The discussion has ignored one important method of communicating with the contractor and resolving questions during construction: the regular progress meetings. Asking and answering questions at progress meetings allows the issue to be documented in the meeting minutes and ends the discussion without additional paper work. I try to encourage this approach by specifying that questions be presented at progress meetings before submitting an RFI.
Quote: “Nathan, the difference is that an RFI response does not change the Contract Documents, but an Order for Minor Changes does. There are times when that matters. There are also times when a minor change is not related to any question that a contractor would logically ask based on the content of the Contract Documents.”
I’m not sure I agree. I have been in too many legal proceedings where the RFI response was treated as authoritative direction to the contractor modifying what may been shown elsewhere in the documents. Yes, an ASI is an appropriately described document establishing a minor change not affecting cost or time, but RFI’s are treated the same way by viturally everyone in the real world and the legal world (not the same thing!), who treat RFI’s as such. The reality is that if an ASI or RFI creates a cost or time impact, they will end up being converted into a PCO/COR and eventually into a formal Change Order. If you don’t have the opportunity for weekly meetings, the RFI is really the only way the contractor has to communicate with the Architect. I do not discourage the RFI process. It is healthy to have a good dialoge. The challenge is in training the contractor’s junior project “engineer” how to think, how to read plans, and what is his scope verses the architect’s, and what is a proper RFI.
RFIs become direction for change when it is clear that the design professional treats them as such. If you treat the REF as direction and then they will be considered as direction. When the response necessitates a change it is not that hard to issue preliminary sketches with the note that a formal change order will be issued. When you do this it will be clear that they are not direction to proceed.
In the “real world” decisions are often made in conflict with logic. The fact that individuals ignore the documents does not invalidate what they say. The contractor often finds it to his advantage to talk about “the real world” as justification for his actions but we should not fall into the trap that just because somebody got away with it once that it is always true.
And you can always modify your contract general and supplementary conditions to make the RFI be an actual change document. I would say that half the offices I’ve worked in have developed their own contract administration forms and then modified the various (contract, general conditions, division 01, etc) documents in order to enforce their document decision making process.