The accurate estimating of healthcare facilities construction must include an accounting of the realities of the environment where the project is constructed, according to an article on the FacilityCare website.
Facilities budget estimators must account for site-specific issues such as ongoing healthcare operations, aging buildings, environmental issues, matching existing construction, noise limitations, the weather, access and egress to the site, time constraints, unrealistic customer demands, sterile environments, the availability of labor and phased construction.
To ignore the context is face project cost overruns. It is inevitable: actual costs will overrun budgeted costs if the baseline budget is incorrect to begin with, the article said.
It is better to accept the true reality cost of a project with the shock of a higher than “expected” estimate than to deal with it later in cost overruns.