How to Start a Project Management Services Business in Dubai

How to Start a Project Management Services Business in Dubai

A date has already been given to somebody who matters. A tenant has been told the unit opens in October. A lender has been told drawdown finishes in the second quarter. A board has approved a factory move on the understanding that production does not stop. From that moment the project has a hard constraint that nobody on it owns: the contractor owns his works, the designer owns his drawings, the supplier owns his lead time, and every one of them can be entirely correct about his own scope while the date quietly moves.

Project management services is the activity that takes the date, and with it the budget and the scope. It is sold after the decision to build has been made — which is the cleanest way to separate it from the development work that precedes it — and what the client is buying is a single person whose job is the outcome rather than a part of it.

The client has already decided, and has nobody to hold the whole of it

Four buyers recur, and none of them is short of technical ability.

The client doing something once. A fit-out, a plant relocation, a new clinic, a systems replacement — a capability needed for nine months and never again. Recruiting a delivery team for it makes no sense, and asking the operations manager to run it part-time is how the date gets lost.

The client whose own people are fully loaded. There is a project office, and it is already carrying three projects. The fourth gets a mandate rather than a secondment, because the alternative is all four slipping equally.

The client who has been burned. The last project ran over, the final account was argued for a year, and the board has resolved to buy a different outcome. This buyer is the easiest to sell to and the hardest to satisfy, because what he wants is not a better programme but somebody accountable.

And the sponsor who is far away. A foreign parent committing capital to a market it does not sit in, needing a representative on its side of the table who reads the local cost base, the local programme risk and the local contractor's habits. This is frequently the most valuable mandate on the line, because the client cannot substitute his own judgement for yours.

CZ 336 — Project Management Services

A mandate on this line contains four blocks of work, and a practice that can do three of them well still loses money on the fourth.

The baseline. Scope, programme and budget, written down in a form everybody has agreed to be measured against. Without it there is nothing to control, and the commonest cause of an unwinnable dispute at the end of a project is that no version of the baseline was ever accepted in writing at the start.

Control. Change control that prices and approves variation before it is built rather than after. A risk log that is reviewed and acted on rather than maintained for show. Cost reporting that tells the sponsor what the project will cost at completion, not what has been spent. Reporting that is short enough to be read.

Coordination. The consultants, the contractors, the suppliers and the authority submissions somebody has to chase. Most of the time a project loses is lost in the gaps between parties who each think somebody else is waiting. Closing those gaps is unglamorous and it is the work.

Closeout. Commissioning, handover, the documentation the client will need to operate the thing, and the final account. Projects are routinely declared finished eight weeks before they are finished, and the last eight weeks are where goodwill is destroyed.

The fee is normally earned across the programme — a monthly or stage-based draw over the duration — which has an awkward consequence worth understanding before signing: revenue is tied to a schedule that can slip for reasons that are entirely somebody else's. A mandate priced for twelve months and delivered over eighteen earns the same fee over a longer payroll. The commercial protection is a clause dealing with extension of the service period, and a practice that has not thought about it discovers the problem on its first delayed job.

The third column is the trap. Taking the works contract in your own name converts an advisory practice into a contractor, and contracting is a separate activity in the catalogue — Turnkey Projects Contracting (CZ 102) exists for exactly that model. The fee looks better and the exposure is of a different order.

What the licence does not cover

A project management licence is permission to plan, control and coordinate. Four things sit outside it and each has caught somebody out.

Design, and supervision on site. Architectural and engineering design, and the supervision role that signs for what was built, are separately licensed professions with their own liability and their own practitioners. A project manager may hold the designer to the brief and may not produce the design or discharge the supervising engineer's duty.

Construction. A project manager does not build. The works contract belongs to a contractor holding a licence for the trade, and the permissions that attach to building — the municipal approvals, the fire and life-safety sign-off, the utility connections — are held by the licensed designer and contractor and granted by the authority. The project manager coordinates the submissions and chases them; he is not the applicant and cannot be.

Operating the asset afterwards. Once the project is handed over, running the building is a different activity again, which is why the catalogue carries Facility Management (CZ 250) separately. Several practices do both in sequence and they hold both lines to do it.

The work before the decision. Shaping the scheme, testing the site and assembling the funding case belong to Project Development Consultant (CZ 335). Where the project is an information-technology programme rather than a physical one, the advisory side sits with Information Technology Consultants (CZ 282) and Computer system Consultancies (CZ 226), and a practice selling itself into systems delivery should look at which activity its work actually falls under.

What the licence requires in order to exist is modest — the activity on the trade licence, premises recorded against it, work permits for a team that may spend most of its week on somebody else's site, and tax enrolment on the fee income once the thresholds are reached. What attaches in a specific case depends on the emirate and the licensing authority, and ConsultZone confirms it against the project rather than against an average.

References

1. Dubai Municipality — premises suitability and the municipal permissions a project must satisfy, which are held by the licensed designer and contractor rather than by the project manager. Dubai Municipality
2. Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation — work permits and labour contracts for a delivery team working away from its own premises. Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation
3. Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure — infrastructure and transport matters that set programme constraints on a project. Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure
4. Federal Tax Authority — enrolment and filing on fee income earned across a programme. Federal Tax Authority