A Description of Duties

This is a personal guide to the duties carried out by a construction administrator stationed on-site, based on my own experiences. Many construction projects costing upwards of £11 million require that offices be set up on-site so that construction staff are readily to hand to co-ordinate all phases of building. Thus, if the project has a large budget for building accommodation flats or schools for instance, and the location is more than an hour's drive from head office then a temporary office base has to be put in place. The site set-up has to render site staff as self-sufficient as possible so port-a-cabins are transported to, and placed on, site to act as temporary offices containing all the stationery, furniture and office equipment you would need to operate normally until the date of project completion and subsequent handover of the building under construction. The set-up generally comprises four offices, kitchen, drawing printer room, administrator's office, boardroom for meetings complete with boardroom table and chairs, male WC and, most definitely, female WC, not least as there may be female architects and engineers visiting on-site. nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan nangthan Within this construction office base, the administrator's duties are 90% centred around construction drawings: receiving, printing, stamping, registering, distributing and filing them all. The majority of these drawings will be issued to you by the project architect and engineer. In the first instance, when the piling points and foundations of the building are being marked out by the surveying engineers, the engineer drawings are the most important. However, the architect drawings start to become more prevalent as the actual building gets underway. As each drawing revision becomes 'live' it is best to request both hard copies, ie paper copies, as well as electronic PDFs (Adobe portable document formats) of the drawings at the same time. The former always get stamped 'Master Copy' and filed in the filing cabinets and they should not be removed by anyone other than the administrator for viewing. It is important to keep a master copy of every revision issued by the architect and engineer in case drawings need to be reviewed if any contentious points of discussion relating to the drawings arise. The latter, electronic PDF formats, are very important for filing in your project folders on your PC and keeping, just as with the paper copies, an up-to-date bank of electronic drawings so that they can be emailed to subcontractors who will invariably need them when they are due to start on site. You will have gathered many subcontractor email addresses by now so that you can send them drawings as easily as possible in this way.