Task & Subcontractor Management: Overview

About Task & Subcontractor Management

Task management on a construction project is the delegation of work to the people who do it, and the oversight of whether it got done. A task can be an instruction to a subcontractor, an action item from the site meeting, a piece of preparatory work for the next trade, or a request to your own team. Each one needs a responsible party, a deadline and a status that everyone can see.

Most of the people doing the work are not your employees. They are subcontractors with their own foremen, their own priorities and several other sites. The general contractor's site manager needs to know at any moment which tasks are open, which are overdue, and which subcontractor is behind, without phoning round.

Task management is close to defect management, and both use the same features. The difference is where the work comes from. A defect is something wrong with work already done. A task is work that still has to be done. Read more in Defect Management: Overview.

Where Tasks Come From

• The site meeting. Every coordination meeting ends with a list of action items: who does what by when.
• The schedule. The next few weeks of work are broken down into concrete tasks per trade.
• Site walks. The site manager sees something that needs doing, for example a missing edge protection or material blocking an access route.
• Instructions from the client or the architect, passed on to the trade that has to act on them.
• Requests between trades, for example the electrician needs the drywall closed on one side before cabling.

Terminology

Whatever the task is called, the record has to answer the same questions: what has to be done, where, by whom, by when, and whether it is done.

What PlanRadar Covers

A task in PlanRadar is a ticket. The ticket carries the description, the location on the plan, the assignee, a due date, a priority, a status and a progress percentage. The assignee, a user or a group, is notified by email and push notification as soon as the ticket is assigned, and gets a reminder before the due date according to their notification settings. Comments and photos on the ticket keep the conversation about the task in one place, and every change is recorded in the ticket journal.

Subcontractors are free of charge in PlanRadar. Invite every subcontractor company's foremen and assign the tickets to a group per company. Each company sees only the tickets assigned to it.

What PlanRadar does not do is decide priorities between trades or enforce the subcontract. It gets each task to the right company, makes the deadline visible and shows who is behind, so that the conversation in the site meeting starts from facts.

Roles and Workflow

Roles

Subcontractors see only the tickets assigned to them or to a group they belong to. They can change status and progress, fill in checklist fields if the field permission allows it, write comments and add photos. They can set a ticket to Resolved but not to Closed, and they cannot create tickets or edit other fields. Read more in User Types.

Workflow

The process runs in four stages: set up, assign, work, follow up.

1. Set up. The project manager creates the Task form and the Trade list, creates one group per subcontractor company and adds the groups to the project.
2. Assign. After each site meeting and site walk, the site manager creates a ticket per task, on the plan where the work is, and assigns it to the company's group with a due date. The company is notified.
3. Work. The subcontractor foreman sets the ticket to In Progress, updates the progress, asks questions in the comments, and sets Resolved with a photo when done.
4. Follow up. The site manager checks the resolved tickets and closes them. Before every site meeting, they filter for open and overdue tickets per company and send each one its list.

Each stage is explained in Task & Subcontractor Management: Workflows in PlanRadar.

The Example in These Articles

A general contractor fits out four floors of an office building for a new tenant over five months. Eight subcontractor companies work on site: drywall, ceilings, electrical, HVAC, plumbing, flooring, joinery and painting. A coordination meeting takes place every Tuesday. The site manager creates the action items from the meeting as tickets and adds tasks from the daily site walk. The tenant's project manager follows progress as a watcher.

The example uses one form named Task for all trades, a Trade list, one plan per floor and one group per subcontractor company. Wherever a decision could reasonably be made another way, a short note points out the alternative.

Planning Your Task Management Setup

Subcontractor Users or In-House Users?

This is the first decision, because it decides what each company can see and do.

Read more in User Types and Permissions.

Assign to a Person or to a Company?

Assign to a user group per company rather than to one person. Anyone in the company can then pick up the ticket, and a change of foreman does not leave tickets with nobody. A ticket has one assignee, which can be a user or a group. Read more in Create & Manage Groups and Set the Assignee & Receivers of a Ticket.

Use the Receiver (CC) field for people who need to follow the task without doing it, for example the client's representative on a task that came from their instruction. Receivers are kept informed about activity on the ticket, according to their notification settings.

Which Lists Do You Need?

• Trade. Which trade the task belongs to. Even when the assignee already names the company, the trade list keeps the statistics comparable across projects where the trades are done by different companies.
• Source. Where the task came from: Site meeting, Site walk, Client instruction, Schedule. Optional, but it shows afterwards how much work came from instructions rather than from the plan.

Use the built-in Priority field for urgency rather than a list. Read more in Create & Edit Lists and Field Types.

One Ticket per Task, or Sub-Tickets?

Keep the rule simple: one ticket, one assignee, one deadline. A task that needs three trades is three tickets.

Where the three belong together, use sub-tickets: a parent ticket for the overall task, for example "Prepare meeting room 2.14 for the tenant's AV installer", with one sub-ticket per trade. The parent shows the sub-tickets and their status in one list. The sub-ticket form needs the Parent ticket field. Read more in Use Sub-Tickets.

The same pattern works for the site meeting: one ticket per meeting with the minutes, and one sub-ticket per action item, each assigned to the responsible company. Sub-tickets are not shown in a schedule.

How Are Deadlines Followed Up?

• Set a due date on every task. A task without a deadline does not appear on any overdue list.
• The assignee and the receivers get a reminder before the due date, according to each user's notification settings. Read more in Set a Due Date or Extension Date for a Ticket and Configure E-Mail Notifications.
• Ask every subcontractor to set email notifications to immediate rather than one email a day, so that an urgent task does not wait until the next morning.
• Before each site meeting, filter for tickets that are overdue, using the filter Overdue by at least, and go through the list per company.

Who Has Seen the Task?

The creator of a ticket sees a read receipt next to the assignee: an eye symbol, crossed out while the assignee has not opened the ticket. It answers "did you see my task?" without a phone call. When the ticket is assigned to a group, the eye shows whether the group leader has opened it. Assignees can switch read receipts off in their settings, so a crossed-out eye does not always mean the ticket was not opened.

To list every task the assignee has not opened yet, filter by Unread by assignee. Read more in View Read Receipts of Tickets and Filter Tickets.

What to Avoid

• Assigning to the foreman instead of the company. When the foreman changes, the tickets are orphaned.
• Several tasks in one ticket. "Electrical: points 1 to 7 from the meeting" cannot be half done, half overdue and partly closed.
• Tasks without a due date. They never show up as overdue.
• Letting the trade close its own task. Resolved means the trade says it is done. Closed means you checked.
• Sending the task list by email instead of assigning tickets. The email is out of date the next morning.
• Keeping the action items only in the meeting minutes. If an action item is not a ticket, nobody is reminded of it.

AI Support for Task & Subcontractor Management

The Resolution Verification Agent creates the check sub-ticket with the same form as the resolved task, so the Task form needs the Parent ticket field. A task that is already a sub-ticket, for example an action item under a meeting ticket, cannot get a sub-ticket of its own.

An AI agent only ever creates a ticket, a comment or an email. It cannot change, reassign, close or delete a ticket. Read more in Create & Manage Your AI Agents.

Steps to Manage Tasks and Subcontractors in PlanRadar

Task & Subcontractor Management: Workflows in PlanRadar explains each stage: set up the form, lists and groups, create and assign tasks after the site meeting and the site walk, work on them as a subcontractor, and follow up overdue tasks per company.

Additional Possibilities

• Add tasks to the project schedule, so that their status and progress roll up into the phases. Read more in Create, Add or Remove Tickets from a Schedule.
• See tasks by due date in the calendar view. Read more in Tickets Calendar View.
• Send each subcontractor its open tasks as a PDF ticket report before the site meeting. Read more in Create a Ticket Report (PDF).
• Compare companies in Statistics, for example the number of tickets per status and per assignee. Read more in Statistics.
• Change the assignee or due date of many tickets at once. Read more in Edit Multiple Tickets at once in the Webapp.
• Use the same groups and form in every project. Read more in Use Project Templates in the Webapp.