Question: Does Sedgwick provide strata managers with a templated scope of works or support or documents to ensure the insurers are put at ease?
Answer: We use a fairly standardised layout. Most of the insurers have all seen it before.
Bruce McKenzie, Sedgwick:
As a business, how Sedgwick prepares our scope of work are relatively typical. Most of them are similar in layout and what we’re doing is providing explicit advice to a contractor on what we want them to do, right through for every stage of the work.
If we talk about cladding and most defects, when we look at the problem of cladding or a particular defect, I can assure you, when you write a scope of work, it’s not a matter of just removing that thing and replacing it. There’s always subsequent work that happens and part of what we try to do is to unpack all of that work.
If it is in a unit where we may end up having to strip plasterboard off, this might mean carpet replacement, it might mean fixing the gardens outside, because the scaffolds going to damage it. It’s all of those knock on things that we try to make sure the builder includes. The benefit of that is to try and alleviate surprise costs and variations later on, where owners certainly don’t appreciate a builder or anybody else, for that matter, turning around saying, it looks like we’ve got another $50,000 worth of cost because we didn’t realise that we had to cut up a section of driveway to do what we did.
Part of what we do is take a fairly deep dive into the whole methodology of ‘How is this going to actually occur?’ We look into things when we start to consider contractors such as, ‘How are they going to gain access to that side of the building? Are they expecting to completely block the driveway and access so no one can park for three months?’, Or ‘What considerations have they made?’, Because we work with live buildings all the time, we know the questions to ask and we already know what’s acceptable and not acceptable to most owners corporation so we will dive into that deeply and make sure a builder is realistic in the way they’re going to approach it to mitigate or reduce the impact to the occupants, particularly when they’re going to be occupying the building. That’s part of the service we provide.
Tho answer the question more directly. Yes, we use a fairly standardised layout. Most of the insurers have all seen it before. It often goes to insurance builders as well if it’s another kind of loss that we’re involved with. Floods is probably a really big one at the moment.
George Endacott:
The scope of work is a very important document. It effectively provides that conduit of written communication between the principle contract or who’s going to undertake that work, and who’s providing or where that instruction has come from. That line of communication needs to be very clear. If there’s any dispute, you’ve got that source of truth to go back to. By the time you have a signed off scope of works, everyone is on the same wavelength. Everyone knows what the expectation is, and you can use that as your conduit for proceeding.
I can’t emphasise enough that the scope of work is an integral document in the whole process. Obviously, as project managers, we would use that then as a cornerstone for how we will then support on behalf of clients the programme delivery of that project.
This post appears in the May 2022 edition of The VIC Strata Magazine.
Bruce McKenzie
Sedgwick
E: bruce.mckenzie@au.sedgwick.com
P: 1300 735 720
George Endacott
Sedgwick
E: George.Endacott@au.sedgwick.com
P: 1300 735 720
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