Client-side project management

The problem

Owners hire client-side PMs to protect their position. Most of the risk on a project is transferred long before anyone starts protecting anything — at tender, in the contract, in the way the scope was written. By the time a client-side PM is chairing site meetings, the shape of the job is fixed.

The second problem is asymmetry. The contractor's commercial manager does this every week. If the owner's representative is doing it for the first time, the negotiation is over before it opens.

How this works

Ambit sits on the owner's side and runs the project as the owner's agent: programme, cost, contract, and the decisions that connect them. The work is the same work a good in-house delivery lead does. The difference is that it has been done before, from both sides.

That includes saying when the owner is wrong. A client-side PM who only reports what the client wants to hear is an expensive way to lose an argument later.

Scale

This suits owners without a permanent delivery team, and developers whose team is capable but thin at the senior end. It is not a substitute for a full project management office on a large programme. If that is what the job needs, that is what gets said.

What you get

• Programme review and independent progress assessment
• Cost reporting and forecast to completion
• Contract administration against the executed contract
• Variation and extension of time assessment on the owner's behalf
• Consultant and contractor procurement
• Risk register maintained as a live document, not a formality

Call when

• You are about to commit to a builder and nobody in your organisation has read the contract closely.
• Your project has a delivery team but no one senior enough to push back on the head contractor.
• You are getting monthly reports you cannot independently check.