No construction project can be executed without exchanging letters between the project stakeholders. Those letters are considered to be formal communication for which contractual obligations might result from their content as well as the response received or lack of response against those letters.
Therefore, the content of those letters needs to be drafted with great care and needs to be aligned with the contract conditions. Those conditions could vary depending on the type of contract whether it is FIDIC, NEC3, or others. It will also depend on the particular or special clauses of those contracts as well as the laws of the country where the contract is being executed. Therefore, it is highly recommended that letter templates are drafted by the legal and commercial team who will ensure that the appropriate contract clauses are aligned with the content of those letters.
One of the registers that a Project Control System (PCS) is expected to provide is a register of all incoming and outgoing correspondence. The PMWeb Correspondence module will be used to document the practice for the receipt, control, and monitoring of correspondence between the different project entities to maintain accurate and concise records about contractual communications. The module allows capturing all needed details for incoming and outgoing correspondence.
The Clause tab will be used to link all contract agreement clauses and other contract document clauses that were added to the PMWeb Clausesmodule. The original correspondence document and all attachments will be uploaded into the PMWeb Document Management Repository and then attached to the correspondence entry.
For correspondence issued by the Project Owner, Project Management Consultant, and Engineering Consultants for a project control system that is managed by the Project Owner, PMWeb allows having pre-defined letter templates to generate the outgoing correspondence. This correspondence usually has contractual implications and can be created with all proper references to the relevant contract clauses. The same could be also for the Contractor’s letters for a project control system that is managed by the Contractor.
The data captured from all incoming and outgoing correspondence becomes available to be reported on in the desired form and format. The report usually includes a filter to identify whether to display incoming or outgoing correspondence, with the option to display both. It also includes donut visuals to summarize correspondence by priority, received from, sent to, and status. The correspondence register can be designed to display critical information associated with each correspondence transaction.
Reference
The content of this article was extracted from the book titled “Let’s Transform: Enabling Digital Transformation of Capital Construction ProjectsUsing the PMWeb Project Management Information System – 2nd Edition” written by Bassam Samman.
The book provides project owners with oversight on how technology available today can support their efforts to digitally transform the management of their projects’ portfolios. For each capital project life cycle stage, PMWeb is used to detail how the relevant project management business processes can be digitalized to enforce transparency and accountability in delivering projects. In addition, MS Power BI was used to show how the real-time, trustworthy data captured in PMWeb can be aggregated, modeled, monitored, evaluated, analyzed, and reported at any time, anywhere using any device.
