Development Checklist

 

To stay on top of your project and make sure you don’t drop any balls, you should create a checklist that covers the whole development process.  This process is lengthy and detailed and there are too many activities that have to happen at different points in the project for you to just leave them to in your head.  You should periodically check your checklist (maybe once every couple of weeks) to make sure you are performing the appropriate project tasks at the different phases of the project.

 

Forgetting to perform a development process task, or not doing it on time, can have negative financial and schedule impacts on your project.  For example, while initially evaluating a piece of land, a development manager can quickly and easily check to see if the land site is in a flood plain by checking FEMA’s interactive map of all known flood plains.  If you can find out early if a piece of land is in a flood plain, you can move on without spending much money on due diligence for that site.  If you don’t check the flood plain status of a site early, you can spend tens of thousands of dollars on legal fees, environmental surveys, and an ALTA survey before you finally discover on the ALTA survey that the land is in a flood plain.

 

Periodically reviewing your checklist keeps you ahead of the game.  There are many tasks in the development process that can take weeks or months to accomplish.  Identifying and starting on these long duration tasks early is key to keeping your project on schedule.  For example, if you need to plat or re-plat your land site, that process could take up to six months with some cities.  Identify that task early and start it early, otherwise you are going to have to pause on other tasks in the development process until the plat is complete.

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Click on the image below for an example ground up development checklist.  This list has several projects listed at the top column, assuming that a development manager will be managing several projects at once.  I prefer the format of putting all my projects on one checklist, as opposed to creating a separate checklist for each project, for simplicity and ease of updating the checklist. 

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