The Deployment and Utilization of New Rules of Measurement within Quantity Surveying

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The construction industry has always been viewed as being the last to adopt modern technology and methods compared with other industries. The need for major change in the industry is abundantly clear as many projects in recent years have been going over budget and clients have not been satisfied with the work. This has been down to new developments in construction technology and materials. Quantity surveyors have tried to use traditional methods to price and measure these new techniques but it has been proven that the current SMM were not adequate to do so. The creation of the New Rules of Measurement aims to change all of this and provide the client with great cost accuracy on modern projects from start to finish. This dissertation aims to analyze the impact the New Rules of Measurement have had in QS firms and whether they are being used effectively by firms that have currently adopted them. The opinions and experiences of current Quantity Surveyors have been gathered by reviewing literature on NRM and by conducting interviews with quantity surveyors from the contracting and consultancy side of the profession. The general feeling in the industry is that quantity surveyors are not utilizing the NRM to its full potential and there are various reasons why this is.

Many professionals in the construction industry are against change and tend to have the opinion of “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it” in regards to the current measurement rules they use (SMM7). Companies have a lack of spare capital to invest in new methods and training. As the full set of documents has not been released people are unwilling to integrate an uncompleted document into their work. A lack of guidance and information from the RICS has also been to blame. The aim of this dissertation is to analyze how NRM is being used in the UK industry by QS professionals and to evaluate whether it is being utilized to its full potential and if it is providing effective cost certainty on construction projects.

Dissertation Objectives

• Analyze the issues that quantity surveyors have encountered in the industry with measurement and costing.
• Compare NRM with SMM7 and how NRM can address issues arising from the use of SMM7.
• Evaluate whether NRM has had a noticeable impact on the UK QS profession since its release.
• Evaluate the problems that quantity surveyors may incur when trying to implement NRM into their everyday work and why some are against using it in the UK industry.

I do hope you enjoyed reading this post on new rules of measurement and how it affects the UK construction industry. There are many other titles available in the construction dissertation collection that should be of interest to construction management students and building professionals. There are many dissertation titles that relate to other aspects of construction such as project management techniques, environmental management, building and construction methods to name a few. It took a lot of time to write this post and I would be grateful if you could share this post via Facebook and Twitter. Feel free to add your thoughts in the comments section. Thank you.