Who does what on a fit-out job

A fit-out job has more roles than people. On a small villa fit-out, one person may wear four of these hats before lunch. That is normal. What matters is that each hat is recognised, and that somebody is clearly wearing it.

The point of this lesson is not to teach you job titles. You know those. It is to be precise about the decision each role owns, because that is where arguments start — two people both sure a call was theirs to make.

The roles, and the decision each one owns

Role	The decision they own
Client	What they want, what they will pay for, and when they need it. The final word on scope and money.
Client rep / consultant	Whether what was built matches what was specified. Approval of drawings, materials, and completed work.
Main contractor	Whether to take the job, and at what price and programme. Carries the overall delivery risk.
Project manager	The sequence of work, who does what when, and what gets escalated. The single point of accountability for delivery.
Site engineer / foreman	What happens on site today and tomorrow. Sequencing of trades on the ground, quality of installation, safety.
Quantity surveyor (QS)	What the work costs, what has been earned, and what is due at each valuation. Owns the numbers.
Procurement	What is ordered, from whom, and by when. Chasing long-lead items before they threaten the programme.
Designer	What the space looks like and how it performs. Drawings, material choices, detail resolution.
Subcontractors	How their trade is actually built. The means and method of their own work.
Accountant	What was paid, to whom, and whether it matches the PO and the valuation. Cash and reconciliation.

Notice what is not on this list: a column for “their job title”. Titles vary between companies and between countries. The decision each role owns does not.

One person, one answer

The most useful idea in this whole lesson is the single point of accountability. For any given decision on a job — the sequence of trades, the cost of a variation, the approval of a drawing — there should be exactly one person whose call it is.

When the answer to “who decides this?” is “the project manager and the QS, sort of, between them”, what actually happens is that nobody decides it until it becomes a problem. Then both remember it differently.

Where the lines blur, and how to hold them

Roles overlap in practice, and that is fine. The PM helps the QS with a valuation. The site engineer talks the client through a detail. The designer answers a question from a subcontractor. Collaboration is not the enemy of accountability — ambiguity is.

The test is simple. When a decision is being made, ask who owns it. If the answer is clear, help that person and move on. If the answer is fuzzy, stop and name the owner before the decision is made. Doing this up front costs a sentence. Doing it after a dispute costs a meeting, a variation, and sometimes a relationship.

A word about the client’s consultant

On many jobs the client brings a consultant or a rep whose approval gates the work. This person is not your enemy, but their signature is not optional either. Drawings issued, materials approved, completed work signed off — these are the milestones that release money and unlock the next stage. Chasing them is not nagging; it is protecting the programme.

The discipline worth building is to treat every approval as a dated event. “The consultant approved the joinery shop drawings” is a fact. “The consultant was fine with the joinery” is a memory, and memories differ at valuation time.

What this looks like in Taskity

Each person on a job is a user with a role, and that role decides which decisions the system expects them to own — approving a drawing, raising a PO, signing off a valuation. The point is not to restrict people. It is to make the single point of accountability visible, so that “whose call was this?” has an answer the whole team can see.

Check what you learned