The Coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic will have an unprecedented impact on construction sites where anti-social distancing has been the trend. Project teams, trade crews, progress review meetings, toolbox sessions, canteen among others are examples of sizable groups of individuals coming together to defy the social distancing requirements. Nevertheless, this must change in the post-COVID-19 era. Similar to other health and safety risks, there will protocols that need to be enforced on construction sites to avoid the risk of a COVID-19 outbreak. Checklists need to be created to ensure that those protocols are properly implemented.
Authorities and entities who are involved in recommending health, safety, and environment (HSE) best practices across the globe have started coming out with documented protocols and checklists to avoid the risk of a COVID-19 outbreak on construction sites. Those include, for example, the Saudi Construction Authority, USA United Contractors among others.
Using a Project Management Information System (PMIS) like PMWeb will enable project owners, project management consultants, supervision consultants, and contractors to create all needed COVID-19 checklists to ensure that each project and entity working on the construction site is complying with the required protocols. PMWeb custom form builder allows creating those checklists in the desired layout as well as in any desired language.
For each checklist form, all supportive documents can be attached. Those documents can be either stored in the PMWeb document management repository or directly uploaded to the record if needed. In addition, links to other relevant project communications and imported MS Outlook emails which will be stored in PMWeb can be also made.
These COVID-19 checklists can be assigned to a workflow to formalize the submit, review, and approval process as detailed in the responsibility assignment matrix (RAM) and health, safety, and environment (HSE) management plan. The workflow will detail the sequence of tasks to be performed by the different project team members as well as the actions can be taken by each and to whom the communication should be returned if it is rejected.
