Most business owners commissioning their first office fit-out assume the contractor simply turns up and gets on with it. In practice a fit-out is a small construction project, and office fit-out project management is the job of making sure the right people do the right things in the right order — designers before builders, landlord consent before demolition, data cabling before the ceiling goes back up. Get that sequence wrong and the costs land on you, not the contractor.
You do not need to understand construction to manage this well. You need to know who is responsible for what, what you have to decide, and when. Here is how it works on a typical SME project in London.
What does fit-out project management actually involve?
Project management on a fit-out covers five things: programme (the order and timing of works), cost (keeping the budget honest as things change), procurement (getting the right trades booked in), compliance (health and safety, building control, landlord consent) and communication (making sure you always know what is happening and what is needed from you).
On a large corporate fit-out, each of those might be a separate person. On a 3,000 sq ft office for a team of twenty, they are usually one person — either an in-house project manager at your contractor, or a consultant you appoint yourself.
Who’s who on a fit-out project?
The job titles vary between firms, but the roles are consistent:
- Client — you. You set the budget, sign off the design, approve variations and hold the lease. Under the CDM regulations you also carry legal duties as the client, even if you delegate the day-to-day work.
- Designer or space planner — turns your requirements into drawings: layout, partitions, finishes, furniture. May sit within your contractor or be appointed separately.
- Principal contractor — the firm doing the building work and coordinating the trades on site. On most projects this is who you sign the main contract with.
- Project manager — owns the programme and the cost, chases decisions and runs site meetings. Usually employed by the contractor on a design-and-build job.
- Subcontractors — the specialist trades: electricians, mechanical engineers, partitioning and ceiling fitters, decorators, flooring and cabling installers.
- Building surveyor — advises on the lease side: licence to alter, schedules of condition and dilapidations.
- Landlord and managing agent — approve alterations, set working hours, control access, lifts and out-of-hours rules. They are not on your team, but they can stop your programme dead.
Who does what, and when?
A typical small works or fit-out project runs in five stages. Roughly:
- Brief and feasibility (weeks 1–2). You set the budget and requirements; the designer tests whether they fit the space. This is also when someone should read your lease.
- Design and costing (weeks 2–6). Drawings are developed and priced. You sign off the layout and specification. Landlord consent — the licence to alter — is applied for here, because it is the single most common cause of delay.
- Pre-construction (weeks 4–8). Contract signed, programme agreed, long-lead items ordered, risk assessments issued, building control notified where needed, and site access and working hours arranged with the managing agent.
- On site (weeks 6–14, depending on scope). Strip-out, first fix, partitions and ceilings, second fix, decoration, flooring, furniture. Weekly progress meetings, and variations issued in writing before any extra work is done.
- Handover and close-out. Snagging list agreed and worked through, certificates, warranties and an operations and maintenance file handed over, and the defects period — typically six to twelve months — begins.
Those timings overlap and they compress on smaller workspace refurbishment jobs. The point is the order, not the calendar.
What stays your job as the client?
Even with a good project manager, a handful of things cannot be delegated — and delays here are the most common reason SME fit-outs run over:
- Making decisions on time. A week spent deciding on flooring in week three can cost you two weeks on site in week nine.
- Approving variations in writing before the work happens, not after.
- Giving your contractor the lease documents early, including any existing licences to alter and schedules of condition.
- Telling your team what is happening and when — noise, dust and moved desks are much easier to accept when they are expected.
- Holding a contingency. Ten to fifteen per cent of the build cost is a sensible indicative allowance for a leasehold office where you cannot see behind the ceilings.
Do you need to appoint a separate project manager?
For most SME projects, no. On a design-and-build contract, project management sits in the contractor’s preliminaries and you deal with one point of contact throughout — simpler, and usually cheaper.
An independent project manager earns their fee when the project is larger, when the design is being tendered to several contractors, or when the landlord relationship is complicated. As a rough indicative guide, independent project management is often priced at around 3–6% of construction cost. Our comparison of design-and-build versus traditional procurement sets out the trade-offs.
Where does the lease side fit in?
This is the part most contractors leave to you, and it is where projects most often go wrong. Your lease governs what you may alter, whether you need written consent, and what you must put back at the end of the term. Every design decision has a reinstatement cost attached to it later — a glazed partition you install this year may become a line on a dilapidations schedule in five.
Good project management means those two conversations happen together: what do we want the office to do, and what will it cost us to undo? Deciding that at design stage is free. Discovering it at lease end is not.
Get an honest, itemised quote
Beem Interiors manages small works, fit-outs and refurbishments for London SMEs — one point of contact, a written programme, and variations priced before they happen. We look at the lease, consent and dilapidations side up front, because that is usually where the surprises live. If you are planning a project, get in touch for a no-obligation chat and an honest, itemised quote.
