I am curious what you think is the status of RFIs on recent projects. A 2013 Navigant study of more than 1300 projects worldwide - projects of all sizes and types - reported on average 796 RFIs per project and 10 RFIs per $1 million construction cost. Do you think the industry doing better or worse today?
Navigant went on to calculate the projected cost to that typical project for the RFIs. Here is what they projected. Three man-years required just to process RFIs. Is your experience better or worse? What is reason, do you think?
The study is available from CMAA at the link below. It seems to be a OCR file of the original. Some text is not properly rendered. But you will get the idea.
One thing we’re seeing is that the RFIs no longer serve just as requests for information. Quite often walk-through and discussion in the field results in Owners arriving at late decisions or changed decisions. Or, they bring in a specialized Vendor late in the process who has different needs for their equipment and systems. There needs to be a way to address it. The GC is then asked to generate an RFI, the design team is tasked with implementing the change, revised documents are issued as a response to the RFI, and a change order is expected. This might seem like a misuse of the RFI process, but but it’s fairly institutionalized at this point. Surely we’re not the only ones experiencing this.
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I have seen where the dirty term “change order” is being phased out and RFIs being extended as the de factor change order. Slippery business… same stuff, different name.
However, there are cases where the CD is so vague, they can essentially get away with it… can’t call it a “change order” if the condition was never specified in any detail.
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@David_Stutzman Do you mean if the number of RFIs has changed (hopefully decreased)?
OR do you mean the nature of the RFIs have changed (sort of to @mkhudson point)?
Quite a bit of BIM marketing is devoted to reducing RFIs at the design and construction phases. Finding any recent studies other than self-serving software marketing case studies is difficult. I did find one… https://www.researchgate.net/publication/388725098_The_impact_of_BIM_on_project_time_and_cost_insights_from_case_studies
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Do you think this is an attempt to avoid bringing the “change” to the owner. Technically owners must sign change orders because they change the contract. If changes are handled by RFI only, does this work only when there is no dollar or time change to the contract?
I realize I was not clear on that point. I hoped to get a sense of the numbers compared to what Navigant found in 2013. Are there more or fewer change orders on average for projects today? Has the level of effort and costs changed to handle and respond to RFIs?
The link provided returns a 403 forbidden error.
hmmm. no problems on my end. I use ResearchGate all the time when looking for academic papers.
