Executive Summary. It’s understandable that contractors do not want to have to do triple the work: their own work, the work of the Owner, and the work of the Engineer. But, if getting off the job on as close to your terms as possible and as quickly as possible are your goals, you might want to rethink your approach. Get in the driver’s seat and drive the bus!
The owner’s lazy and the engineer needs to do his job. This can be true on both accounts. Here are the true conditions which lead to these perceptions:
- Owner laziness – the primary driver for this assumption on the owner’s side is lack of profit drive. A municipality or a state or an agency is employed by personnel who are not driven by profit. There is no budget of manhours to follow and, if there is, there is no real accountability if the budget is exceeded. It then follows that there is no real reason to rush and get back issue in five days instead of twenty-five days.
- Engineer needs to do his job – the driver here is threefold: hourly billing, engineering mindset, and liability. Some engineering contracts are lump sum, some are time and materials. So, again, why rush? Secondly with the engineering mindset, there is an instinct to analyze and study – should the slab be 5” or 6” thick, or should the pipe be 12” or 18”? I’m not even on the job and I know the answer is 6” and 18”, respectfully. Lastly, there is liability – every engineer’s Achille’s heel. Yes, there is fear of a professional liability claim for an error, but also there is reputational liability (what if I make a mistake and the owner is not satisfied?).
I guess I’ll do their work too. That’s the spirit. You got in late this morning anyway at 7:00 am, and you might as well stay until 6:00 pm. That’ll give you enough time to do your job and that of the other two parties listed above.
The goal here is to get the job done correctly (in compliance with the Contract) and as quickly as possible (to reduce your project overhead costs). Here are some pointers on what you can do to help get you on to the next job (and increase profit along the way):
- RFIs – in addition to the question, provide the answer. This is a big advantage for the contractor because he can write the answer which works best for schedule and cost.
- Submittals – make them complete and simple enough for a third grader to review. This means highlight, use arrows, and color code it. The color coding is the most valuable. At the top of the submittal make a legend: blue or black for Contractor, green for Owner, and red for Engineer. The colors are so important because these days everything is being done digitally. And the legend put on by you takes all assumptions out of who said what.
- Change orders – there’s only three components to a change: merit, time, and cost. And each of these should be on each of your requests all in one package. The merit has specification and drawing references as to why it’s extra, the time is the change in work or calendar days (use the same day unit of measure as your contract does) to the Contract, and the cost should have all necessary backups (blue book rates, materials quotes, and subcontractor proposals).
- Go meet with other agencies – this is a sensitive one, but if there is something you need from another agency (say your job is with a city, but the job needs something from a state agency), offer to meet with that agency. As a contractor, time is the enemy, and you may be able to get things done quicker using whatever negotiating advantages you may have in your toolbox.
- Do just a bit of design – I know, contractors aren’t designers. But most contractors carry professional liability. And contractors know how to build things. So, grab an erasable pen and graph paper, or sketch it up in a PDF, and provide the proposed answer.
- Push the explanation meeting – as a contractor, you should be saying “can we set up a time to review this issue?” The purpose is to guide the Owner or Engineer on the RFI or submittal or pricing package you’ve put together. As a reviewer, it’s hard to muster up the desire to open an 84-page package which will take perhaps hours to review. If you can promise a 10-minute maximum introduction of a subject, you may get some takers. Owners and engineers don’t want to hear a whining or aggressive contractor for these ten minutes; you need to just promise ten minutes and keep it efficient and to the point.
- Prioritize – as a contractor you want it all back now, whatever “it” is, but that’s just not realistic. The answer to getting things back as quickly as possible is prioritization. Of the forty-five things in the Owner’s court pick five you want back, or prioritize the top ten.
- Field walks – admittedly this can be a difficult task, but if a meeting can be held on site to see an issue, a field walk can be worth a thousand words. Pictures help too, but seeing, smelling, feeling an issue can make the difference. Plus, it gives you the opportunity to bond on a different level with the owner: “look what we’re building out here” and “thanks for the answer on that RFI 128, we made that change over here and it saved a lot of time for the project.”
My story. I’m currently the construction manager on a project and there’s always something that needs to be discussed. The current contractor usually makes an ask to me to meet at my leisure, but sometimes he just throws on a hardhat and walks over. I love it. He has been writing RFI solutions, providing quick design solutions in PDF, pushing the explanation meetings – he’s been driving the bus! This is a good thing for his company and it’s good for the Owner. As the Owner we don’t want the job to finish late, but let’s be real, it may not mean anything for us to finish a month, or two, late. But what we’re trying to avoid here is a one comma or two comma time extension claim because the contractor is in an extended performance situation. The natural solution is to trust your contractor and let her tell you what may protract the job. And best of all, let her drive the bus and set the pace. If an Owner can stay at half the pace of the contractor, this is a project win. If you can stay at full contractor pace, well, your job is practically guaranteed to turn out well for all parties.
Work safe!
