own goals, and you will need to decide when they are pushing you beyond the limits which you wish to pursue...

Taking a moral stance may put your job at risk, but you must weigh up which road you wish to go down for the sake of your conscience.

Job description

The main purpose of the quantity surveyor is cost control. It is not to maximise profits. Sound cost control will avoid losses, and this is most important.

With the current arrangement of the industry, where sub-contractors undertake all the work and main contractors step-back and coordinate, the role of the QS may seem to have changed but it has not. Some quantity surveyors will wait until a sub-contractor admits an application before processing a payment and any legitimate variation or expense will be added to the next valuation for the client to reimburse.

While this approach may offer a “safe system” for securing the required return, it is in fact insufficient…It results in “fire fighting”, i.e. responding to issues when they arise. I perceive the job as controlling the situation so that either the problems do not arise or if they do they can be expected and the response be pre-planned.

Negotiating techniques

Some will find wheeling and dealing easier than others but there is a technique to all negotiations. There are three sections to every negotiation:

• Initial statements, setting out your position
• Proposed bargaining area, setting out the areas on which there will be negotiation
• Settlement of the deal

If you are misled in some way and you have to backtrack, then be bold and be honest. I have been involved in some negotiations where we took a stance because we thought something was considered a certainty. In one final account negotiation I knew the carpentry section was over-measured by some £20,000. I took it that we would keep the £20,000 and therefore did not seek the additional £10,000 required in the brickwork remeasure.

I agreed to the brickwork on the bill, only to have the PQS decide to remeasure the carpentry. I had to explain the reasons for my agreement and renegotiate. This came from a failure to set out my position.

Measurement – a lost art

The art of measurement has been lost due to it not being studied at degree level and due to technological advances. This is unfortunate as the whole commercial pivot of the industry is the bill of quantities.

Measurement offers an in-depth knowledge of the project. I was on a hotel project in Bristol when, while walking around the site, I noticed a kicker wall which appeared to be wider than 200mm. I took up the issue with the site engineer who was stunned that I knew what the wall size was. He explained that he had made an error with the reinforcement and that to overcome this the reinforcement had been bent over, but this required the wall to be 300mm thick for the first floor. The only reason I knew this was because I had measured it.