Roofing Project Management: 7 Key Tips to Know

What is Project Management?

Project management involves using certain techniques and tools to guide a team toward achieving certain objectives as defined by the project’s specifications. The goal is to complete the project within a set time frame without exhausting available resources.

Project management has six vital principles:

• Project planning: Provides a detailed roadmap for a project’s execution. It covers the different processes for taking the project from start to finish.

• Time management: Centers on scheduling project subtasks to keep to the time frame. It ensures efficiency throughout the project and helps project managers keep stakeholders informed about progress.

• Quality management: Details the processes of ensuring the quality of the final deliverable—the product or service. It prevents customer dissatisfaction and costly mistakes.

• Resource management: Addresses the acquisition and management of the human, material, and financial resources necessary to complete the project. It prevents budget overruns and ensures profitability.

• Risk management: Involves identifying potential risks and minimizing the possibility of them occurring during the project. It helps project managers create contingency plans for every possibility to prevent project setbacks.

• Project procurement management: Focuses on acquiring the materials needed to execute the project. It includes negotiating contracts, finding suppliers, and ensuring vendors abide by the contract. This ensures that team members have all they need to complete the project.

What does a roofing project manager do?

A roofing project manager supervises roofing projects to completion. They ensure the roof meets the customer’s expectations and is completed by the predicted date.

Here are the basic responsibilities of roofing project managers:

1. Asses the damage

Roofing managers inspect the roof, photograph the issues they find, and show them to the customer. This determines the approach and resources used to resolve the situation.

For example, severe hail damage with multiple missing shingles will require a new roof installation. But a small hole around the chimney will become a roof repair project.

2. Educate property owners

After inspecting a roof, roofing managers will explain their findings to the property owners, and convince them to sign a contingency agreement. 

They’ll also propose solutions and estimate the associated costs and time to complete the work.

3. Roofing project management 

Roofing project managers work with roofers and other subcontractors to ensure the project is successfully completed to the homeowner’s satisfaction. To fulfill this role, they will do the following:

• Coordinate and schedule all subcontractors and other trades involved with the project, including gutter experts, roofing installers, etc. They will prepare an estimated schedule specifying when each subcontractor will be onsite to handle their part of the project. This ensures they arrive on time so the project continues unhindered. 

• Plan the entire project to continue regardless of weather disruptions, material delays, etc.

• Oversee the roofers or installers to ensure they follow the project's specifications and scope.

• Update customers regularly about the project's progress and inform them about any changes to the predicted time of completion.

• Provide roofing materials and inspect them to ensure they are of high quality.

• Ensure everything is done to code and that contractors obey safety guidelines such as fall protection, safety paperwork, and designated landing zones. This is crucial to prevent fines and penalties from OSHA and the city's building department.

4. Post-job inspection and cleanup

After a job is completed, the roofing manager will inspect the roof to ensure it meets quality requirements.  

They will also work with the subcontractors to clean the job site so it's in the same or a better condition than it was before the project. Nails, shingle pieces, and other debris all have to go.

Why is Project Management Important for Roofing Companies?

Here’s why roofing companies need project management when handling projects:

1. It ensures projects meet quality standards

Roofing projects are only successful when customers are satisfied with the quality.

Roofing project managers build quality checks into different stages of the project to ensure the final result is acceptable. They will also check the roof one last time after the project is completed, to confirm that the roofers and other trades did a good job, before notifying the customer.

2. It ensures workplace safety

Unfortunately, workplace injuries occur frequently in the roofing industry, especially when employees fail to adhere to safety guidelines. 

A roofing project manager ensures all subcontractors wear the right protective gear, take steps to minimize fall hazards, and use fall arrest systems. Sometimes, they write up or terminate subcontractors who fail to abide by safety guidelines to prevent workplace accidents before they happen.

3. It limits downtime

Sometimes, initial measurements and estimates of the job scope may be inaccurate. In such situations, roofing project managers can help source materials. This is better than the roofers doing so themselves, which impairs productivity and causes delays.

4. It mitigates risk

Roofing projects are plagued by unforeseen risks and circumstances that can disrupt the project and make it impossible to meet deadlines. Weather can change suddenly, a supplier may fail to deliver at the agreed date, etc.

Project management helps you anticipate risks and plan the entire project to proactively accommodate possible disruptions and minimize their impact on the project. 

For example, roofing project managers can develop a contingency plan to deal with a potential delay in the arrival of a material. They can contact multiple suppliers, source materials from alternative sources, etc.

5. It facilitates effective collaboration

Differences in operating standards and processes underpin many of the challenges and issues that arise on roofing projects. These issues can be avoided if a roofing project manager is in charge.

Roofing project managers create a single operating procedure and working standards with which everyone must comply. This helps ensure all the subcontractors and tradespeople contracted for a roofing project collaborate seamlessly.

6. It helps roofing projects meet deadlines

Roofing project managers enforce deadlines at different stages of the roofing project. They hold regular meetings with employees to ensure everyone is on track to deliver the project as promised.

This boosts customer satisfaction, earning the roofing company positive reviews and organic referrals.

Roofing Project Management Tips

Here are seven tips roofing services managers use to manage projects effectively.

Let’s take a closer look at each one.

1. Use a shared calendar

Scheduling crews and knowing their availability can quickly become a headache for roofing companies. This is usually the case for large roofing projects, especially during June to November, when storms are prevalent. 

Having a shared calendar mitigates this challenge by providing each crew's actual location and project progress. The project manager can easily see the crews available and identify efficiency bottlenecks before they upend the project.

An example of a shared calendar is ServiceTitan’s Service Scheduling platform, which allows users to increase or reduce calendar spots for certain roofing projects automatically.

For example, to cope with surging demand, a roofing project manager can increase the spots available for roofing installations during storm seasons and reduce those for routine maintenance.

The platform also allows dispatchers to schedule jobs months in advance and assign jobs to crew members based on the following:

• Proximity of the roofer to the job site.

• Predicted arrival time based on traffic or weather conditions.

The roofer’s skill set and ability to handle the job.

This feature is valuable during storm seasons when there’s a surge in roofing projects, which can easily overwhelm project managers.

2. Set a project scope

The project scope comprises every task, deliverable, deadline, and objective that must be achieved for a roofing project to be successfully completed. Defining a project scope allows managers to deliver the roofing project promptly without reducing quality or overworking crews.

For example, your crew is replacing dislodged shingles, and you promised to deliver the project in two weeks. However, midway through the project, the customer insists you must replace the old gutters, too.

Without a defined project scope, the team must work overtime to accommodate the new instructions and meet the deadline. They may reduce the quality of the final deliverables and cut corners.

To define your project scope, do the following:

• Determine the customer’s roofing needs.

• Agree with the customer on an approach to resolve the issue.

• Identify the resources needed for the roofing project.

• Break down the project into subtasks and deliverables, and attach deadlines.

• Draft the project scope statement.

• Get buy-in from the customer and stakeholders involved in the project.

Here’s a template you can use to draft a project scope statement:

• Project objectives: To replace all dislodged shingles to protect the property from the next storm.

• Resources: Four roof installers working six hours daily for three days, $5,000 for shingles, $1,000 for nails, and roofing tools.

• Deliverables

• Removing all damaged shingles by 7th June 2024.

• Installing new shingles by 8th June 2024.

• Project roadmap and timeline:

• 6th June: Assess damage and purchase supplies

• 7th June: Remove faulty shingles

• 8th June: Install new shingles and perform post-job cleanup and quality checks.

• 9th June: Deliver project to the customer

• Out of scope:

  • Changing gutters

  • Replacing decking.

3. Allocate the right resources to the right job

Resource allocation means establishing the resources—roofers, subcontractors, roofing materials, and equipment—needed to complete a roofing project.

Resource allocation ensures that all available resources are used prudently to avoid budget overruns and minimize disruptions to other projects. It also helps project managers identify potential resource issues before the project begins.

Unexpected resource shortfalls, over-allocation, and under-utilization are common challenges.

For example, without the right tools, roofing managers may pile work orders on techs who are still in the middle of a job. They may also mistakenly overestimate the amount of materials in the warehouse and only notice the error midway into the project.

We created our Dispatch and Inventory Management software to handle such challenges.

The Dispatch software shows exactly the stage a roofer is in the job cycle, ensuring project managers or dispatchers only assign more jobs to roofers who have completed their work orders. This prevents over-allocation, burnout, and downtime.

Similarly, ServiceTitan’s Inventory platform provides an Item Overview report highlighting each material’s availability, quantity, and unit pricing.

Roofing project managers can use this report to quickly check if a material is available in sufficient quantity for the project. They can confirm if teams have all they need to execute a project and purchase extra materials to prevent stockouts and project delays.

This allows roofing companies to complete projects on time to satisfy customers. 

For example, Robert Maier, founder of Laing Roofing, contacted ServiceTitan after trying multiple tools, none of which delivered the results he wanted. He now recognizes the Dispatch software as one of the reasons he loves ServiceTitan.

“When we started with ServiceTitan, we had maybe two trucks on the road,” he said. “We quickly grew to six in 12 months.”

“Where I want to be in five years, I think that’s where ServiceTitan is and where it's going. I'd like to hitch our wagon to that tractor.”

4. Go paperless

Paper documents introduce a lot of inefficiencies into roofing projects. 

For starters, techs can lose or forget to fill vital paperwork. Also, the time it takes to sort through several documents is better spent on other aspects of the roofing project.

Additionally, reading documents with smudged ink or illegible handwriting can take a lot of work. 

Going paperless and securing valuable documents in a centralized digital database makes it painless for team members to confirm details and maintain a single source of truth.

ServiceTitan’s Field Service App allows roofing companies to operate without paper documents.

The application grants field techs access to data collected during the intake call, alongside the customer’s complete service history. This eliminates the need for technicians to carry clipboards and call the office to confirm details.

ServiceTitan’s Field Service App also lets roofing project managers upload forms automatically triggered to appear at specific job cycle stages. This ensures roofers fill out forms when the details are still fresh in their memory rather than when they return to the office and struggle to remember some information.

Before switching to ServiceTitan, Guardian Roofing struggled with inefficient processes and multiple paperwork. To manage jobs, they even had a printer that printed 300 pieces of paper daily.

However, that became a thing of the past immediately after they switched to ServiceTitan. Within only seven years, the company tripled its value, reporting almost $30 million in revenue in 2023.

“I can't even imagine going back to pre-ServiceTitan because of how archaic it was and not having real-time information,” says Lori Swanson, co-founder of the company. 

“Having to wait until the end of the month to know your metrics is just not scalable. It's really hard to grow that way. You find yourself really reactive.”

Check out 11 other ServiceTitan features that have helped grow Guardian Roofing Company.

5. Automate inventory management

Automating inventory management makes it easy to maintain healthy stock levels to prevent project delays.

Some companies create dedicated Excel sheets or purchase project management and inventory-only tools to automate inventory management.

The major issue with such solutions is that they are disconnected from the rest of your business operations. Therefore, the users must manually update multiple platforms to document materials used at the worksite.

In contrast, companies that use ServicTitan’s Inventory Management software fully automate the inventory management process since the tool communicates with other tools for invoicing, customer relationship management, etc.

Whenever a technician adds an item to customers’ invoices, an automated process adjusts the replenishment schedule to change its quantity.

The tech can then start the requisitioning process from the tablet and select either the warehouse or a vendor as the source.

Once the tech triggers the replenishment from the vendor, ServiceTitan automatically notifies the project manager or business owner to create a purchase order.

When the purchase order is created, the user can export it in CSV or PDF formats or send it directly to the vendor or supplier before leaving the platform.

Users can also monitor the purchase order process from the platform to know its status—pending, sent, partially received, received in full, or canceled. This ensures items are replaced when they're almost exhausted, preventing stockouts and minimizing project delays.

6. Keep your team informed

Roofing crews excel when they have sufficient information about the customer, their service history, and the project’s specifications. They can deliver the project to the customer’s satisfaction with sufficient information to avoid reworks.

Keeping team members informed is almost impossible with clipboards and other manual systems. It’s only possible if they can access information via a centralized database and use it to post updates.

ServiceTitan’s Field Service App empowers roofing companies to provide unrestricted access to roofing projects and customer information.

Field techs can deliver exceptional service with complete access to customer names, voice notes, photos, previous service history, and CSR notes. They can also listen to the intake call recording to confirm the customer’s specific instructions.

Field techs can also quickly check the customer’s property details before leaving to recommend extra services and upsells.

7. Always track project progress

For effective project management, the progress of the roofing project must always be monitored. This way, you can pinpoint and resolve bottlenecks before they disrupt the project.   

Here’s how to track project progress:

• Use the project scope document to create daily checklists. Have roofers submit them daily so you can track the job’s progress.

• Encourage roofing project team members to submit status updates to keep them accountable daily. Use their updates to prepare a status report.

• Visit the job site at the start, at any random hour, and at the end of each work day. Use the first visit to confirm what was written in the status update and checklist of the previous day.

What Tools Can Roofing Businesses Use for Project Management?

Digital tools are integral to effective project management. They streamline collaboration, centralize information, automate repeated tasks, and help with task management.

Roofing companies have two choices when it comes to picking a project management tool.

• Roofing software: Dedicated roofing software that interacts with tools for other business processes.

• Project management software: Standalone project management tools such as ClickUp, Asana, and Monday.

Based on our experience, we often advise roofing companies to use dedicated roofing software like ServiceTitan to eliminate manual processes.

Because the software communicates with tools for other business operations, roofing business owners use it to manage projects from start to finish. It also automates simple tasks such as updating customers, inventory replenishment, and costing.

Book a demo today to learn how to use ServiceTitan to manage roofing projects effectively and increase roofing sales.

ServiceTitan is software that helps roofing companies automate key business processes and efficiently manage roofing projects. Join thousands of contractors nationwide who have increased their revenue by an average of 25 percent in just their first year of working with us.