A project management consultant is engaged by an owner or developer to manage delivery on their behalf. The practice reviews drawings, manages tenders, monitors progress, audits quality and safety, checks and certifies quantities and bills, assesses variations and time claims, and reports to the owner. It does not typically execute the construction work itself, though the range of services firms offer varies. With Pentoggle, a consultancy can describe its certification process, reporting formats and staffing structure and generate the starting application around them.
The commercial model is different from a contractor's. Income is typically a professional fee, which may be percentage-based, lump-sum, time-based or a combination, while a significant part of the cost is people deployed across projects.
Many consultancies already run accounting and hold reports as documents. What is usually missing is the record behind each certification, and a view of staff commitments across every project at once.
Key takeaways
- Certification is the product, and the evidence behind each certificate is the practice's principal risk control.
- Where a fee is fixed or capped and a project's duration is not, schedule slippage can transfer cost to the consultant without transferring income, depending on how the appointment is structured.
- A significant part of the cost base is people, so deployment across projects behaves like a professional services utilisation problem rather than a construction one.
- Sitting between owner and contractor means one party will often disagree with a given judgement, and the record is what the decision rests on.
- A useful number is elapsed project duration against the duration the fee was based on, across every live commission.
Your product is a signature
A consultancy's principal output is not the building itself. It is a series of judgements recorded as certificates, recommendations and reports, on the strength of which an owner pays money and accepts work.
When a quantity is certified, it supports the contractor's payment claim and the owner's payment process. When a variation is recommended, the contract value changes. When an extension of time is assessed, the contractual time position is determined, while any associated payment entitlement depends on the appointment and circumstances. When work is accepted, a defect that emerges later becomes a question about who approved it.
That places the evidence behind each judgement at the centre of the business. Not the judgement itself, which is what the practice is paid for and what experienced people are good at, but the record of what was checked, by whom, against what, and when.
The exposure can appear years later, often in the form of a question about a past certification. An owner asks why a quantity was certified. A contractor asks why one was reduced. A dispute reaches a stage where somebody has to produce the basis of a certification made twenty months earlier by an engineer who has since left the practice.
Where the certification record holds the measurement checked, the sample verified, the drawing revision applied and the person who did it, the question is answered in an afternoon. Where it does not, the practice is defending a judgement it cannot reconstruct, which is a poor position regardless of whether the judgement was right.
This is why the measurement and billing records matter to a consultancy from the opposite direction to a contractor. The contractor is establishing entitlement. The consultancy is establishing that it checked properly.
You are paid a fee and exposed to a duration
This is the commercial risk that defines the business and it is rarely managed as a number.
A commission may be priced against an expected project duration, particularly where the appointment includes a defined staffing plan or fixed fee. Staff are allocated on that basis: a resident engineer, a quantity surveyor, a planning engineer, a safety officer, for eighteen months.
The project takes twenty-six months. The contractor may receive an extension of time, which extends the contractual period but does not by itself establish an entitlement to additional payment; whether additional cost is recoverable depends on the contract and the cause of the delay. The consultancy's team, meanwhile, remains on site for the additional eight months, because the owner still needs supervision and certification, and the fee frequently does not move with it, depending entirely on how the appointment was drafted.
The result is that a consultancy can lose money on a commission despite performing well, because the additional staffing cost of somebody else's delay can consume its margin.
Two responses help and both are about visibility rather than contract drafting, which is a separate matter for your own advisors.
The first is knowing the exposure while it is accruing. Elapsed duration against the duration the fee assumed, on every live commission, shows which appointments are running past their basis and by how much. That is the earliest point at which a conversation with an owner about additional fee is possible, and it is considerably easier to have at month nineteen than at month twenty-six.
The second is knowing what the extension is actually costing. Staff deployed to a project, and their time, held per commission, converts a vague sense that a job is dragging into a figure. Where staff time is a significant cost, that figure can be a useful indicator of margin exposure.
Your cost base is people, not material
A consultancy runs on staffing economics closer to a professional services firm than to a contractor, and where staff time is a significant part of the cost, the operating questions follow from that.
Who is deployed where. Who is committed to two projects at once because two project directors both counted on them. Which commissions are absorbing more staff time than they were priced for. Who is available when a new commission starts, and whether accepting it requires hiring.
Much of this is not visible from accounting alone, which records salaries by month rather than by commission. It requires time and deployment held against projects, which is unglamorous and is the difference between a practice that knows its per-commission profitability and one that knows its annual profitability.
There is a second-order effect worth naming. Consultancies frequently keep good people on a difficult site because the client relationship depends on them, and absorb the cost of doing so without ever quantifying it. That may be the right decision. It is a better decision when it is made deliberately with the number in front of you rather than by default.
You sit between two parties and one of them will often disagree
A consultancy is in an asymmetric position by design. The owner pays the fee and expects protection. The contractor is affected by every judgement and expects fairness. Both are entitled to their view and they cannot both get the answer they want on a contested item.
That produces a steady stream of disagreement, most of it professional and ordinary, and the practice's standing depends on being demonstrably consistent rather than on being liked.
Consistency is a records problem more than a judgement problem. The same kind of deviation accepted on one project and rejected on another, by two engineers from the same practice, can damage a consultancy's authority, particularly when there is no shared record of how similar items were treated before.
Holding audit findings, non-conformance dispositions and variation recommendations across projects, in a form that can be looked at together, gives a practice something valuable and unusual. It can answer how it has treated this kind of question previously, which is both a better basis for the current decision and a strong position to state to either party.
It also produces something a single contractor or owner is not usually positioned to assemble: comparative information across many contractors and many projects. Which contractors submit accurate bills. Which generate the most non-conformances. How long approvals typically take on each owner's side. A consultancy sees all of this and almost none of it survives beyond the individual who noticed it.
The workflows a consultancy runs
- Measurement and Quantity Tracking, from the checking and certifying side rather than the claiming side.
- RA Billing and Retention, reviewing bills submitted rather than raising them.
- Construction Quality and Inspection, covering audits, findings and disposition across contractors.
- Construction Progress Tracking, consolidating what contractors report and verifying it.
- Construction Change Order and Variation, assessing and recommending rather than proposing.
- Construction Project Management, including the pending decisions that sit on the owner's side.
Why consultancies choose Pentoggle
Certification with its evidence attached
What was checked, against what, by whom and when, held with the certificate rather than in a file.
All commissions on one view
Progress, findings, certifications and staffing across all live projects.
Duration against fee basis
Elapsed time against what the appointment assumed, so an overrun is visible while a conversation is still possible.
Staff deployment per commission
Who is where and for how long, which is an important input to understanding per-project profitability.
Owner reporting from the record
Monthly reports assembled from what was captured rather than compiled from scratch.
A useful number for a consultancy
Elapsed project duration against the duration the fee was based on, across every live commission.
Where the fee is fixed or capped and a significant part of the cost is time, this is an important indicator of margin exposure, and it is usually not being watched because it is nobody's specific job. Project directors watch their projects. Finance watches the annual position. The exposure lives between them.
Read it across the portfolio rather than per project. One commission running long may be a negotiation. Several running long simultaneously can become a staffing problem that affects the practice's ability to take new work, and it is much better understood before a new commission is accepted than after.
Read it alongside staff time deployed, since duration alone understates the position. A project that extended but wound down to a skeleton team is a different situation from one that extended at full strength.
The number needs the fee basis recorded at appointment, which sounds obvious and frequently is not, because appointments are signed by one part of the practice and delivered by another.
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You will be asked to justify a signature you gave two years ago. Everything else follows from that.