It would be helpful to choose a scale that you are comfortable with but it doesn't have to be full scale it can be a ratio of say 1 tenth , if you know certain measurements i.e a door is 1.8 meters then working in 1/10th scale it would be easy to make a door 0.18 units high.
As long as you set your working units so you can easily work with your grid or fractions of a unit to be able to acurately model to scale you will be ok.
Maya also have a measurement tool but that could get a little tedious if you had to check every single measurment.