EV above PV, AC above EV. That is the acceleration: a second erection crew, Saturday premium time, and a resequenced enclosure, bought deliberately for $168,000 to recover 17 of the 23 days lost to the steel delay. → Construction Management
"Approved as noted"
which permits fabrication to proceed — versus **"revise and resubmit,"** which does not. In March, at the design-team kickoff, identify the gating submittals by name and ask the A/E to use "approved as noted" wherever their comments do not go to design intent. It is a free conversation and it is wor → Construction Management
"coordinate the maintained envelope"
object plus insulation plus hangers plus required access — repeated every single time a dimension comes up, for the rest of the term. → Chapter 10 — Instructor Notes
"Did anybody touch this scaffold since yesterday?"
somebody walks the building and signs, and on Northgate that somebody is Margo Deacon, not a bar on Wei Chen's schedule. Second, **the interior sequence has two hold points**, and a gate cannot be partially complete. Chapters 10, 23, and 25 all assume students already own both. → Chapter 9 — Instructor Notes
"Issued to installer (date / signed by)"
and one rule: *no scope starts until that cell is filled.* It costs nothing, and it closes the loop that failed at Northgate. The full submittal machinery is [Chapter 25](../../part-05-communication-and-documentation/chapter-25-submittals-rfis-document-control/index.md); this handoff is the single m → Construction Management
"Last Planner" is a registered trademark of LCI
worth knowing before you print it on a form or a proposal. Start with its published description of the system's levels and terminology, because the vocabulary in the field is inconsistent and having one authoritative reference for the terms will save you an argument a month. → Construction Management
"Or equal"
Specification language naming products and permitting substitution of an equivalent. The operative word is *approved*: nothing is equal until somebody with authority says so in writing, and the substitution procedure in Division 01 sets the deadline after which the specification is effectively close → Appendix I — Glossary
"overhead, fee, and margin" @ 8.5% of subtotal
7.8% of the contract sum. Ch 13's full build-up and canon §2.4 carry an **anticipated fee of $784,000, 3.5% of the contract sum.** These are not in conflict: the $1,754,000 is *markup*, which funds home-office overhead before any of it is profit, and the $784,000 is the *profit portion* of that same → Continuity Tracker — *Construction Management*
and let the honesty of the answers do the rest. Most people want #2, and the chapter's observation is the one worth carrying: *did you evaluate the assumptions, or scan for the number and then find the assumption that justified it? Both feel identical from the inside. The only difference is the orde → Chapter 30 — Instructor Notes
"Willow Street as 34 Houses" memo
three to four pages rebuilding the student's own project as a different kind of business, with the same $6,800,000 and the same 425 calendar days, at **$200,000 of construction cost per house**. → Chapter 37 — Instructor Notes
#2
med gas (4) v. supply main (2): **med gas gives way.** Duct cross-section is fixed by airflow; copper offsets with fittings — but every offset is a brazed joint to be purged and verified, so offset → Construction Management
#3
gravity waste (1) v. sprinkler main (3): **sprinkler gives way**, with a permit consequence — rehydraulic calculation and resubmittal, filed the day you decide. → Construction Management
#4
boom support v. branch duct: **the duct gives way.** Vendor-fixed equipment support is not routable, exactly like structure; if the duct cannot clear, it becomes an RFI, never a field decision. → Construction Management
#5 is not a routing negotiation
a tray at the finished ceiling elevation is a geometric impossibility against an architectural boundary. → Construction Management
#8
coil-pull zone v. tray (6): **the tray gives way** — and note this conflict exists *only* because somebody modeled the zone and wrote the rule. → Construction Management
$0
it consumed float and drove nothing. The identical 6-day slip on a zero-float path is worth `6 × $10,650 =` **$63,900**. The difference exists in exactly one place: the total-float column of a schedule update somebody had to run at the time. See [Chapter 14](../part-03-preconstruction/chapter-14-sch → Appendix G — Contract Clause Decoder: The 25 Clauses That Decide Who Pays
$0 → $1,200 → $8,160 → $217,560 → $486,300
is theme 3 with a dollar sign on it. **The project is built twice, and the first build is where things cost nothing to fix.** The cheapest tool in construction is a project engineer who reads a detail, notices that two documents disagree, and writes it down. → Construction Management
$0.38 per loose cubic yard
about 7 percent — and finishes in two-thirds the time. On 60,000 LCY that is $22,800 and roughly 14 fewer work days. → Construction Management
$1,041,536
an increase of **$276,864** (c) 2,528 ÷ 1,856 = 136.2%, or a **+36.2% variation.** That exceeds the roughly 25% threshold common in unit-price specifications, which typically allows either party to request renegotiation of the unit price — because the contractor's mobilization and fixed costs no lon → Construction Management
$1,049,957
22% of the gap — and it would have looked like a better number, not a mistake. - **Escalate only un-bought scope.** Northgate's escalation line fell from $2,801,338 at SD to $575,200 at GMP because 84% of the work was bought at fixed prices. - **Three adjustments to historical cost, in order:** time → Construction Management
$1,050,000
about **22% of the entire gap** everyone is about to spend nine days arguing over. It would not have looked like a mistake. It would have looked like a better number. That is what makes it dangerous. → Construction Management
49.9% of the GC budget. When an owner asks you to cut general conditions, it is asking you to take someone off the job. Sometimes that is right. Usually the person they want to cut is the safety manager or the project engineer — the two whose absence costs the most and shows up latest. → Construction Management
$1,512.20/CD
(b) Contract = cost ÷ (1 − margin). Cost here = 8,400,000 + 620,000 = 9,020,000. 9,020,000 ÷ 0.935 = **$9,647,059**. Markup = (9,647,059 − 9,020,000) ÷ 9,020,000 = **6.95%** - (c) 9,020,000 × 1.065 = **$9,606,300**. Margin = 586,300 ÷ 9,606,300 = **6.10%** — short of the 6.5% target by 0.4 points, r → Midterm Examination
$1,600 + $1,200 = $2,800/CD.
**Disruption is not delay, and the measured mile is the only strong proof of it.** Your own unimpacted performance against your own impacted performance, on the same job — because it removes the attack that kills every other method: *your estimate was optimistic.* Factor tables are negotiating refer → Construction Management
a variable cost of **$210/LF** — plus $52,000 of item fixed cost spread across 616 LF ($84.42/LF), marked up about 40%. In rock, the same rig made about **1.2 LF per hour**: a variable cost of **$1,400/LF**. → Construction Management
$1,802,000
staff overtime and extra temporary heat during the acceleration. Fold that line into the project and watch what happens: → Construction Management
$1,804,800
4.0 percent of the $45,120,000 subtotal. And unused contingency is shared **75 percent owner / 25 percent Kestrel**, so returned contingency is real money to Kestrel. → Construction Management
$1,840,000
the differing site condition, the directed changes, and delay damages. He recovered **$265,000.** → Construction Management
$1.42/LB
paid on **computed** weight from the placing drawings, not what you bought | | 36-inch drilled shaft | **$412/LF**, measured in place | | Pier 2 shafts as bid / as built | 616 LF ($253,792) → **320 LF ($131,840)**, a 48.1% underrun | | Rock event recovery | DSC **$135,216** + force account **$44,160 → Construction Management
$10,461,628
converged within about $1,100. Fee as a **5.0% markup** on the subtotal; as a **margin** = $498,173 ÷ $10,461,628 = **4.76%**. → Construction Management
a return ratio near **125 to 1** against an assistant superintendent's burdened cost. Measured against the full gap it is closer to $16,000 an hour. → Construction Management
$5,150 of extended general conditions plus $5,500 of liquidated damages — which would have nearly doubled the value of the same 17 days. → Construction Management
the sprint returned about two dollars for one on the arithmetic alone. And behind the arithmetic sits the cliff: nine days late puts the certificate of occupancy past **October 1**, and there is no version of that where Meridian collects $103,320 in liquidated damages and is satisfied, because they → Construction Management
$11,380,000
more than the shortfall. If the bond does not have to be executed until after Fair Oaks closes out, and if Rivermont #12 stays on schedule, the math works. So the real question for the surety is not "can we?" but "*when* is the bond required, and what does our uncompleted bonded work look like on th → Construction Management
$11,480 per calendar day
$5,150 extended general conditions, $5,500 liquidated damages, and $829 of carrying cost on $3,562,500 of retention. → Chapter 40 — Discussion Guide
$11,840
framing, board, finish, revised light layout, two sprinkler head relocations. | | Day 28 | Corinne Alderman approves. **Change Order #3** is executed before the work begins. | | Day 31 | Soffit framed. | → Construction Management
$110,880
Cost: (2,880 × $20.00) + $48,000 = $57,600 + $48,000 = **$105,600** - Margin: **$5,280**, which is $1.83/CY. → Construction Management
roughly **$861,400** of extended rent, which dwarfs the construction-cost difference. → Construction Management
$12,650
Four weeks at $8,900 = **$8,900**, and you keep the machine for the rest of the month → Construction Management
$12,772
about **ten percent of everything Sightline expects to earn on Northgate, gone in three days, through no fault of theirs.** They will come after it. They will come after it as a disruption claim, as thicker markup on the next change order, as a slower response when I need a favor in month eighteen, → Construction Management
$124,000
of which `$85,680 − $60,000 = $25,680` is carried over and `$98,320` is newly stored. New G = `$128,520 + $162,000 + $124,000 = $414,520`. → Construction Management
$128,800
and that is before any acceleration cost, before any disruption claim from subcontractors whose sequences just changed, and before whatever the surety decides to do with a job that reported 40 days of comfort seven months in a row and was actually four weeks behind. → Construction Management
$13,050
nearly a wash. The *real* driver is that Meridian's leased interim clinic space expires **October 1, Year 2**: six days late is survivable, twenty-three days late is not. Kestrel accelerates. Then the second lesson lands: acceleration is not free of *non-monetary* cost — trade stacking, a rework eve → Continuity Tracker — *Construction Management*
because the enclosure-by-area resequencing we did to recover the steel delay put curtain wall on the south elevation about two weeks early, and we closed the south third of levels one and two ahead of the milestone. → Construction Management
$13,700
*if the supplier performs*. So the real decision is not "JIT or stockpile." It is: **how do I buy JIT's savings without buying its risk?** The answer is a partial buffer. On Northgate we held **one week of units** on site — enough to keep the glazing crew working through a single missed truck — and → Construction Management
$133,200
**1.96 percent of the contract**, two cents of every dollar, missing from a number displayed to the square foot. (d) The hand takeoff, **198,400 SF**, stamped: *"Hand takeoff from A-201 through A-206, rev. 2; cross-checked against model extraction at LOD 300 (166,600 SF); model does not carry layer → Construction Management
$141,100 on day 56
the day before draw 3 funds. Note that the peak is not at the end of the job. It is in the middle, right after the most expensive stage and right before the biggest draw arrives. → Construction Management
roughly **$387 a minute**. And the $43,650 consumed **2.4 percent of Kestrel's entire $1,804,800 fee** on a $47.5 million project, on work everyone agreed had been performed. - **The settlement premium is not comfort.** Pri Sethi paid $21,750 above what Kestrel could prove because she knew the work → Construction Management
$155,214
seven times cheaper, and it carries roughly double the margin. This is why experienced contractors are constantly, quietly trying to move up that table. → Construction Management
appears nowhere in the original forty-one rows. Kestrel had a row for steel *escalation*, a row for the *fabricator's* capacity, and a row for the *erector's* manning. It had no row for the eleven days the anchor-bolt and embed submittal sat in Kestrel's own office before it went to Caldwell Structu → Construction Management
more than your entire temporary-facilities budget for water, sanitation, and lighting combined, spent on stairs. Get units onto the floors as soon as the hoist can carry them, put hand-wash stations with them, and stop treating this as a comfort item. → Construction Management
$185,000
a fixed fee, paid monthly over the design period, credited against nothing. Meridian paid it out of the soft-cost line of a $61,000,000 total project budget. We will come back to that budget in §11.5, because a construction manager who does not understand the owner's *whole* budget gives confident, → Construction Management
$187,980 short of $19,600,000
the stated GMP does not reconcile to the stated components. *Finding the inconsistency is the exercise.* On a real job this is exactly the moment you stop and ask, because an unreconciled GMP is either an arithmetic error or an undisclosed line. For (b) and (c), use the built-up figure of $19,412,02 → Construction Management
$19,840,000
Plugs outstanding: earthwork $1,140,000, elevators $410,000, food service $265,000 - Your general conditions were built on a 480-calendar-day duration; the bid form requires 450 calendar days - The second-lowest bidder on your last three jobs against this competitor field came in within 1.5% - Your → Construction Management
$196,000 of gross margin
every year, until somebody takes the constraint back out of the line. On Northgate a lost day costs $10,650 once. Here a broken rate bills you annually. → Construction Management
$199,500
is the price of *reaching* the work: thousands of ceiling tiles lifted and reinstalled, floor protection, night work around move-in crews, 62 cuts through finished hard ceilings, patching, repainting, lead-lined gypsum replacement, and shielding re-verification. **The cost of correcting a defect is → Chapter 23 — Discussion Guide
$2,000,000 tenant fit-out
existing grid, two systems, one congested mechanical room. Write the paragraph recommending a deviation to your VP of Operations, and name the three things you would still do. → Construction Management
Excess over target = `$2,069,332 − $1,828,800` = **$240,532** - Pool at 10% = `$240,532 × 0.10` = **$24,053** → Construction Management
$2,135,000
still slightly below Kestrel, but only slightly, and Contractor A's number now depended on a conversation about who pays for something they had already said they were not carrying. Studio Bellweather recommended Kestrel. Corinne Alderman agreed. → Construction Management
and the contract's extended-general-conditions rate for approved time extensions was set from the bid. **Curtis shaved his own recovery rate before he wrote his first change order.** → Construction Management
$2,479.40
a difference of **$23.00** for one worker in one week, decided entirely by which hours the daily record says were which classification. → Appendix J — Answers to Selected Exercises
$2,496,480
an overrun of **$896,480, or 56%.** The job also ran nine months instead of seven. → Construction Management
$2,640,000
nearly a third of the original job's value, earned again from scratch, to erase a four percent miss. And a four percent cost miss is *not a disaster* in construction. That is exactly the point. → Construction Management
$2,800/CD
$1,600 extended general conditions plus $1,200 liquidated damages — that is **$11,760**. That is the number the conversation is actually about. 2. **Look at the −1 path too.** Fixing only the −3 path leaves you at −1, which is still late. Recovery has to address every negative path or it is theater. → Appendix B — CPM Scheduling Workbook
which should immediately make you re-read the subcontractor's scope, because a spread that large usually means the sub is carrying scope you are not. (Check: does their number include the vapor barrier? The excavation and subgrade prep? The topping? The warranty?) At a 25% productivity miss, labor a → Construction Management
contractor absorbs $110,400 | | GMP | **$2,292,368** | Cost + fee = $2,424,168 vs. cap $2,292,368; contractor eats **$131,800** | → Construction Management
$23,301
and both readings of the contract are honestly arguable. **Fix: one sentence saying whether the fee applies to allowance adjustments, and whether underruns are credited to the client.** → Construction Management
$24,411
a third of the number. You make it because the alternative is a $72,996 claim that dies to the first competent question and takes every other element's credibility with it. **The credibility of the method is the damages.** → Construction Management
$24/CY
a 20% swing on a single logistics assumption. **On a heavy civil bid, the haul road is a line item in disguise.** → Construction Management
$244,950
which is *more than the entire excess gross profit* that created the pool. One submittal sitting in an office for eleven days would have erased the bonus for the whole team and taken $4,418 of margin with it. → Construction Management
$246,300
about 8.5% of the entire general-conditions budget, spent in weeks one through three, with the first payment arriving around day 55. That gap is financed out of Kestrel's working capital and it is real. → Chapter 17 — Discussion Guide
$25,000 or 3 calendar days
the directive does not issue until a **safety impact review** is attached and signed by the safety director. → Construction Management
the unpriced portion is **57 percent** of the priced premium. Re-run with real numbers, accelerating cost about **$82,750 more** than absorbing the delay would have. → Chapter 20 — Discussion Guide
$268,000
roughly half the job, for the same company, purely because of pay timing and retention. **Negotiate the payment terms and the retention before you negotiate the price;** on a small contractor's first jobs they are worth more than a point of margin. Note also that using the whole line of credit to fu → Construction Management
money the City has not budgeted unless it carried an owner's contingency. Then name three specific coordination risks on *this* building: the bearing and transition detail where the wood-framed second floor meets the steel and CMU first floor; the commercial kitchen's hood, gas, grease-waste, and ma → Construction Management
$28,272
roughly a project engineer's salary for four months, and it is left on the table more often than not. → Construction Management
$280,500 a year
real interest, on money already earned, paid so that owners can hold cash. The contractor passes two thirds of the burden down to companies with smaller balance sheets and higher borrowing rates, so the *project's* true cost of the retention provision is higher than $280,500, and every dollar of it → Appendix J — Answers to Selected Exercises
$284,042
added board, ceiling grid removal and reinstall, re-firestopping, re-taping and painting, 46 replaced door frames because the throat depth no longer matches the wall thickness, re-inspection, and 7 CD of delay. Guess high (build 2-hour, only 1-hour required): roughly **$62,540** unrecoverable, becau → Construction Management
$285,000 unsuitable soils allowance at $75.00/CY
exists precisely because somebody read these two clauses next to each other before the GMP was set. On a heavy civil job like Cottonwood Creek, where structural excavation runs **$38.50/CY** against 14,200 estimated CY, the same misreading is worth six figures on one bid item. → Appendix G — Contract Clause Decoder: The 25 Clauses That Decide Who Pays
$287,000
a net loss of $122,000 on a transaction he counted as a win. And his mechanical coverage went from five bidders to two inside a year. Nobody announced a boycott; estimators stopped returning his calls, because a mechanical estimator spends forty hours on a bid and learns quickly whose jobs are a rea → Chapter 16 — Discussion Guide
$3,027,200
63% of the gap. The other 37% closed because the design contingency retired to zero when the documents completed and the escalation allowance fell from $2,801,338 to $575,200 once 84% of the work was bought at fixed prices. Between SD and GMP the cost of the work went **up** $233,310. **The building → Construction Management
is **owner-furnished**. It is not in the GMP; it sits in the owner's budget, procured by Meridian's imaging vendor on Meridian's schedule. That single fact is the seed of the most expensive change order on the job. The vendor selected a different MRI unit *after* the GMP was set, requiring a deeper → Construction Management
$3,824,103
application #12's payment, carrying the **$1,009,850** of excess retention released at the step-down — against $2,369,340 of disbursements, and the cumulative position moves from negative $819,030 to positive $635,733 in a single month. → Construction Management
and it does not work. The new stack is 34 inches against 30 available and the new plan width is 103 inches in a 96-inch corridor. **Nobody had to buy that option to find out it failed.** A model ran both checks in under an hour. → Construction Management
$330,000
about seven-tenths of one percent of the GMP, and that is the price of the contractor being willing to sign a cap at all. Under the lump-sum alternative the equivalent contingency is invisible and the refund is zero. **The savings split is the single most valuable thing an owner gets from an open-bo → Construction Management
$34,068
an increase of $13,376 with nothing else changed. Hold points are most dangerous on the activities with the largest crews, which is exactly where superintendents are most tempted to proceed anyway. → Construction Management
$340,000
a charge that will be deducted from Brannock's remaining billings and its retention. → Construction Management
$35.87
base plus vacation accrual, because bona fide benefit-plan contributions are generally not taxable wages — and getting it backwards over-burdens every hour in the estimate. Finish at $50.47 and a burden factor of 1.484. Then build the crew, divide by production, add material and equipment, and land → Chapter 12 — Instructor Notes
$350,392 a year
$3.98 per craft man-hour, **6.0% of the cost of every craft hour**, which is roughly the entire fee margin on a hard-bid job. → Chapter 41 — Discussion Guide
$350,392 ÷ 88,000 MH = $3.98 per craft man-hour
Against a burdened rate of $66.00, that is a **6.0% difference in the cost of every craft hour** — on a Kestrel-employed workforce, between two Kestrel superintendents, with identical wages and identical benefits. → Construction Management
$357.46/SF
four years earlier. Escalating at roughly 3.5% per year to compare like with like gives a Northgate-era equivalent of about **$410/SF**. Northgate's GMP is **$360/SF**. → Construction Management
$359.85
the canonical **$360/SF** | | Per exam room (whole-building cost ÷ 72) | $726,397 | **$659,722** | | Per surface stall (site paving element only) | $3,292 (212 stalls) | **$2,766** (188 stalls) | → Construction Management
$360 per square foot
$47,500,000 ÷ 132,000 SF. Every owner's rep in the country will benchmark you against that number in the first meeting. → Construction Management
$360/SF
Northgate, $47,500,000 ÷ 132,000 SF | | Municipal community/recreation center | $250 – $340 | † **$283.33/SF** — Willow Street, $6,800,000 ÷ 24,000 SF | | Public elementary school | $230 – $330 | Rivermont Elementary #12, $22.4M | | Public library | $280 – $400 | Ridgeline Regional Library, $31.4M | → Appendix C — Estimating Reference: CSI Divisions, Unit Costs, Productivity, Waste Factors
$368,000
about **8.2%** of the firm's entire annual project contribution, earned by not bidding sixteen jobs. → Construction Management
$371,300
about $35,400 *more* and eleven work days longer. Hauling is essentially a cost per yard-mile and barely changes with fleet size; what changes is how long you rent the excavator, the operator, the foreman, the dozer, and the site. Then the punchline: eleven work days is roughly 15 calendar days, mas → Chapter 8 — Instructor Notes
$372.22/CY
(b) Remaining 520 CY × $372.22 = **$193,554** - (c) FAC = 268,000 + 193,554 = **$461,554**. Variance = 412,000 − 461,554 = **($49,554) unfavorable** - (d) By quantity 720 ÷ 1,240 = **58.1%**. By cost 268,000 ÷ 412,000 = **65.0%**. Cost is running ahead of production — the classic productivity-overru → Final Examination
$38,000
6.6 percent of the entire crane cost, and none of it appears on a rental rate sheet. → Construction Management
$38,116
and note that the $13,945 contingency did real work, without which the loss would have been the full $52,061. - Cost-plus: the City pays **$542,746** and the contractor earns **$2,603 more**. → Chapter 4 — Instructor Notes
$38,500 enclosure installation does not go down
it is a fixed cost already incurred. Same average-versus-marginal lesson as C4. → Construction Management
$389,375 — an effective 0.82%
inside the $900,000 insurance-and-bonds line. Willow Street's run roughly **$83,250 — 1.22%**. **The small job pays 49% more per dollar of contract than the big one**, and if you bid small public work that spread comes straight out of your margin. → Appendix G — Contract Clause Decoder: The 25 Clauses That Decide Who Pays
$4,300
on one slab, from a quarter inch. Now apply the same discipline to the elevated decks: **99,000 SF of composite metal deck with 3¼-inch lightweight topping.** A quarter-inch average overpour across 99,000 SF is 99,000 × (0.25 ÷ 12) ÷ 27 = **76.4 CY**, or roughly $15,000 in lightweight concrete plus → Construction Management
$4,900
relocate 90 LF of temporary fence ($1,200), move and re-hook a job trailer ($2,400), traffic control and flagging on the clinic drive for one day ($1,300) | Just above the 80% threshold, so it is a **critical lift**: written plan, lift director, pre-lift meeting. Requires a day's coordination with t → Construction Management
$4.82/LCY
still $0.88 over the bid > > Remaining 73,396 LCY ÷ 300 = 244.7 hr × $1,445 = **$353,590** → Construction Management
$40,000,000
the first line of the GMP build-up, sitting inside a **$47,500,000** guaranteed maximum price. → Construction Management
$41,000
and I had no idea until Lorena Vasquez showed me the fuel cost code climbing while the excavation quantity did not. Now I check fuel against telematics hours monthly. It is the cheapest early-warning signal on a dirt job. → Construction Management
this exhausts C and ties the two branches. Project 243. Running total: 17 CD, $110,000. **Both branches are now critical: the path has shifted.** *Step 4 — the next day costs D ($13,000) + E ($17,000) = **$30,000/CD**, against a day worth $8,900.* Stop. → Construction Management
$42,283
and that is only Kestrel's benefit. Every dollar of that release flows down to subcontractors who have been financing this job with their own working capital since month one, and who will remember which general contractor got their retention released in September rather than the following March. The → Construction Management
against about **4.1 hours** of writing that was never done. Roughly $10,600 an hour. → Construction Management
$43,650 unrecovered.
**Jurisdiction matters and changes.** Pay-if-paid enforceability, retention limits, prompt-payment deadlines, anti-indemnity statutes, and lien-notice periods **vary substantially by state.** Check yours, and record the date you checked. → Construction Management
$432,000
a 10 percent margin, which is a good one. Labor is 60 percent of cost and you pay it weekly. Material is 40 percent and your supplier gives you 30 days. Retention is 5 percent, held to closeout. You bill monthly; the general contractor bills the owner; the owner pays in 30 days; the GC pays you shor → Construction Management
nearly a quarter of Kestrel's entire fee — between two numbers that sound identical when spoken aloud in a bid room at 1:40 p.m. → Appendix A — Construction Math Reference
there are no executed change orders yet, which is precisely Owen's point number three. Retention is **10 percent**, because the job is well under 50 percent complete. → Construction Management
$47,500,000 → $49,594,200
what a guarantee actually did on a well-run job, 4.4% above the cap, with nobody doing anything wrong. → Construction Management
$478,000
a $66,000 overrun. The month-four forecast of $462,200 would have caught **76 percent of the eventual damage five months early.** Nobody made it. → Construction Management
$49,594,200
$2,094,200 and 4.4% above a number labeled *guaranteed maximum price*, on a well-run job with a competent owner, a written change protocol, and no bad faith on either side. The guarantee did exactly what it promised: it capped Kestrel's price for the scope defined in February of Year 1. Meridian's * → Construction Management
a combined exposure of **$10,650 per calendar day**. Kestrel updates the CPM monthly with a data date on the first of the month. → Construction Management
$2.6 million over, with no design contingency left to retire and no time to find anything. The VE was the difference between a job that happened and a fourth floor that didn't. → Construction Management
$520.00/LF
an increase of $349,920 on the estimated quantity — and drop excavation by the same amount over 14,200 CY, which is $24.64/CY, giving **$13.86/CY**: → Appendix J — Answers to Selected Exercises
Released with the September application: $3,562,500 − $536,000 = **$3,026,500** - Carrying cost avoided over the 60 days to final completion: $3,026,500 × 0.085 × (60 ÷ 365) = **$42,283** → Construction Management
a separate line with separate rules | | Register total EMV / Kestrel's share | **$1,201,550** / **$735,650** | | Savings split | **75% owner / 25% contractor** | | Extended general conditions | **$5,150/CD** | | Liquidated damages | **$5,500/CD** | | **Total daily exposure** | **$10,650/CD** | | Bur → Construction Management
$588,800
the best year in the company's history. Seven jobs in the backlog and **not one of them a loser.** On the day it failed: positive working capital of $2,340,925, positive equity, and **$71,400 in the bank against a weekly payroll of about $118,000.** → Chapter 32 — Discussion Guide
the rest of the $22,800 was already in the bid. Everything else on the ledger is the cost of paperwork that did not exist. → Chapter 17 — Discussion Guide
construction, design fees, FF&E, medical equipment, permits, financing. When changes consume $2,094,200, that money comes out of *her* owner contingency, and when it runs out she has to go ask a board for more in a public meeting. She has a fiscal year. She has a capital plan. And she has an interim → Construction Management
$61,000,000 total project budget
construction, design fees, medical equipment, furniture, permits, owner's contingency, and financing carry. Priyanka "Pri" Sethi was the owner's representative. Halvorsen + Pike were already engaged as architect. The delivery method was decided early and deliberately: **CM at Risk with a guaranteed → Construction Management
and a qualifications and assumptions page consisting of one paragraph, ninety-four words long, whose operative sentence was: *"This proposal is based on the documents referenced above and our understanding of the project's scope and intent."* → Construction Management
and the entire variance is the acceleration premium and the second crew after the steel delay. **Drop $712 into the unit-cost library and you have permanently overpriced steel erection on every future bid because of one job's one-time event, and you will not know why for years.** The right entry is → Appendix D — Forms and Templates Library
$66.00 to $90.42
a 37% premium. Then show the weeks 31–36 table, where near-miss reporting falls to **one** in week 34. That is not the job getting safer; that is a job under pressure that has stopped talking. → Chapter 41 — Instructor Notes
$7,400,000, or about $309/SF
which is **$600,000 over the City's $6,800,000 budget.** That gap is the assignment, not a mistake in your arithmetic. It is the reason the value-engineering log exists, and it is what actually happens on municipal projects with a fixed bond amount and a program written before anyone priced it. → Appendix K — The Willow Street Community Center Project Package
$7,440
about **2.7 times the hard carry**, and 10.3 percent of the gross margin. And unlike the carry, you cannot see it coming, cannot manage it, and cannot cap it. **Spec builders do not go broke on interest. They go broke on timing.** → Construction Management
you are being asked to donate **32%**. A great many owner's representatives sincerely believe a time extension is a favor they are granting rather than a cost you are absorbing, and they are not being sharp; they simply have never seen the arithmetic. Your general conditions do not pause. → Appendix D — Forms and Templates Library
$76,813 apart on a $41 million forecast
about two-tenths of one percent. **That agreement is the most valuable thing in this report.** Two methods computed different ways converging is evidence. One method by itself is an opinion. → Construction Management
$77,250
there is no argument left. Without one, submit the **audited $71,900**: it costs $5,350 against the highest available number and buys a line no consultant can attack. §33.6.2 records what the other choice costs. → Construction Management
3.4 percent — and **$1,700,000 below the independent estimate** — 7.1 percent. On a hard-bid public job, that is not winning. That is buying. → Construction Management
and it does not count the time position, which on a job with $10,650 per calendar day of exposure is worth far more than the labor. → Construction Management
$80,000,000 a year
schools, small medical office buildings, municipal work, the occasional retail center. Argosy had a reputation for finishing on time and for treating subcontractors decently. Hollis knew every superintendent's kids' names. → Construction Management
which is 122 percent of the entire construction contingency, sitting in one package, five months later, in a different cost code, caused by a decision made in April. → Construction Management
$841,000
32.1 percent. His first ten recovered 71.1 percent in nineteen days; his last fifty-one recovered 26.7 percent in forty-six days. The change-order program netted **negative $194,750** before counting the $1,299,600 that simply evaporated. → Chapter 31 — Discussion Guide
$856,550 is real, permanent savings
the fee. The rest is risk repriced or risk deferred into the change-order and claims process. → Construction Management
$861,400
before a dollar of deferred clinic revenue, and before the operational cost of running a split practice for another two seasons. → Construction Management
$87,700
before anybody answered one, and before anybody built anything because of one. → Construction Management
call it $950,000. > > The anchor-bolt and embed submittal sat in Kestrel's office for **11 days** before it went to Caldwell Structural, and Caldwell took its full **14-day** contractual review. Ironbridge Steel missed its mill rolling slot. The next opening was five weeks out. Steel erection start → Construction Management
$96,000 and nine calendar days
is the same upsize option Kestrel had priced during preconstruction planning and set aside. → Construction Management
$96,000 and zero days
**$118,000 eaten** ([Chapter 3](../../part-01-foundations/chapter-03-project-delivery-methods/index.md)). → Construction Management
$97,600
**contractor absorbs** | | Cost-plus fixed fee | $1,264,000 | fee intact at $54,000 — **owner absorbs** | | Cost-plus 5% | $1,270,500 | fee rises to $60,500, **up $6,500** — **owner absorbs and pays a bonus** | → Construction Management
$97,684
**59.9 to one.** Then the part that stings, because it generalizes to almost everything in this book: the $1,630 was never a decision. Nobody weighed it and declined. It was simply not on anybody's schedule, because pre-installation conferences live in a specification section the field staff had not → Chapter 23 — Instructor Notes
$998,000
against a carried fee of $784,000, a **$214,000 loss** requiring $6,114,286 of additional, perfectly executed work to earn back. → Chapter 13 — Discussion Guide
($40,000)
an unfavorable variance. Overall percent complete, measured cost-to-cost, is $15,239,000 ÷ $41,240,000 = **37.0 percent.** → Construction Management
(1) The application date and payment period
when it is due and how many days the owner has. **(2) The retainage clause** — the rate, whether it steps down, at what milestone, and critically whether the *previously withheld* excess is released at the step or only future withholding drops. **(3) The payment flow-down** — how many days you have → Construction Management
(1) the fabricator's dimension
a door clock; eleven minutes of your time against a mill slot that, if missed, is worth 23 calendar days at $10,650 per day on a job like Northgate. Then **(4) the look-ahead** — schedule the ninety minutes now, because a stale look-ahead is the reason items appear on this list at all. Then **(3) th → Construction Management
(10 22 26)
motorized, with a stated acoustic rating and a **structural support above the partition, with a stated deflection limit, "by others."** Metal lockers. Toilet accessories. Signage (allowance). **11 40 00 Foodservice equipment** — furnished and installed by the foodservice contractor, with rough-in by → Appendix K — The Willow Street Community Center Project Package
(a)
`Working capital = $27,600,000 − $19,200,000 = $8,400,000` - `Current ratio = $27,600,000 ÷ $19,200,000 = 1.44` - `Working-capital turnover = $118,000,000 ÷ $8,400,000 = 14.0×` - `Aggregate ÷ working capital = $95,000,000 ÷ $8,400,000 = 11.3×` → Construction Management
it is visible in the pay applications months before the default, and it means the subcontractor is financing something with money it has not earned. → Construction Management
real, but it is the worst of the three per dollar and it leaves the cause untouched. It also sets a precedent every other trade will hear about by Friday. → Construction Management
about 51%. Every feeder looked safe; the merge point is a coin flip. Add a fourth and you are at 41%. This is why a schedule with many parallel paths converging on one milestone is far riskier than the same activities in a line, and why the critical-path calculation alone will not show it to you. [C → Construction Management
0.54⁵ ≈ 4.6%
the five-trade sequence works as planned about once in twenty-two weeks. Then backward: to get a 90 percent chain you need **97.9 percent** per trade, which is unattainable. → Chapter 27 — Discussion Guide
0.64 days per house
the difference between 9.00 and 8.36 — and the gap **never closes**. It is not a delay. A delay is a fixed quantity you can recover. This is a **rate mismatch**, and a rate mismatch compounds: house 4 waits two days, house 10 waits six, house 22 waits thirteen, house 34 waits twenty-one. By the end → Construction Management
0.65
sixty-five cents on the dollar. And §35.10 says plainly, as the industry mostly will not, that on a $2,000,000 tenant fit-out full multi-trade coordination will very often not pay for itself. → Chapter 35 — Instructor Notes
0.666 percentage points
the small job pays about **81% more per dollar of contract**. On a $1,850,000 job with a 4% fee ($74,000), the extra bond cost relative to the large-project rate is roughly $12,300, or about 17% of the fee. Bonding is a regressive cost, and it is one reason small contractors struggle to build backlo → Construction Management
0.875
(b) EAC₁ = BAC ÷ CPI = 840,000 ÷ 0.890 = **$943,820** EAC₂ = AC + (BAC − EV) = 511,000 + 385,000 = **$896,000** EAC₃ = AC + [(BAC − EV) ÷ (CPI × SPI)] = 511,000 + [385,000 ÷ 0.7788] = **$1,005,364** EAC₄ = AC + bottom-up ETC (requires a re-estimate; state the method) **Report EAC₁ as the default** — → Final Examination
0.93× the original contract
you must run the job again, almost exactly, and perfectly, to get back to zero. → Construction Management
1 · Master schedule
SHOULD | Whole job, updated monthly | Scheduler | CPM network, milestones | Does the work fit in the time, and where is the longest path? | | **2 · Phase / pull plan** — SHOULD | 6–12 weeks, rebuilt each phase | The trade foremen | The wall; handoff commitments | What sequence do the people doing th → Construction Management
1,372 hours a year
roughly 70 percent of a 1,950-hour work year — before owning it beats renting it. Kestrel's actual utilization is 1,250 hours, so owning costs about $1,594 a year more than renting: a rounding error, which means the decision is correctly made on things that are not money. → Appendix A — Construction Math Reference
1,875 sheets.
**At 11.8 MH/1,000 SF:** 90 × 11.8 = **1,062 MH** → × $68 = **$72,216** - **At 14.6 MH/1,000 SF:** 90 × 14.6 = **1,314 MH** → × $68 = **$89,352** - **The box at the top of your page: $17,136.** → Construction Management
1. Design-Build Institute of America (DBIA)
*the primary resource if you want to understand design-build properly.* DBIA publishes a family of design-build contract documents, maintains a body of design-build best practices, and runs the DBIA certification program. Its material on progressive versus competitive design-build, on writing owner' → Construction Management
1.00
full payment; the lot met the specification. - Pay factor **below 1.00** — the lot is acceptable but deficient; you are paid a reduced price for material that stays in place. - Pay factor **above 1.00** — some agencies pay an **incentive** for results better than the target, particularly on smoothne → Construction Management
1.020
ahead of schedule. The gymnasium, which is the critical path, is running at **0.845**, and the CPM update shows the gym chain at **minus 34 days of total float.** Substantial completion has moved thirty-four calendar days. → Construction Management
1.047
about **7.5 percent better than budget** — by a team that has run at 0.974 for eleven consecutive months and has never posted a cumulative month above 1.000. → Construction Management
1.132
about 22 percent better than the 0.928 this crew has demonstrated over ten months — merely to break even. There is no version of "try harder" that produces a 22 percent improvement. → Construction Management
1.170
**31 percent better than the 0.890 this crew has demonstrated over eight months** — just to break even. There is no version of "try harder" that produces a 31 percent improvement. The package cannot be recovered; it can only be **contained**, and containment is worth real money: lifting the remainde → Construction Management
1.19
in the "trouble" band. At this pace the reserve is exhausted at roughly 84% complete, leaving the last sixth of the job unprotected, and the back end is where commissioning, punch, and closeout risks concentrate. → Construction Management
1.22%
and show where that dollar figure lives in your bid. Add one line naming which subcontractors must bond back to you, and the threshold you chose. → Construction Management
1.34
call it **about 1.3 to 1.** Net gain: **$218,250** on a > $47,500,000 project. → Construction Management
1.40
the "job is eating itself" band. At this pace the reserve is exhausted around 71% complete. → Construction Management
1.5–1.8
*higher* for low-wage classifications (flat per-person costs) and *higher again* for high-hazard trades. An ironworker's comp can be nearly three times a carpenter's. → Construction Management
quick by any standard — the order releases April 20, still **three days past** the cutoff. Caldwell would have had to return a 985-ton frame's anchor-bolt package in **seven days, exactly half its contractual review**, to land on the cutoff with zero margin. → Construction Management
10. Construction Industry Institute (CII)
*for research rather than practice guidance.* A research consortium of owner and contractor member organizations based at a major U.S. university, producing empirical research on front-end planning, project delivery selection, and project performance. Useful when you need something more rigorous tha → Construction Management
100%
it sits *outside* the 75/25 savings split, because it is a reserve, not a savings opportunity. → Construction Management
ceiling-suspended backstops, side goals, motorized divider curtain, wall pads, and floor sleeves; **the section requires a minimum 25'-0" clear height from finished floor to the lowest structural member for the specified backstop and curtain.** Roller shades. **14 24 00** hydraulic passenger elevato → Appendix K — The Willow Street Community Center Project Package
11 days that were ours
a curtain-wall supplier problem that was Kestrel's responsibility to Meridian. Meridian granted the 18 days it owed. Kestrel built a recovery plan for the 11 it owned, executed it, and hit **September 18, Year 2** — the original contract date. The 18-day extension became genuine float, and we spent → Construction Management
11 inches
and ask what fits in eleven inches. (Nothing on the list. The tray, the conduit rack, the med-gas rack, and the domestic water are already homeless before you started.) 5. Only now name the concept. → Chapter 10 — Instructor Notes
11 work days instead of 16
five work days, roughly seven calendar days, on an activity that sits on Northgate's critical path. → Construction Management
11% apart
yours is higher. The owner asks you to "reconcile and get to one number." Describe the reconciliation process you actually run: what you compare, in what order, and what you do about the categories of difference you find. Then answer the harder question: is the correct outcome always a single number → Construction Management
11. Engineering News-Record (ENR)
*for market context and current disputes.* ENR's ongoing coverage of alternative delivery, public procurement reform, and large-project disputes is the fastest way to see how these methods behave in the field in your region and in the current market. Read it for pattern recognition, not for doctrine → Construction Management
11:52
a mechanical number arrives **$340,000 below** the next bidder. (It is missing the medical-gas-equivalent scope. Nothing in the quote says so.) - **12:20** — a masonry bidder withdraws. - **12:41** — an addendum acknowledgment nobody has recorded surfaces. - **1:15** — a drywall subcontractor calls → Field Simulations and Role-Plays
12 calendar days of time extension
which means no liquidated damages for those 12 days, saving 12 × $5,500 = **$66,000** of LD exposure. You get **no money**, so you absorb 12 × $5,150 = **$61,800** of extended general conditions yourself. Net: the clause protects you from about half of your daily exposure. And you get none of it unl → Construction Management
12-350, exam-room casework
a $960,000 line inside Northgate's interior finishes package, at the **month-15 data date.** Thirty-two identical exam rooms at $30,000 each. The baseline scheduled 15 rooms complete by the data date. The field reports **12 rooms complete, 9 rooms started and physically about 40 percent installed, 1 → Construction Management
125 to 1
and that is the conservative version. Measured against the full $65,400 gap between incurred and substantiable cost, it is closer to $16,000 an hour. This is the entire economic argument for field documentation in one line. → Construction Management
126 calendar days
plus roughly $135,000 of working capital standing in the mud. **Starting houses feels like production. Finishing houses is production.** Push them to name the number: completions per week, or cycle time. Never starts. → Chapter 37 — Discussion Guide
132,000 gross square feet
outpatient clinics, imaging suite, ambulatory surgery, café and lobby | | Structure | Structural steel frame, spread footings, slab on grade, composite metal deck floors | | Enclosure | Unitized aluminum-and-glass curtain wall plus architectural precast; TPO membrane roof | | Site | 6.2 acres, slopi → Construction Management
1345
P. Sethi (Meridian Health System) directed Kestrel verbally, on site at the Level 1 imaging suite, to proceed with the deeper depressed slab and the additional framing required for the revised MRI unit, stating a written directive would follow. **Present:** P. Sethi, R. Alvarez, J. Foster. Kestrel a → Construction Management
material distribution from mobilization through the interiors phase. Kestrel owns three. Should the job take one, or rent? → Construction Management
14,200 lb
Main load block and hook: **380 lb** - Slings and shackles: **640 lb** - Spreader bar: **480 lb** - Required radius from the center of rotation to the center of the load: **74 ft** - Grace's model says you need at least **96 feet of main boom** to clear the parapet, the roof-edge fall-protection pos → Construction Management
14.3%
because material does not care how long you took. The *time-based* portion of the unit cost (labor + equipment) rose from $5.0962 to $5.9953, which is **+17.6%**, exactly `1 ÷ 0.85`. That is the asymmetry that governs every productivity conversation you will ever have: **a 15% production loss is a 1 → Construction Management
**Foster:** 0.11 × 44 = **5 separations a year** - **Difference: 10 people a year** → Construction Management
15,700 lb
and then note that a student who forgets the 380-pound block on a 15,000-pound pick has moved roughly two and a half percentage points of chart. Then the honest closer: somebody always suggests a lighter spreader bar, it saves 300 pounds, and the pick still fails. **Rigging weight is real and you mu → Chapter 21 — Instructor Notes
150 psf per foot of fluid concrete
a 12-foot fully fluid pour is 1,800 psf. Cold weather, retarders, and self-consolidating concrete all extend the fluid period and raise the pressure at the same placement rate. Treat SCC as full liquid head unless your engineer says otherwise in writing. → Construction Management
spent in the last ninety days, on work that was in the contract from the beginning, because it was never scheduled and therefore never staffed. Note what is *not* in that number: no liquidated damages, no extended general conditions. Kestrel made the date. This is the cost of closeout done in a scra → Construction Management
19 calendar days
slower than the contractual 10 working days, because the volume has buried him. → Construction Management
2,880 CY
60 percent of estimate, because the resident engineer authorized tighter neat lines. Revenue $110,880, cost $105,600, margin **$5,280**. Then split the loss so they can see the mechanism: $19,200 of fixed cost never recovered, plus $16,320 of overhead and profit on units never built. **The margin fe → Chapter 38 — Instructor Notes
2. AIA Contract Documents
*the most widely used standard agreement family in U.S. building construction.* The AIA publishes distinct agreement families for different delivery methods and pricing structures — among them owner-contractor agreements for stipulated sum and for cost of the work with a guaranteed maximum price, a → Construction Management
2. Force account
the eight directed verification cores. A subcontracted driller, four days, every ticket signed by the inspector the day it was worked. **Claimed $44,160, allowed $44,160.** The cleanest recovery on the job, and the reason was entirely procedural: nothing was reconstructed. → Construction Management
2. Run a stopwatch study on the earthmoving cycle
forty cycles, element by element: spot, load, haul, dump and maneuver, return. Designed to find: where in the cycle the time actually went. "The machine's running good" almost always means the constraint has moved off the machine and nobody re-measured, which is the exact failure in [Case Study 2](c → Construction Management
2. Scope sheets for five trades
earthwork, concrete, masonry, mechanical, and electrical. Use the four-part structure from §16.4: Included, Excluded (with the package that carries each excluded item named), Clarifications, and Schedule and manning obligations. Run all twenty seam-checklist items against each trade and force a yes → Construction Management
2. What do you do in the next ten minutes?
**Stop this specific wall.** Not the crew — move them to a non-conflicted area on the same floor and keep them productive. Stopping eleven people costs roughly $600 an hour; moving them costs the walk. - **Check three things fast:** the current revision of A-011 and G-004 against the drawing log (is → Construction Management
2.02%
is far enough outside their intuition that it produces genuine surprise, and surprise is what you want in the first ninety seconds. → Chapter 2 — Discussion Guide
2.4 percent of the fee for a $47.5 million project
money that was earned, spent, and never recovered, on work that everybody agreed had been performed. → Construction Management
2.4 times the specified maximum leakage rate
with roughly a hundred square feet of enclosure temporarily performing better than the finished construction ever would. → Construction Management
2.4%
roughly **$1.2 million** on a Northgate-sized project. Nobody notices that error. It just quietly makes you low. → Construction Management
214 tons — 59% of everything hauled this month
and it is being credited at 62 cents on the dollar. Every ton sitting in that container is throwing away 38% of its own diversion value. → Construction Management
22 near-misses across weeks 34, 35, and 36
six, nine, and seven — against a running average of roughly two and a half a week over the preceding month. That is a spike of nearly three times, sitting in plain text in the daily reports, in a folder, on a server, unread. > > One of those twenty-two was the week-34 scaffold event on the north ele → Construction Management
23 calendar days
from August 4 to August 27 — because the anchor-bolt and embed submittal sat in Kestrel's office for 11 days before it went to Caldwell Structural, Caldwell took its full 14-day review, and Ironbridge lost its mill rolling slot. → Construction Management
23.7% productivity loss
14.6 ÷ 11.8 = 1.237 — on the same floor plate, with the same crew, in the same month. → Construction Management
23.8
up 56%. Commitments made also rose from an average of 25.3 to 31.8, so the PPC improvement is real, not a denominator effect. → Construction Management
27 WD.
The owner event, **on its own**, would have caused **22 WD** of that. - The contractor event, **on its own**, would have caused **27 WD** of that. - The two overlap for **22 work days** — a period during which *either* cause, standing alone, would have delayed completion. That is **genuine concurren → Appendix B — CPM Scheduling Workbook
assuming a perfectly steady queue with no gaps, which never happens. (b) Arrivals are not uniform; the bulk shows up in the last 10–15 minutes. One gate is **not sufficient**, and the 28-minute figure is the optimistic case. (c) 1,680 s ÷ (12 × 60 s) = 2.33, so **three readers** (round up; you need → Construction Management
28.2% of available crane capacity
plus 127.5 man-hours of trades waiting. About $14,048 of measurable waste in one week and two work days of precast erection behind plan. Nadia Haddad says bring a second crane. Margo says: *"We don't have a capacity problem. Stop moving the crane."* → Chapter 18 — Discussion Guide
and a missed deadline on a mill slot is binary. Hank Duffy called Ray on a Wednesday afternoon. → Construction Management
3,889 MH
At the impacted rate: 84,000 ÷ 15.2 = **5,526 MH** - Difference: **1,637 MH** × $62.00/MH = **$101,494**, call it **$101,000** → Construction Management
3. ConsensusDocs
*the coalition-drafted alternative.* Drafted by a coalition of industry associations including owner, contractor, subcontractor, and surety organizations rather than by a single professional body. Worth reading precisely because the drafting constituency differs from the AIA's, and the default risk → Construction Management
3. Who you copy, and why.
**Trellis Engineering** — the mechanical engineer of record. They own the RTU location and will have to concur with any relocation. Copying them is not politeness; it prevents an answer from the architect that the engineer then reverses. - **Pri Sethi, Meridian** — the owner's representative. Both o → Construction Management
3. Write "the first hour"
a pocket-card procedure for the sixty minutes after an operator finds a facility that is not where the drawings say. Six steps or fewer. **It must work when you are across town and the only people on site are an operator, a foreman, and a flagger.** → Construction Management
3.8%.
**Most of the job is communication.** Ray was interrupted 31 times in one day; Margo walked 6.4 miles and had 47 conversations. The technical knowledge is the price of admission. → Construction Management
3/A-311
number over sheet, always in that order. Every professional in the industry reads that shorthand. Use it in your RFIs; it makes you sound like you've done this before, and more importantly it removes all ambiguity about which of the eleven details on a sheet you mean. → Construction Management
30 inches available, 39 required, nine short
and the supply and return ducts already consume 85 of the corridor's 96 inches of width. Four options are priced twice, in dollars and in days at $10,650/CD. Option 4, the reroute, wins at $46,100 with no schedule impact. Then the harder half: Tavares Hill at Sentinel Fire Protection argues he shoul → Chapter 10 — Discussion Guide
30 minutes on §16.4
the seam checklist and the scope-gap hunt, run as live work rather than presentation. 15 minutes on §16.8, the steel back-schedule. 8 minutes on §16.9's four reporting rules. 4 minutes on the checkpoint. → Chapter 16 — Instructor Notes
30 more days of market risk on the price itself
the one variable that can move against them without limit and that no amount of field management can influence. That is why spec building is a different risk business from production building even when the houses are identical, and why a builder who is excellent at one can be wiped out by the other. → Construction Management
30.9
the section > on where earned value misleads on a construction project, which is the half of this subject that > certification courses skip. > > 🔬 **Deep Dive:** The arithmetic conventions and rounding rules are in > [Appendix A](../../appendices/a-construction-math-reference.md). Cost loading a sch → Construction Management
300 lb over
102 percent of chart. Framed the other way, net capacity for the load is 15,600 − 480 − 520 = 14,600 lb against a 14,900 lb load. Options A and B are the classic error of comparing the bare load to the gross chart and forgetting the deductions. → Construction Management
31 years
contradicted by this chapter's own `case-study-01.md:24` ("31 years") and by Ch 3, 21, 22, 24, 35, 41, 42 | HIGH | | M-3 | `part-04-field-operations/chapter-22-temporary-structures/index.md:23` and `case-study-01.md:21` vs. `part-04-field-operations/chapter-24-safety-management/index.md:21` | — | Mi → Consistency Audit — *Construction Management: Building the Built World*
32,000 BCY
Swell factor **25%**; shrinkage factor **12%** (carry it, you will not need it here) - Truck capacity: **12 LCY** - Excavator production: **290 LCY/hr (232 BCY/hr)**; load time per truck **2.5 min** - Spot at excavator 1.0 min; dump and maneuver 2.0 min - Loaded haul speed **24 mph**; empty return s → Construction Management
33,000 SF at 5 inches, 510 cubic yards
the plumber lays sanitary and storm piping in the dirt, sets floor drains and cleanouts, and sleeves every future penetration. Then it gets inspected, then it gets covered with vapor barrier and reinforcing, and then it is under six inches of concrete for the next fifty years. → Construction Management
35 to 55 codes
enough to see the job, few enough that a foreman can use it. For every code, state the unit of measure and the source of the data. Then run the five-place test in writing: name, for each of the five places (estimate, budget, time cards, AP coding, schedule of values), how this structure will be used → Construction Management
35 − 12 = 23 calendar days
and note the six days are not in that sum, because they are its cause rather than a term in it, or $244,950 of exposure at $10,650 per calendar day. The management lesson is to back-schedule submittal approval dates from the fixed slot, not forward from today. → Construction Management
352
squarely in "pursue with conditions." Staff availability scored a 2, because the intended superintendent is finishing another job and will not be free until *five weeks after* notice to proceed. Everything else scored 3 or better. Write down what *condition* you would attach to this pursuit — someth → Construction Management
the item from §38.4 | | **Driven piles** | Steel or concrete piles driven to a required capacity or tip elevation | Hammer energy, driving criteria, pile order length vs. actual, noise and vibration limits | Not used on this bridge | | **Footings and pile caps** | Reinforced concrete connecting the → Construction Management
38 percent better than the estimate
not better than current performance, better than the *estimate*, which was already built on good conditions. That is not realistic. **This activity cannot be recovered; it can only be contained.** Learning that in the middle instead of at the end is exactly the point, because containment still saves → Construction Management
direct cost, and schedule cost at your daily exposure rate. On Northgate that rate is **$10,650/CD**. Know yours by heart. → Construction Management
4. Projects and experiences that close them.
Own the cost-to-complete for **three cost codes** on the next job — with Lorena Vasquez reviewing my arithmetic and Ray reviewing my judgment — and be in the room every month while the forecast is challenged. - Ask to be assigned as **APM on a smaller job** rather than a second field-engineer seat o → Construction Management
4. What to write into the subcontract
**Exhibit A — Scope of Work**, reproducing the scope sheet item by item, with an explicit "complete and in place" clause: all labor, material, equipment, scaffolding, hoisting, layout from Contractor's control points, cold-weather protection, cleanup, and incidentals necessary to complete the masonr → Construction Management
4.5 MH/LF
set deliberately above what Northgate achieved, because a criterion you set at your own best-ever result is not a fair test, it is a trap you built for yourself. → Construction Management
4.6%
once in about twenty-two weeks | | Per-trade reliability needed for a 90% chain of five | **97.9%** — unattainable, so shorten the chain | | Northgate baseline PPC | **101 ÷ 187 = 54%** | | Share of misses caused by the GC's own systems | **55%** (prerequisite work 21 + material 14 + information 12, → Construction Management
4/A-514
parapet section at north edge · Specification Sections **23 74 13** (Packaged Rooftop Air-Conditioning Units) and **07 54 00** (Thermoplastic Membrane Roofing) · Submittal 141 (RTU product data, approved as noted) · Submittal 156 (coping shop drawings, approved as noted, fabricated) > > **Observed c → Construction Management
40 to 60% of the in-place cost of the concrete
far more than the concrete itself. **ACI 347** covers formwork for concrete. Depth is in [Chapter 22](../../part-04-field-operations/chapter-22-temporary-structures/index.md); here is what you must understand now. → Construction Management
40,000 yards
8,000 yards of pure air that you nevertheless pay a truck to carry and a landfill to receive. At 12 LCY per truck: → Construction Management
400 CD
it fits, with 25 days to spare.) 2. **Scheduling technique.** State that you are replacing CPM with line of balance and say *why* in two sentences — the rate-versus-path argument from §37.3.1. Then sketch the LOB chart with five trade stages, by hand, on paper. 3. **The submittal log and the RFI pro → Construction Management
412,000 SF of gypsum board
three and a half miles of wall — and twelve to twenty trades move through the same space in a fixed order. If the order breaks anywhere, everybody behind the break stops. **This sequence is the construction manager's to own.** No single subcontractor can see it, because each one sees only their own → Construction Management
Start interval: `92 ÷ 11` = **8.36 calendar days** - Community duration: `92 + 33 × 8.36` = **368 CD ≈ 12 months** - Company-wide, at 90 homes a year: `(90 ÷ 365) × 92` = **22.7 houses in process** → Chapter 37 — Instructor Notes
45 productive minutes per hour (0.75)
realistic for structural excavation with an inspector present, not for open mass excavation, which runs higher. → Construction Management
46 SF per leg
about a 6'-9" × 6'-9" pad, which tells you immediately that spreading alone is not the answer here. The other question: **is the slab on grade even the right load path?** The real answer is usually a designed footing or a load path down to grade, not a bigger pad. And the uniform design load is not → Construction Management
your empirically observed uncertainty between the two methods, on this site, with this control, in this material. → Construction Management
480 equivalent man-hours
Effective output at baseline: **400 equivalent man-hours** - Gain: **+80 equivalent MH, or +20% output — for +64% cost** → Construction Management
4D
A three-dimensional model linked to schedule activities, so the building can be watched assembling itself over time. Its real value is not the animation but the questions it forces: where does the crane sit in week 30, and what is in the way. See [Chapter 35](../part-07-specialized-practice-and-tech → Appendix I — Glossary
5 calendar days of float
on a 266-day chain. That is a 1.9% margin on the longest procurement chain on the job. It is not comfort. It is the same margin that the anchor-bolt submittal on this project consumed and did not have. → Appendix J — Answers to Selected Exercises
5 percent of the final contract value
`0.05 × $47,500,000 = $2,375,000` on the base contract, and about `0.05 × $48,124,000 = $2,406,200` once the approved change orders are in. **That $2,406,200 is the number Owen quotes back to you in [Chapter 34](../chapter-34-construction-finance/index.md).** → Construction Management
5 recordables over 412,000 MH, TRIR 2.43
three before week 34, two after. Had the corrective actions done nothing, the expected count in the remaining 254,000 hours at the pre-incident rate would have been about five. We got two. Is that a result? **No.** At counts that small, two versus five is a coin-flipping exercise, and anyone who tel → Construction Management
which is exactly the arithmetic problem §24.9 warns you about, and which Curtis had never had explained to him. → Construction Management
51 picks — about 20%.
**Priority allocation:** steel and concrete are critical path and get what they need (189). Curtain wall is near-critical and feeds a milestone with money behind it — protect it (74) if you can. That is 263, still 13 over. Mechanical, with 12 days of float, is the give: cut it to 25 and defer 13 roo → Construction Management
534.7 CY
That is **25 CY** more than the neat 510 CY — a full 5% overrun from a quarter inch of grading tolerance. → Construction Management
56 calendar days
Northgate's total daily exposure to slipping substantial completion = **$10,650/CD** ($5,150 extended general conditions + $5,500 liquidated damages) - Exposure = 56 CD × $10,650/CD = **$596,400** → Construction Management
56 work days
four days gained. And now there are **two critical paths**: A → F → G → H (6 + 26 + 8 + 16 = 56) and A → C → E → G → H (6 + 12 + 14 + 8 + 16 = 56). Take F to 25 and the project stays at 56, because the west abutment chain governs. Every dollar spent expediting girders past the four-day mark buys not → Construction Management
5D
A model linked to cost data, so quantities and prices update as the design changes. It works well for repetitive, model-native quantities and badly for anything the model does not represent, which is most of what an estimator worries about. See [Chapter 35](../part-07-specialized-practice-and-techno → Appendix I — Glossary
5S
A lean workplace-organization method (sort, set in order, shine, standardize, sustain). On a job site it mostly shows up as material staging and housekeeping discipline, which is the cheapest productivity program available to you. See [Chapter 27](../part-05-communication-and-documentation/chapter-2 → Appendix I — Glossary
6,800 man-hours removed from the site
*moved, not saved.* Total both locations 11,400 → 8,900: **2,500 MH, a 22% genuine productivity gain**, and that is the number a defensible programme is built on. - 19 work days in the corridors → **9 calendar days** at substantial completion, because in-wall rough-in, above-ceiling inspections, and → Chapter 39 — Instructor Notes
6. Associated General Contractors of America (AGC)
*the contractor's-side view of delivery and risk.* AGC produces practical guidance for contractors on delivery methods, subcontracting, project delivery selection, and risk management, and collaborates on the ConsensusDocs family. Its guidance on preconstruction services and on GMP administration is → Construction Management
6. Three relationships.
**Tomás Reyes**, chief estimator — four lunches a year, and I bring an actual estimate to be taken apart. He sees every job before it exists. - **Sofia Marchetti**, Cardinal Mechanical — the best subcontractor PM I have worked with, and the person who will tell me the truth about how a general contr → Construction Management
6.7% band
they read the same documents and reached roughly the same conclusion, and the architect's estimate lands in the middle of them. One bidder is **8.5% below every one of them and 9.5% below the estimate.** → Construction Management
60 ft north of the
Willow Street right-of-way line
*the source for IPD behavior, target value design, and pull planning.* LCI is the organizing body for lean construction practice in North America and the home of the Last Planner System. Most of what makes IPD work — target value design, big-room co-location, pull planning, transparent cost models — → Construction Management
7.5% more material
about 405 extra tons at whatever your mix costs, delivered free to the public. → Construction Management
7.5% of the contract sum
10% withheld on the first half of the work and 5% on the second half — which on the $47,500,000 guaranteed maximum price (GMP) is **$3,562,500** sitting in Meridian's account. Liquidated damages (LDs) run at **$5,500 per calendar day**. Extended general conditions run at **$5,150 per calendar day**. → Construction Management
70% (16/23) is the threshold to proceed.
--- title: "Case Study 1 — Fourteen Feet and an Airspace Problem" chapter: 17 type: case-study --- → Construction Management
3,375 psi. The plan is a **5 work-day cycle**: 6 × 5 = 30 WD, about 42 calendar days, top out mid-November. The cycle actually runs **8 work days**: 48 WD, 67 calendar days, top out just before Christmas. Nobody notices for three floors — floor 2 was a start-up floor, floor 3 was rain, floor 4 was e → Chapter 22 — Discussion Guide
770 LF total
510 LF at the building perimeter, 80 LF at the gym demising wall, 180 LF at interior bearing walls. **2'-6" wide × 12" deep**, top of footing elevation 96'-4" | | **Column spread footings** | **24 footings** in three sizes per the footing schedule (see below) | | **Foundation walls** | 8-inch CMU on → Appendix K — The Willow Street Community Center Project Package
plus other triggers: multi-crane lifts, personnel platforms, lifts over occupied structures or live utilities, blind picks, and anything the lift director says is one. A critical lift gets a **written, signed lift plan** containing: the load weight **from a verified source** (a shipping ticket, a ce → Appendix D — Forms and Templates Library
82.5%
the target is met with 2.5 points of cushion. Tons diverted above the 80% requirement = 1,130.06 − (0.80 × 1,370 = 1,096.0) = **34.06 tons of cushion.** → Construction Management
87 percent
still a critical lift by a 75 percent threshold, so it needs a written plan. To get comfortably under 75 percent you need a chart value of at least 21,250 ÷ 0.75 = 28,333 lb, which on the 100-ft column means a radius around 45 ft. **Compute the radius you need, then go find out whether the site will → Construction Management
9 through 14
**6 calendar days.** Both delays are live in that window and both are on the critical path. That is *literal* concurrency: an actual calendar overlap of two critical delays from different parties. → Construction Management
far too much this close to the deadline, and earthwork at $1,140,000 is the dangerous one because earthwork has the widest bid spread of any trade. Call for numbers. Any plug replaced by a real leveled quote is a legitimate move in either direction. Any plug that survives to T−45 gets a risk load an → Construction Management
90 percent curve
each doubling of cumulative units takes 90 percent of the previous doubling's hours. Framing labor per house: → Construction Management
90% reliable
nine times out of ten, when it says it will hand off Friday, it hands off Friday. That is a good crew. That is better than most. → Construction Management
97.9%
unattainable; shorten the chain instead | | Northgate baseline PPC | **101 ÷ 187 = 54%** | | Share of misses caused by the general contractor's own systems | **55%** (prerequisite work + material + information) | | Takt time | Available time ÷ (zones + wagons − 1); **round down** | | Slip rate measu → Construction Management
99
you bought **four days, not six**, because beyond four the steel chain governs the merge at J. Four work days is 5.6 calendar days, worth $59,640 against $13,870 — still a good trade, net $45,770. But you would have paid the same money believing you were buying 8.4 calendar days' worth $89,460. **Ru → Chapter 14 — Instructor Notes
99 work days
you bought **four days, not six.** Beyond four days, the steel delivery chain governs the merge at J and further slab acceleration buys nothing at all. And the critical path is now A → C → D → F → J (5 + 5 + 14 + 45 + 30 = 99), with the concrete chain carrying two days of float. → Construction Management
[1] Rework
contractor QC + identifying party | ↓ | | Is there an **engineered method** to make it acceptable? | **[2] Repair** — **design professional in writing**; manufacturer's concurrence where a warranty is involved | ↓ | | Will the **design professional accept it as installed, in writing**? | **[3] Use a → Construction Management
[Appendix C](c-estimating-reference.md)
this section supplies only the *inputs* that are > specific to Willow Street. > > Real numbers come from your own historical cost data first, current quotes second, and published > data adjusted for time, location, and size third. → Appendix K — The Willow Street Community Center Project Package
`📋 Try it` in §15.11
Cedar Hollow (346) and Bell Harbor (282) scored in teams of three, 25 minutes, with each team defending its two-sentence justification out loud. Then 20 minutes on §15.6's qualifications page, comparing Tomás's page against Curtis Boone's nine words. If you have the block available, this is the bett → Chapter 15 — Instructor Notes
`🧩` three-proposal drill in §16.4
the site-utility, plumbing, and fire-protection exclusion lines with the five-foot gap — done in teams of three on paper before anyone speaks. Then 20 minutes back-scheduling the curtain wall in §16.8, which forces the choice between holding June 24 and losing 22 days at the back end, or moving exec → Chapter 16 — Instructor Notes
|
** | | Bidder B | $24,864,000 | +11.0% | | Bidder C | $25,110,000 | +12.1% | | Bidder D | $25,395,000 | +13.4% | | Bidder E | $25,680,000 | +14.6% | | Bidder F | $26,240,000 | +17.1% | | Bidder G | $26,905,000 | +20.1% | → Construction Management
§36.7
water and site, resilience, electrification — to reading. Four good surveys, none of which carries the argument. Second cut is **§36.6.3 and §36.6.4** (steel, mass timber, EPDs and buy-clean): the mass timber table teaches itself and the buy-clean material is a procurement note. Third cut is **§36.3 → Chapter 36 — Instructor Notes
§41.11, Leading Yourself
it is personal, it reads beautifully alone, and it does not need a facilitator; assign it and mention the cynicism tell. Third cut is **§41.6.3's practice table**; keep only **teach-back**, demonstrated live in ninety seconds, because that is the item people skip and the one that works. Fourth cut i → Chapter 41 — Instructor Notes
winning was worth less than nothing. Ashfield scored 384, with a client that pays, a delivery method that bounds the downside under a GMP, and a real fee; expected value of that pursuit was **+$405,250** at a 25% win probability. Both pursuits cost roughly the same to chase, which is the entire deci → Construction Management
−3
three days of negative float, which is precisely the margin by which the April 18 mill release was missed. Because the constraint at the end of that chain was **discrete** rather than continuous, three days of lateness became a 35-day wait for the next rolling opening, and after Ironbridge's 12-day → Construction Management
🏃 Fast Track
Ch 1, 3, 4, 6, 12, 14, 25, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33, 40 | 3–6 weeks | | Learning the discipline properly for the first time | **📘 Standard** — all 42 in order, with the project | 8–12 months | | Going all the way, or preparing for a credential | **🔬 Deep Dive** — everything, plus both appendix workbooks | → Self-Paced Independent Study
🚪 threshold concept
an idea that changes how you see the job. If you read nothing else, read these fifteen paragraphs. → Learning Paths
A
A 4D sequence for one hard week
Ch. 35 - **A backup pump.** — Ch. 21 - **A building grid** — Ch. 18 - **a bulletin is not a directive** — Ch. 7 - **A caution about the personal diary.** — Ch. 26 - **A certificate of insurance is not coverage.** — Ch. 5 - **A change in appearance, weight, or hygiene** — Ch. 41 - **a change order th → Index
a bulletin is not a directive
if a superintendent builds a bulletin because it looked official and it never becomes a change order, you built scope for free. → Construction Management
A completeness error
the measurement was right, the boundary was wrong | Reconcile counts against schedules; build a sheet index and tick every sheet | | F-6 thickness | **A reading error** — the boundary was right, the input was wrong | A physical control: straightedge, highlighted row, read-back | | No waste | **A con → Construction Management
the instrument that exists for exactly this situation, where the owner needs work to proceed before price and time are agreed. A CCD would have obligated Kestrel to proceed *and* established the cost-accounting basis from hour one. 3. **The contract's own force-account provisions**, which typically → Construction Management
a control
a comparable conventional scope on the same project, measured the same way. Without it you have a demonstration, and demonstrations always succeed. → Construction Management
A factor the model didn't include
most commonly *design control over an evolving program.* If end users will keep changing requirements, DB's price advantage evaporates, because every change is negotiated with the party holding all the leverage. That risk may simply not appear as a row. → Construction Management
A failure sends you back to find the source
a far worse position than a slow flush-out | | When to choose it | You have float and limited confidence in your source control | You have a tight schedule and high confidence in the products actually installed | → Construction Management
A gating-submittal list
the six items whose approval releases a long-lead purchase — on one page, with a 48-hour internal turnaround commitment and a daily standup that asks only *where are they.* 3. **A Monday ball-in-court report**, published to the entire team including the architect and the owner's representative, with → Construction Management
A humane schedule is a health intervention
the bridge into §41.9 and back into Case Study 2, where Foster's practices are, read one way, exactly that. → Chapter 41 — Discussion Guide
a letter, a ticket book, a cost code
and you want them named in order, because the whole chapter compresses into ninety minutes of somebody's Thursday afternoon. → Chapter 31 — Discussion Guide
a named human being behind each action
Margo's talk in §24.7 is the model, and the reason it works is that it admits institutional fault, which almost no talk does. The emergency action plan should answer the questions "call 911" does not: who calls, who meets the ambulance and at which gate, who runs the headcount, and — on a municipal → Chapter 24 — Instructor Notes
A named owner
a person, not a department — and a named executive who can remove obstacles. 3. **A fixed window** with a start and an end date. 4. **A pre-registered success criterion**, written before the pilot begins, in numbers, that you would accept as a fair test. 5. **A cost cap.** State the number at which → Construction Management
full program, scoped subset, or decline — with the two model uses you would pursue first. → Construction Management
A schedule does four jobs
prove the work fits, tell people what to do next, price change, and prove entitlement. Most baselines are built for the first and fail at the other three. - **Label every duration WD or CD.** Contract time, liquidated damages, and extended general conditions run on calendar days. Crew productivity r → Construction Management
A selections schedule as a contract exhibit
every line with the information the client needs, a **decision-due date**, a **lock date** tied to the order or the trade start, and a **stated consequence**: *the builder selects the base item, and any later change is a change order at cost plus fee plus lead time.* Bring each deadline forward once → Construction Management
A specific, finishable deliverable
"top track complete in Zone B, all 47 partitions," not "work in Zone B." 3. **A date**, which is this Friday. 4. It is made **out loud, in front of the other trades**, who are relying on it. → Appendix D — Forms and Templates Library
A strategic pursuit
a deliberate negative-EV bid — is legitimate only with a written declaration, a capped budget, and a named executive sponsor. → Construction Management
adverse weather that prevents work for more than a defined portion of a shift on a **controlling activity**. → Construction Management
A time impact analysis inserts a fragnet
a small sub-network modeling the delay event and its logic — **into the contemporaneous schedule update that was in effect when the event occurred**, then recalculates to measure the movement of the projected completion date. The word *contemporaneous* is the whole method. A TIA run against a baseli → Construction Management
a trade billed ahead of the
trade it depends on
roofing at 30% when the deck is at 85% means either stored material you have not verified or a percentage that is wrong; and **any request to move money out of the closeout, commissioning, and punch line**, which funds the hardest part of the job and is the first place a contractor under cash pressu → Appendix E — The Owner's Companion: For Owners, Developers, Facility Managers, and Homeowners
A written definition of the cost of the work
reimbursable and non-reimbursable schedules, an agreed labor burden rate, an agreed equipment rate schedule, and audit rights with a stated record-retention period. 3. **A control budget by cost code with a monthly cost-to-complete forecast**, not just cost-to-date. See [Chapter 28](../../part-06-pr → Construction Management
A3
A structured one-page problem-solving format from lean practice: condition, analysis, countermeasure, plan, follow-up, on a single sheet. The constraint is the point — one page forces you to decide what actually matters. See [Chapter 27](../part-05-communication-and-documentation/chapter-27-lean-con → Appendix I — Glossary
AACE International
the association for cost engineering — publishes a cost-estimate classification system that most of the construction and process industries follow, sorting estimates into **Class 5** (earliest, least information) through **Class 1** (latest, most information), and tying each class to a range of expe → Construction Management
Acceleration
Adding resources, hours, shifts, or resequencing to finish sooner than current progress projects. It is never free, and its non-monetary costs — trade stacking, fatigue, rework, and near-misses — are systematically underpriced. *Directed* acceleration is ordered by the owner and usually compensable; → Appendix I — Glossary
accept
actively and correctly, because they funded it. The risk is genuinely held by the subcontractor, and it cost the project $110,000 in certain money to move an uncertain exposure to a party who probably cannot control it. Whether that was a good trade depends entirely on one question: could you have * → Construction Management
Accept as modified
N+1 retained at the ambulatory-surgery AHU; accepted value **$331,300** | | VE-04 | Imaging suite: replace the full-bay depressed slab and isolation pit with a localized thickened slab and a steel-framed isolation platform sized to the actual vendor template | $223,000 | **$267,700** | Neutral | −5 → Construction Management
Accept partial
$6,700 | | Erect steel in three sequences instead of four | Ironbridge Steel | $0 | Reduces crane moves, saves 4 calendar days of erection | **Accept** — free schedule | | Delete the imaging-wall mockup | Solano Interior Systems | $18,400 | The imaging wall is a shielded assembly with a single-sourc → Construction Management
Accrual
Recording a cost in the period the work happened rather than the period the invoice arrived. Without accruals your cost report will show a job making money in the month a subcontractor was slow to bill and losing money the month they catch up, and neither picture is real. See [Chapter 28](../part-06 → Appendix I — Glossary
accuracy-and-reliance statement
what the model represents, what its accuracy is, and what it is not (not a design document, not a warranty of concealed conditions, and it does not show what the scanner could not see). Reliance is where liability lives, and you are creating a document a facilities engineer will rely on for twenty y → Construction Management
ACI 347
the American Concrete Institute's guide to formwork for concrete — is the governing document in most of the United States, and your specification will reference it. It covers design loads, materials, construction and use, shoring and reshoring, and removal criteria. Get a current copy. Do not work f → Construction Management
Activity
One unit of work in a schedule, with a duration, a defined start and finish, and logic connecting it to other activities. A good activity has one responsible party, one location, one trade, and a finish somebody can point at. See [Chapter 14](../part-03-preconstruction/chapter-14-scheduling-cpm/inde → Appendix I — Glossary
Actual cost (AC)
In earned value, the money actually spent on the work performed to date. It is the number your accounting system produces, and its usefulness depends entirely on whether costs were coded correctly and accrued honestly. See [Chapter 30](../part-06-project-controls/chapter-30-earned-value-management/i → Appendix I — Glossary
Additional insured
A party added to somebody else's liability policy so that the policy defends and indemnifies them for claims arising out of that party's work. The endorsement form and its wording decide what you actually got; a certificate of insurance saying "additional insured" proves almost nothing by itself. Se → Appendix I — Glossary
Advertisement
legal newspaper, agency site, state procurement portal | The date, the time, the *place*, and whether the pre-bid is mandatory | | **Document availability** — you register as a **planholder** | Register under your real company name; addenda go to registered planholders only | | **Pre-bid meeting and → Construction Management
after the order was placed
restocking and re-order | $9,400 | | — | Primary bath layout revised after rough plumbing; walls opened and re-roughed | $5,900 | | — | Stair rail changed from painted poplar to stained white oak, decided at the trim stage | $4,850 | | — | Shower niche and bench added at tile | $2,100 | | | **Total → Construction Management
After you cross it, you think:
The estimate is a *proposal about who owns what.* Every quantity you took off is a statement: *"I will build this much, at this productivity, under these conditions, and if any of that is wrong, here is who pays."* - Accuracy means every assumption in the estimate is **stated, testable, and owned.** → Construction Management
aggregate billing position
showing the gross over-billing and gross under-billing separately, as they would appear on the balance sheet. 3. Identify **the one job that should worry you**, and state exactly why in numbers. 4. Write the three questions you would ask that job's project manager on Thursday. → Construction Management
agreed
scope, price, and time are settled and executed | The change log, the schedule of values, the next pay application | | **Change order request / proposal (COR or PCO)** | Priced, submitted, **not yet agreed** — pending | The pending-change log ([Chapter 31](../chapter-31-change-order-management/index → Construction Management
Agreement
The signed document naming the parties, the price, the contract time, and the basis of payment. It is the smallest and least interesting part of the contract documents; the general conditions decide most disputes. See [Chapter 4](../part-01-foundations/chapter-04-construction-contracts/index.md). → Appendix I — Glossary
AHJ
the **authority having jurisdiction**, the local building department, fire marshal, or health department that issues your permits and inspections — decides whether your building may proceed. Frank Petrosyan, the Rivermont building official, has never once been moved by "but we're behind schedule." * → Construction Management
AHJ (authority having jurisdiction)
Whoever has legal authority to approve, inspect, and permit on your project: the building official, the fire marshal, the health department, the utility, and sometimes several at once. The AHJ does not work for you, does not enforce your contract, and does not care about your schedule. See [Chapter → Appendix I — Glossary
AHJ enforces the adopted, amended version
not the current one, not the one you used on your last job, not the one you learned in school. → Construction Management
Alder Street
`ch-18/index.md:23, 31, 795`, `ch-18/case-study-02.md:25, 36`, `ch-24/index.md:408` | | **Geotechnical borings** | **Fourteen** — `ch-04/case-study-01.md:104`, `ch-04/index.md:715`, `appendices/g:208, 872` | **Fifteen** — `ch-08/case-study-01.md:23`, `ch-08/index.md:83` | | **North property-line off → Consistency Audit — *Construction Management: Building the Built World*
all of those factors are
about to change at once
which they occasionally do, but only when somebody deliberately changes them. Hence the asymmetry: to forecast at the actual rate you owe nothing; to forecast better than actual you owe a written, specific, mechanical reason with a date. "Jamal split the level-4 topping into two placements and added → Construction Management
All surviving files verified structurally complete
no mid-sentence truncation, no tool-call artifacts anywhere in the book. → Generation Checkpoint
what the owner's business case can fund. On Northgate that is $47,500,000, straight from Meridian's pro forma. 2. Validate that the program can be delivered for that cost *before* design begins, using benchmarks and conceptual estimates. 3. Break the target into **cluster targets** by system — struc → Construction Management
Allowance
A stated dollar amount carried in the contract for scope known to exist but not yet defined, reconciled against actual cost at the end. A good allowance states a quantity, a unit price, and — this is the sentence people forget — **whether it includes overhead, profit, and general conditions.** See [ → Appendix I — Glossary
allowances
a dollar amount included in the contract for a scope the client has not yet chosen. Cabinets, countertops, plumbing fixtures, lighting, flooring, tile, appliances, landscape. Allowances exist because you cannot price a kitchen before the client picks the kitchen. → Construction Management
Alternate
A priced option the owner may accept or decline, usually at award. Add alternates increase the base scope, deduct alternates remove something; accepting alternates can change who the low bidder is, which is why public bid documents usually state the order in which they will be considered. See [Chapt → Appendix I — Glossary
your own cost consultant prices the same drawings in parallel, and where the two differ by more than a few percent somebody explains why line by line. (On Northgate the owner's consultant came in at $46.9 million against the CM's $47.5 million; the reconciliation meeting took six hours and was worth → Appendix E — The Owner's Companion: For Owners, Developers, Facility Managers, and Homeowners
an offer
two things Kestrel gives, in exchange for something Kestrel needs. That is what leverage sounds like when it is being used well. → Construction Management
and closeout
on their own lines. - **The application is an arithmetic ladder and two rungs cause most of the errors.** Line 7 is the prior period's total earned less retainage **as certified**, not as submitted. Column E contains previously stored material that has now been installed, so it is not the same as pr → Construction Management
And it shows the deferred items
CL-34 and CL-35 — which live past final completion and which drop off every schedule that ends at the ribbon cutting. → Construction Management
Anticipation
what is going to go wrong, and how early can I see it? **Allocation** — who owns this risk, and what did they get paid to own it? **Communication** — does everyone who needs to know, know, and can I prove it? The middle one carries the sentence worth memorizing: if you cannot answer "who owns this r → Construction Management
Any code that has not moved in three months
go look at the work. The money is going somewhere. 6. **Open the "miscellaneous" code** and sample twenty transactions. 7. **Look for round numbers in the forecast column.** Real forecasts are ugly. $462,197 rounds to $462,200, not to $460,000. → Construction Management
Anything with a truck already rolling wins
you cannot un-dispatch concrete. 2. **Anything that blocks a life-safety route loses**, always, immediately, no discussion. 3. **Direct-to-install beats laydown.** If one pick puts material in its final position and the other puts it on the ground for a second handling, the first one goes first. 4. → Construction Management
Application for payment (pay app)
The monthly request for payment, built on the schedule of values, showing work completed this period, work completed to date, retention, and the balance to finish. You sign a certification on it, which makes it a representation and not just a bill. See [Chapter 32](../part-06-project-controls/chapte → Appendix I — Glossary
Apprentice
A craft worker in a structured program combining paid on-the-job hours with classroom instruction, progressing through wage steps toward journeyworker status. On prevailing-wage work, apprentices may be paid a percentage of the journeyworker rate only within stated ratios, and blowing the ratio is a → Appendix I — Glossary
April 21
fourteen calendar days after Kestrel finally transmitted it on April 7, which is exactly the review period Caldwell agreed to. Ironbridge missed the release deadline by → Construction Management
10 calendar days. Contractor-side. - **Meridian suspended work in the ambulatory surgery suite** from **April 9 through April 15** — 7 calendar days — to accommodate an accreditation survey at the adjacent clinic that stays open. The suspension blocked the corridor that was the only route for elevat → Construction Management
April 9, Year 1
thirty-seven days after NTP, with **five days of float on a thirty-eight-week chain.** → Construction Management
Arbitration
Private, binding dispute resolution before one or more arbitrators chosen by the parties. Usually faster and more private than litigation, with limited appeal rights; the single most consequential decision in the process is who the arbitrator is. See [Chapter 33](../part-06-project-controls/chapter- → Appendix I — Glossary
architecture
a defined set of recurring events, each with a purpose that does not overlap the others, a defined owner, a defined output, and a defined attendee list. If you cannot state the purpose and the output of a recurring meeting in one sentence each, delete it and see who complains. → Construction Management
Ardmore Properties
that sees patients five days a week for the entire 565 days Kestrel is on site. Marquand Avenue, a four-lane arterial, is on the south. Selby Street, a two-lane residential street with a noise ordinance, is on the east. Meridian's existing medical office building and its patient parking lot are on t → Construction Management
Are we going to finish on time?
schedule control, Chapters 29, 30, and 33. 2. **Are we going to make money?** — cost control, this chapter, plus 30 and 34. 3. **When something changes, what is it worth and who pays?** — Chapters 31, 32, and 33. → Construction Management
areas
as a starting point | Surfaces are geometric | **Excavation with slopes and shoring** | The model has a neat-line volume. The excavation has laybacks required by the excavation standard, over-dig for working room, haul roads, and swell | | Door, window, fixture, device counts | Discrete, scheduled, → Construction Management
As an over-reacher would write it
an entry that overstates, editorializes, and blames H+P by name for incompetence. → Construction Management
as of a data date
if an exercise gives you a table without one, the first thing you write down is that you cannot use it. `CD` = calendar days, `WD` = work days, `MH` = man-hours. → Construction Management
See **record drawings**. The two terms are used interchangeably in practice, though some specifications distinguish the contractor's field-marked set (as-builts) from the architect's final compiled set (record drawings). Read your Division 01 closeout section rather than assuming. → Appendix I — Glossary
As-built model
geometry updated to reflect what was built | Moderate — model maintenance through construction | Useful for future renovation and space planning | | 3 | **As-built model + structured asset data** | Moderate, *if collected as you go*; expensive if reconstructed at the end | **This is the rung that pa → Construction Management
As-planned versus as-built
The simplest delay-analysis method: lay the baseline beside what actually happened and identify differences. It shows *that* activities slipped, not *why* or whose fault, which is why it rarely carries a claim by itself. See [Chapter 33](../part-06-project-controls/chapter-33-claims-and-delay-analys → Appendix I — Glossary
ASI
Architect's Supplemental Instruction | During construction | The architect's position: a clarification, no cost or time. Frequently wrong. Read every one and evaluate it. | | **Bulletin** / **Proposal Request** | During construction | The owner is asking what a change would cost. Price it; do not bu → Construction Management
ASI (architect's supplemental instruction)
An instruction from the architect clarifying or making a minor change, *asserted* to carry no cost or time impact. That assertion is the architect's, not yours. If you disagree, you must say so promptly in writing, or you have accepted it. See [Chapter 31](../part-06-project-controls/chapter-31-chan → Appendix I — Glossary
ask the direct question in your review
"What would I have to demonstrate in the next two years to be considered for X?" Two vague answers in a row is your answer (§42.2). → Construction Management
Ask your project accountant for the accrual log
the sources, the amounts, the initials, and what reversed from last month. If there is no log, that is this week's assignment. 5. **Walk one self-perform pour or install before 7 a.m.** Not a meeting. A walk. Watch a crew work for twenty minutes. 6. **Check three weeks of time cards for coding accur → Construction Management
Assembly estimating
Pricing by composite units that bundle several trades — a square foot of exterior wall including studs, sheathing, air barrier, insulation, and cladding — rather than by individual line items. It is faster than a detailed takeoff and less accurate, and it is the honest method at design development. → Appendix I — Glossary
asset data
what equipment was installed, where it is, who made it, what its warranty is — so the owner's maintenance system can consume it without somebody retyping four thousand rows. COBie is a data-handover *concept and format*, not a product, and if your contract requires it, find out at the BIM execution → Appendix H — Software and Tools Directory
Assistant superintendent
asked for it; the PM track was offered and declined | Junior estimator. Took the AC credential. Passed the PE exam in year 4 | | 5–6 | PM, first job of her own: a $24M municipal building | Superintendent on a $14M job, then a $27M one | Estimator on healthcare and lab work; found the niche | | 8 | P → Construction Management
at all
it is invisible on the bid tab — and it is still an unbought scope. **Circle shared exclusions separately, always**, and assign each one somewhere before award. → Appendix D — Forms and Templates Library
At Kestrel — the Northgate team
**Ray Alvarez** — *Senior Project Manager; the narrator.* 22 years. When the book says "I," it is Ray. Runs Northgate. Believes the job is won or lost in preconstruction. - **Dani Okonkwo** — *the reader's stand-in.* 24, CM degree, first real job: **field engineer** on Northgate. Sharp, over-prepare → Continuity Tracker — *Construction Management*
at least one is a Type 2
work directed with no signed change. The report **foots**: cost to date + cost to complete = forecast at completion; budget − forecast = variance. The narrative names one code where a productivity factor is computed and shown, and one unbought code where budget minus committed is the real exposure. → Chapter 28 — Instructor Notes
August 1, Year 1
which Wei Chen had back-scheduled from the depressed-slab pour date. Meridian's assumed base equipment package is documented by manufacturer and model in an exhibit. Any deviation from that package, or any selection after August 1, is a change to the contract sum and, if it lands on the critical pat → Construction Management
August 14, Year 1
the decision meeting"; "Nadia approved **both** accelerations … in the same meeting"; "**week 25**" | | `part-04-…/chapter-22-…/index.md:41` and `case-study-01.md:17`; `part-04-…/chapter-20-…/case-study-02.md:196`; `part-04-…/_part-intro.md:79`; `instructor-guide/safety-teaching-guide.md:95` | — | * → Consistency Audit — *Construction Management: Building the Built World*
August 18, Year 3
walk the building with the owner's facilities staff and the architect, before the correction period expires. → Construction Management
twenty-three calendar days, on the critical path — and Kestrel spent **$168,000** accelerating to recover seventeen of them. → Construction Management
August 4 to August 27, Year 1
twenty-three calendar days, on the critical path, at a combined exposure of **$10,650 per calendar day**. We spent **$168,000** accelerating. → Construction Management
August 4, Year 1
a date Kestrel is already nervous about for unrelated reasons involving an anchor-bolt submittal, which is a different story in a later chapter. → Construction Management
authority having jurisdiction (AHJ)
the building official and, on most buildings, the fire marshal | Legal permission to occupy the building | Confused with substantial completion. **It is not the owner's to grant and it is not yours.** It has its own queue, its own prerequisites, and its own inspectors, and it does not care about you → Construction Management
automatic or discretionary
"may be reduced in the owner's sole discretion" is not a reduction. Whether retention is released at substantial completion or held to final completion, which on Northgate is sixty days later. Whether the owner may instead retain a multiple of the punch-list value (150% and 200% are both common) — u → Appendix G — Contract Clause Decoder: The 25 Clauses That Decide Who Pays
Avoid
drilled piers instead of spread footings | ~$600,000 | 0% | $0 | **$0** | Nobody | | **Transfer** — differing site conditions clause to Meridian | $0 direct; a slower, contested change process | 35% | $420,000 to Meridian | **$0** to Kestrel | Meridian | | **Transfer** — flow the whole risk to the e → Construction Management
B
B is findable
but only if somebody modeled the clearance zone *and* wrote the rule that tests for intrusion into it. That is the difference between a soft clash and a 4D clash, and most coordination programs are quietly mediocre at the first one. → Construction Management
B-9, and it is 140 feet away
which is normal, and which is exactly the problem. Dani reads the log. In the northeast corner, at roughly the elevation we are standing on, B-9 recorded standard penetration test blow counts of **4, 5, and 6** through a three-foot layer. The report's *recommendations* section says medium-dense sand → Construction Management
B. Bid shopping
the GC disclosed (in effect) a competitor's price level and invited a lower number for unchanged scope. **Bid peddling** would be the same transaction initiated by the sub ("just tell me what to beat"). The test that separates both from legitimate negotiation: on the legitimate side, the scope or th → Construction Management
BAC
the budget for the whole cost of the work | **$40,000,000** | | **PV** — the value of the work we *planned* to have built by January 31 | **$25,760,000** | | **EV** — the budgeted value of the work we have *actually* built | **$24,970,000** | | **AC** — what it actually cost us to build that | **$25 → Construction Management
BAC (budget at completion)
The total budget for the scope being measured in an earned value analysis. Everything else in the earned value family is measured against it. See [Chapter 30](../part-06-project-controls/chapter-30-earned-value-management/index.md). → Appendix I — Glossary
Backcharge
Charging a subcontractor for costs you incurred because of their failure: cleanup they did not do, damage they caused, work you had to supplement. Backcharges almost never survive a dispute unless you gave written notice before incurring the cost and documented it contemporaneously. See [Chapter 19] → Appendix I — Glossary
Backlog
The value of contracted work not yet performed. It is the number that runs a construction company: too little and you have no revenue coming, too much and you cannot staff it, and the composition matters more than the total. See [Chapter 2](../part-01-foundations/chapter-02-the-construction-industry → Appendix I — Glossary
backup pump
roughly $1,900 in mobilization and minimum against a $43,000 to $69,000 exposure — plus a written stop-point decision made before the pour starts rather than at 10:40 a.m. with eight trucks in the queue. → Construction Management
a three-year window that already lags a year — **volatile for small firms**, since a twelve-person contractor with one bad claim can carry a 1.6 for three years and be a perfectly safe operation today, **jurisdictional**, and it measures the **cost of claims, not exposure to hazard**. A hard cutoff → Chapter 16 — Discussion Guide
Ball-in-court
Whose desk a submittal, RFI, or open item is sitting on right now. A ball-in-court report collapses a two-hundred-row log into five numbers and is the single most useful log report you can send weekly. See [Chapter 25](../part-05-communication-and-documentation/chapter-25-submittals-rfis-document-co → Appendix I — Glossary
Ballard Masonry & Restoration
CMU and brick veneer, **$1,840,000** subcontract, bonded back to Kestrel at 100 percent because the scope exceeded Kestrel's $500,000 bond-back threshold. Kestrel and Ballard had done four previous jobs together. Curtis liked Ballard's owner personally. → Construction Management
material as it sits in the ground, undisturbed. That is the convention on a mass diagram, and 44,000 − 12,000 = 32,000 tells you the sheet is internally consistent. → Construction Management
Bank measure (BCY)
Soil volume as it sits undisturbed in the ground, in bank cubic yards. It is the normal convention for a mass-haul summary, and it is not what fits in a truck. See **swell**, → Appendix I — Glossary
BAS
*building automation system*, sometimes called **DDC** for *direct digital control* — is the nervous system. Sensors report temperature, pressure, humidity, and flow; controllers run a written **sequence of operations**; actuators move dampers and valves. Two things about controls should worry you a → Construction Management
Base of wall
above-grade WRB to below-grade waterproofing, with through-wall flashing and weeps at the brick. 2. **The floor line at the CMU-to-wood-frame change** — differential movement plus a change of air-barrier *material* (fluid-applied to self-adhered), which means a compatibility question and a lap-direc → Construction Management
Baseline float
planned approval April 11 against required mill release April 18 | — | **+7** | | 1 | Submittal 019 held in Kestrel's office; transmitted **April 7** instead of April 1 | −6 | **+1** | | 2 | Caldwell takes its full contractual **14 CD** against the **10 CD** the baseline assumed; approved as noted * → Construction Management
Baseline schedule
The accepted plan against which progress and delay are measured. On most contracts it is a submittal with a review period, and once accepted it becomes a contract document that you argue from later — which is why an unrealistic baseline is a liability, not an advantage. See [Chapter 14](../part-03-p → Appendix I — Glossary
Basis of estimate
The written record of what an estimate assumed: quantities, productivity rates, wage rates, market conditions, exclusions, and the specific documents priced. Without it, an estimate is a number nobody can defend six months later. See [Chapter 12](../part-03-preconstruction/chapter-12-estimating-fund → Appendix I — Glossary
Beacon Communications
low voltage, cable tray, the smallest detailing allowance on the job at **$19,000** — had detailed level three the way they have always detailed: on paper. The model Beacon submitted for federation was produced *afterward*, by a subcontracted service, from those paper sheets, to satisfy the requirem → Construction Management
Because you cannot direct, you must influence
the leadership restatement of the Chapter 19 threshold concept. Positional authority is the weakest instrument you have and the most frequently used. → Construction Management
Become genuinely good at spreadsheets
not formulas, *discipline*. It is the only tool on this list you will use on every job for your entire career, in every company, whatever they buy. 2. **Learn to read a CPM schedule properly**, whichever package your company runs. The engine matters less than knowing what retained logic does and why → Appendix H — Software and Tools Directory
before bid day
the 92% set, the designer's history, the "TBD" superintendent, six bidders, an immovable August opening, $2,400/CD liquidated damages, and the client's RFI record. Do not use anything you learned from the outcome. → Construction Management
Before you cross this threshold, you think:
The estimate is a forecast. The job either "comes in" or it doesn't, and a good estimator is one whose forecasts are accurate. - Accuracy means the total is close to the actual cost. - Exclusions are fine print. The real content is the number. - An assumption is something you write down if you have → Construction Management
Bellwether owes Kestrel nothing
not a date, not a response time, not a dollar; it is not late, because it never promised Kestrel anything to be late about. **Kestrel cannot direct it or escalate to it**; Del's calls reached a damage-prevention desk, then a regional engineer with forty jobs. **Bellwether's constraints are real and → Construction Management
Benchmark installation
The first production run of a repetitive assembly, inspected and accepted as the standard for everything that follows. Unlike a mockup, it stays in the building. The rule that makes it work: **the crew that will do the production work must be present at the review.** See [Chapter 23](../part-04-fiel → Appendix I — Glossary
BEP (BIM execution plan)
The document that says which model uses you are actually pursuing, who models what to what level of development, what the coordination workflow is, and what the deliverable at turnover is. Without it, BIM is expensive decoration. See [Chapter 35](../part-07-specialized-practice-and-technology/chapte → Appendix I — Glossary
Bid bond
A surety bond guaranteeing that if you are awarded the contract you will execute it and furnish the required payment and performance bonds. If you refuse the award, the owner recovers the difference between your bid and the next one, up to the bond amount. See [Chapter 5](../part-01-foundations/chap → Appendix I — Glossary
A subcontractor who was not low approaching a general contractor after bids to offer a price below the number the GC carried. The mirror image of bid shopping, initiated from the other side, and legal in most private contexts — which does not make it survivable as a business strategy. See [Chapter 1 → Appendix I — Glossary
Bid rigging and collusion
criminal antitrust exposure; there is no small version, and the person who answers commits it too. **Bid shopping and peddling** — usually lawful, usually unprofitable, and it destroys your subcontractor market. **Unbalanced bidding** — an undisclosed bet on the owner's quantity error; the honest ve → Construction Management
Bid shopping
Taking one subcontractor's price to that subcontractor's competitors after bids are in and asking them to beat it, with no change in scope. It is the fastest way to teach good subcontractors not to bid your work, and it usually costs more than it saves. See [Chapter 16](../part-03-preconstruction/ch → Appendix I — Glossary
Bid tabulation (bid tab)
The side-by-side comparison of subcontractor quotes for one scope, adjusted so that each bidder's number covers the same work. The comparison is worthless until it is leveled; the low number and the complete number are usually different bidders. See [Chapter 13](../part-03-preconstruction/chapter-13 → Appendix I — Glossary
bidding a job you cannot staff
because nobody calls it an ethics problem and it does more damage than the other three combined. → Chapter 15 — Discussion Guide
BIM (building information modeling)
A three-dimensional model carrying data about the objects in it, used for coordination, quantity extraction, sequencing, fabrication, and handover. The word is used loosely: "we're doing BIM" can mean anything from a design visualization to a fabrication-level coordinated model, and the difference i → Appendix I — Glossary
BIM execution plan
written *BxP* or *BEP* depending on whose template you inherited — is the document that says what you are actually going to do with the model, who does it, to what level, by when, on whose coordinates, and what happens at the end. It is short. On Northgate it is nineteen pages. It is also the highes → Construction Management
binding constraint
the single thing that decides it — and explains why it is different from Northgate's. 3. Names the **one question you would ask first** if you walked into that December meeting, and says what answer would change your recommendation. → Construction Management
Bonding capacity
The maximum amount of bonded work a surety will support, stated as an aggregate limit and a single-project limit. It is a hard governor on a contractor's growth, set by working capital, net worth, character, and track record. See [Chapter 34](../part-06-project-controls/chapter-34-construction-finan → Appendix I — Glossary
boring logs
a record of what a drill found at specific locations, with sample descriptions, blow counts, groundwater observations, and often laboratory results. It also includes, almost always, a **disclaimer** saying in some form that the subsurface information is furnished **for information only**, that it re → Construction Management
both cost and time
remember that in most contracts these run on different clocks. - Contains nothing accusatory, nothing speculative about dollars you cannot yet support, and nothing you would be uncomfortable having read aloud in a hearing three years later. → Construction Management
boundary
between two disciplines, between two subcontracts, or between two scopes of supply. That is not a coincidence. Design work is divided by discipline, and each discipline's consultant is competent and careful *inside* its own boundary. Nobody is paid to own the seam. Which means the seams are systemat → Construction Management
bounds the extent honestly
including admitting what is not yet known and committing to a date. An NCR that says "340 LF affected" when you have not looked at the other three levels is a document you will have to amend in front of people. → Construction Management
Break the package up
by area or by system — and see whether smaller firms come to the table. One elevator bidder is a fact of life; one drywall bidder means your package is too big or your terms scared people off. 3. **Carry a qualified allowance and disclose it** in the basis of estimate, with the exposure named. → Construction Management
bubble
a circle with the letter or number in it. Grid intersections are named by their coordinates: **E-4**, **A-1**, **K-12**. → Construction Management
Bucket 4 — operations and occupant behavior.
Corridor **lighting occupancy sensors were disabled** by facilities staff after evening cleaning crews complained about lights going out on them. - **Night setback was turned off** three weeks after occupancy, following a single Monday-morning complaint that the building was cold at 7:30 a.m. It was → Construction Management
buffer
in time, in units, or both — so ordinary variability does not turn into a collision. 4. **The slowest trade sets the rate of the entire line.** Not the average. Not the total. The slowest. → Construction Management
Build a unit cost from first principles
crew cost per hour ÷ production per hour, plus material per unit, plus equipment per unit — and say which of the three terms does *not* move when the crew slows down. 5. **Convert markup to margin and back, in both directions**, using `markup = margin ÷ (1 − margin)` and `margin = markup ÷ (1 + mark → Chapter 12 — Instructor Notes
Build a unit price from production
machine, cycle time, payload, efficiency, swell, hourly cost — and separate the variable component from the fixed cost divided by an estimated quantity. 3. **Explain why an item can destroy margin by not happening**, and apply the **quantity variation clause** to recover stranded fixed cost. 4. **Di → Chapter 38 — Instructor Notes
Build and price a form cycle
show what a two-day difference costs on a given number of floors — and run the own-versus-rent arithmetic in cost per square foot of contact area per use. 3. **State the criterion for removing shores**, name the cylinder type that answers that question, and name the single person permitted to sign t → Chapter 22 — Instructor Notes
Build the cash-flow model
billing, cost, receipts, disbursements, retention, net, cumulative — and find the trough. Then run one sensitivity: what does 45-day payment do instead of 30? That number is the most persuasive thing you will ever put in front of an owner during contract negotiation. 12. **Substantiate the retention → Construction Management
Build the one-page rental log
machine, vendor, rate tier, on-rent date, off-rent date, and the name of the person who owns the return. Then find every machine sitting on a daily rate past day three and convert it. 3. **Take the heaviest pick on your next four weeks of schedule and work it to net capacity.** Load, rigging, block, → Construction Management
Build the permit matrix
every approval, authority, lead time, prerequisite, and what it gates — and find the gaps. This is the afternoon of work that catches the next four problems before they are problems. 4. **Write the utility responsibility matrix** and send it to the owner, engineer, and subs asking for corrections in → Construction Management
Build the project-specific plan
not your standard approach. *This* site, *this* phasing, *these* constraints. This is the bulk of the work. 6. **Name your top three risks out loud, in the deck,** with what you will do about each. 7. **Rehearse with a hostile panel** two or three days out: colleagues who were not involved, asking t → Construction Management
Buildability
can it be built with normal means and methods, or does it need something exotic? 2. **Sequence** — does the order of assembly the drawings imply actually work? Can each trade get in, do its work, and get out? 3. **Access** — can the material, the equipment, and the people physically reach the work? → Construction Management
Builder's risk insurance
Property insurance covering the work under construction against physical loss — fire, wind, water, theft, collapse. Who buys it, what it covers, whose deductible applies, and when coverage ends at substantial completion are all negotiated, and all four surprise somebody on every job. See [Chapter 5] → Appendix I — Glossary
Built a table by mark
F-1 through F-6 and CF-1 — with volume each, count, and extension, rather than adding footings one at a time in a running total. 3. **Red-ticked each footing on the plan as it was counted**, so nothing was counted twice. 4. **Found the pedestals.** The concrete between the top of the footing and the → Construction Management
built twice
once on paper and once in the field — and that the first build determines the second. → Midterm Examination
burdened
multiplied by the 1.2005 factor from §11.3.3, so it is the effect on the bottom line, not on the raw cost of work. Tomás says this at the start of every VE meeting: *"Every number in this log is burdened. I've already done that math. Don't do it twice."* → Construction Management
Burdened labor rate
The full hourly cost of a worker: base wage plus payroll taxes, workers' compensation, general liability, fringe benefits, vacation accrual, and any small-tools or consumables loading. It is usually 1.4 to 1.8 times the base wage, and estimating from base wage is one of the most expensive beginner e → Appendix I — Glossary
buying the job
reducing the number without a corresponding change in scope, risk, or expectation. It is legal, it is common, and it is the most reliable way to lose money in this industry. → Construction Management
Buying wins by $12,350
about 9 percent. (d) Reversals: (i) no next job for the panels, so the 50 percent residual is fiction; (ii) a schedule slip — rental bills calendar time, but so does the working capital tied up in a purchase, so model the specific delay; (iii) no yard space or maintenance capability. → Construction Management
Buyout
Converting the estimate into signed subcontracts and purchase orders. It is where the estimate's assumptions meet the market, where scope gaps are found or created, and where most of the job's profit is won or lost. See [Chapter 16](../part-03-preconstruction/chapter-16-procurement-and-buyout/index. → Appendix I — Glossary
buyout package
bill of sale form, insurance endorsement language, approved storage location, right of inspection, transfer of title, all agreed at award rather than on the 24th of the month, on every subcontract with long-lead material. On Northgate that single change was worth **$1,226,062** of trough improvement → Construction Management
by area
by room, by wing, by elevation — not by activity name. You should end with somewhere between 25 and 45 lines. This re-cutting is the work; the printing is not. → Construction Management
by construction
the denominator moves with the numerator. It shows only in the estimated gross profit column, read across periods. This is the argument for Nadia's change #4, the two-month rule, and it is worth asking whether students can design a cheaper trigger. → Chapter 34 — Discussion Guide
by default
a column nobody touched, fixable with a method column and two hours. Ashcombe Ridge failed **by design** — an operations board that displayed margin against bid margin, a bonus computed the same way, no controls function, and a staffing plan cut at buyout. The first is a competence problem. The seco → Chapter 28 — Discussion Guide
by function
what each column does, why it is there, and which entry decides a > dispute — and never reproduces their text or layout. Get the actual forms from the publisher, and > read the ones your contract requires you to use. > > And the standing caution from the front of the book applies here most of all: t → Appendix D — Forms and Templates Library
C
C's five days are free. B's five days are not.
**C has free float of 5.** Perimeter fire-safing can run five days long and *nothing moves* — F is waiting on the in-wall rough-in anyway. Sofia's request costs the project nothing at all. - **B has free float of zero and interfering float of 5.** If the curtain-wall subcontractor takes five extra d → Appendix B — CPM Scheduling Workbook
C-2 / C-2b / C-3 / C-3b / C-4 / C-5
settle Rivermont Elementary once, against §2.4 and §10a, and propagate. One editorial decision closes six CRITICAL items and §§3.1–3.3. 2. **C-7 / C-7b** — decide whether Northgate's substantial completion is September 18 (canon, Chapters 5, 23, 33, 40) or September 24 (Chapter 29). The canon says S → Consistency Audit — *Construction Management: Building the Built World*
Caldwell was not late
Ruth Caldwell's office took exactly the fourteen days its contract allowed. The only party that was late was Kestrel, by six days. And six days of internal slop, landing on a fixed mill slot, became thirty-five days of waiting, of which Ironbridge clawed back eighteen with shop overtime. This is the → Chapter 8 — Instructor Notes
Calendar day (CD)
Every day, including weekends and holidays. Contract time and liquidated damages are almost always in calendar days; crew productivity is almost always in work days. Say which one you mean, every single time. See [Chapter 14](../part-03-preconstruction/chapter-14-scheduling-cpm/index.md). → Appendix I — Glossary
Can
read your definition of substantial completion | | Conforming at turnover, failed later | **Warranty item** | No | | Conforming, then damaged by someone else | **Damage** | No — but prove who, with photographs taken before they started | → Construction Management
can the loss exceed what you can absorb?
if a single event could take more than your annual profit or your working capital, transfer it regardless of the arithmetic, because solvency is not a line on a spreadsheet. **Is the premium less than the expected loss plus what you would pay for certainty?** — insurers profit, so premiums usually e → Construction Management
an interconnected pore network. More water means more voids, and voids are where strength isn't and where chlorides and water get in later. This is why a truck driver adding water at the gate to make the mix easier to place is not doing you a favor: he is trading permanent strength and durability fo → Construction Management
at the submittal, verified at the nameplate, on the daily report. Reconstructing it in the last six weeks from equipment already above a hard ceiling is how you deliver a spreadsheet with 40 percent of the serial numbers wrong. → Construction Management
Carpenter
because it was easier, or because somebody decided form-stripping was laborer work all week, or because nobody was watching. > > | | Carpenter | Laborer G1 | > |---|---:|---:| > | Straight time (40 hr) | $1,394.00 | $1,056.00 | > | Overtime premium hours (4 hr) | $209.10 | $158.40 | > | Fringe (44 h → Construction Management
committed plus the pending change. This is a fixed-price subcontract; your cost is the subcontract price whatever the subcontractor's productivity does. But the other three numbers are not noise, they are **diagnostics**. Money spent is 59.5 percent of committed against 50 percent of the units in pl → Construction Management
Cash flow
The timing of money in and money out. It is not profit, and the distinction kills contractors: a company can be profitable on every job and still fail because it pays craft weekly and gets paid in sixty days. See [Chapter 34](../part-06-project-controls/chapter-34-construction-finance/index.md). → Appendix I — Glossary
cash-flow curve
the time-phased value of the work. It is called an **S-curve** because it always has the same shape. → Construction Management
Cast-in-place concrete
footings, foundation walls, and the slab on grade. - **Masonry** — the structural CMU of the first floor, including grouting, reinforcing, and mortar and grout sampling. - **The roof** — the membrane over the gymnasium and the low-slope areas, including substrate, insulation attachment, flashings, t → Construction Management
Caught-in / caught-between
One of OSHA's Focus Four hazard categories: trench collapse, being pinned between equipment and a fixed object, unguarded machinery. Trenching fatalities in particular are almost entirely preventable and almost entirely the result of skipping a protective system on a "quick" excavation. See [Chapter → Appendix I — Glossary
Cavity budget (ceiling cavity budget)
The arithmetic of what will physically fit between the structure above and the ceiling below: available depth minus structure, ductwork, piping, conduit, sprinkler, hangers, and clearances. When the budget does not close, either the ceiling drops, the duct changes shape, or somebody discovers it in → Appendix I — Glossary
A wrap-up in which the general contractor buys liability and often workers' compensation centrally for all enrolled contractors on a site. Subcontractor bids must then be adjusted to remove the insurance they are no longer carrying. See [Chapter 5](../part-01-foundations/chapter-05-construction-law/ → Appendix I — Glossary
CCM
Certified Construction Manager | CMAA (Construction Management Association of America), through its certification institute | A professional certification for construction managers, requiring qualifying experience and an examination | Owners, public agencies, and program-management firms. It is some → Construction Management
Certificate of insurance (COI)
A one-page summary of somebody's insurance, issued by their broker. It is evidence that a policy existed on the day it was issued and nothing more; it does not amend the policy, does not guarantee additional-insured status, and does not survive cancellation. See [Chapter 5](../part-01-foundations/ch → Appendix I — Glossary
Certificate of occupancy (CO)
The building official's legal permission to occupy the building. It is issued by the AHJ, not by the owner or the architect; it is not the same event as substantial completion, and confusing the two is the most common closeout error in the industry. See [Chapter 40](../part-08-closeout-and-career/ch → Appendix I — Glossary
particularly the concrete field testing technician certification — define what "a certified technician" means in the ITP line that requires one. *For: anyone who manages concrete work, which is most people, and specifically for the `🔄 Check your understanding` on the failed cylinders in §23.7.* → Construction Management
Certified payroll
The sworn weekly payroll report required on most prevailing-wage work, listing each worker, classification, hours, rate, and deductions. It is a compliance document with real penalties attached, and the classification — which depends on the work performed, not the job title — is where most violation → Appendix I — Glossary
Ch 32 + Ch 38 finishers
the six remaining chapter files, `index.md` untouched. 2. **Appendix K** — the Willow Street project package (52 inbound links; the last missing file). 3. **Appendix J** — full rewrite; the existing introduction is kept, the per-chapter answer sections are written. 4. **Instructor notes + guides for → Generation Checkpoint
Change nothing during the baseline
if you start fixing things you will never know what the baseline was. 2. **Count your constraints, right now.** Ask whoever you think owns make-ready: *how many constraints did you close last week?* If nobody can answer, you have a meeting, not a system. This one question is the whole diagnostic. 3. → Construction Management
change order #14
$186,400 of cost incurred, $142,750 recovered, $43,650 Kestrel never got back. I had predicted that exact change in the interview. → Construction Management
Change order (CO)
A written, executed modification to the contract adjusting scope, price, and time. A change order is a **settlement**, not an invoice: once both parties sign, the price and time stated in it are generally the end of the conversation for that change. See [Chapter 31](../part-06-project-controls/chapt → Appendix I — Glossary
Change order request (COR)
Your priced proposal for a change, submitted for the owner's review. It becomes a change order only when executed; until then it is exposure, and it belongs in the cost report as pending change exposure rather than as revenue. See [Chapter 31](../part-06-project-controls/chapter-31-change-order-mana → Appendix I — Glossary
changed
a new energy-code cycle, an amended lien statute, a shift in how a state treats implied warranty. They are not a basis for a decision on your project. Use them as a tripwire, then go to the primary source, then, when money or somebody's savings turns on the answer, go to counsel licensed where you b → Construction Management
Changed means and methods
prefabricating MEP racks off site, switching from stick-built to panelized framing, changing a formwork system — can genuinely reduce both cost and duration. Its constraint is lead time. It is available in month four and gone by month fourteen, which is a good argument for running your acceleration → Construction Management
Chapter 21
the end of the preconstruction and early-field material. A cleaner break for a two-course sequence is after **Chapter 17** (end of Part III), which splits the book into *planning the work* and *doing the work*. → Learning Paths
Chapter 24 owns the system half
the argument over whether to write finding three down, the acceleration that produced the pressure, and the safety impact review that came out of it. Read [`../safety-teaching-guide.md`](../safety-teaching-guide.md) before you teach either chapter so you know which half you are in. → Chapter 22 — Instructor Notes
Chapters 5, 32, 33, 34
law, payment, claims, and company finance. Assign these in the second six months; they land much better once someone has watched a payment cycle and a dispute. - **Chapters 8, 9, 10** — means and methods, for participants without a field background. - **Chapters 18–23** — the field operations chapte → Onboarding Program — New Project Engineers and Field Engineers
character
one of the three things a surety underwrites, and the one you cannot rebuild in a quarter. The underwriter now knew that Kestrel's forecasts had been wrong, in the same direction, for seven consecutive periods, on one of the company's three largest contracts. A work-in-progress schedule that reports → Construction Management
Check the currency of whatever you pull
construction law texts age quickly, and a superseded edition is worse than no edition because it reads authoritative. *For: the reader who wants the doctrine behind §33.2 and §33.5 rather than the practice.* → Construction Management
> 🔄 **Check your understanding.** Your subcontractor defaults. Its performance bond pays the full excess cost to complete the work. Your project finishes six weeks later than planned. Did the bond make you whole? > > Answer > > **Almost certainly not.** The bond is a mone → Construction Management
Choose among the five responses
avoid, transfer, mitigate, accept, exploit — for one risk, price each response, and defend the choice. 4. **Size a contingency two ways** — bottom-up from expected values and top-down as a percentage — and write the reconciliation. 5. **Read a drawdown curve** and identify from the burn ratio, eight → Chapter 6 — Instructor Notes
Claim
A demand for additional money or time that the other party has not agreed to. It is the formal state a change enters when negotiation fails, and it requires three separate proofs — entitlement, causation, and damages — every one of which you must win. See [Chapter 33](../part-06-project-controls/cha → Appendix I — Glossary
Clarification
restates what the documents already required | "Per A-421, hold the exam room dimensions" | Log it. Distribute it. Build it | | **Interpretation** — resolves an ambiguity, and one reading is more expensive | "The corridor is 2-hour rated per G-004" | Compare against your bid basis. If you priced the → Appendix D — Forms and Templates Library
Clash detection
Running the coordinated models against each other to find physical conflicts before they are built. The raw clash count is meaningless; what matters is how many are real, who owns each one, and whether they get resolved before the deck gets poured. See [Chapter 35](../part-07-specialized-practice-an → Appendix I — Glossary
clash matrix
every trade against every other trade — tells you which conversation to have. Here is Northgate level three, round 2: → Construction Management
clinic
stood at its loading dock at 6:00 a.m. on a Tuesday, counted eleven deliveries, came back at 4:30 and counted nine cars in the drop-off queue, and timed the ambulance approach. *Facilitation note:* do not let this land as "she worked harder." Ask what her interview answer *demonstrated*: that Kestre → Chapter 15 — Discussion Guide
Closeout package assembly begins
warranties, operations and maintenance data, and as-builts collected as each trade finishes, not at the end | | 110 | Pre-punch walk by Kestrel alone, before showing the client anything | | 112 | Punch walk with Studio Bellweather: **82 items** | | **114** | **Substantial completion — four days earl → Construction Management
closeout plan
commissioning, the punch process, the O&M and warranty package, turnover, and lessons learned. And the 360-degree capture you just committed to in Part 3 is going to make that closeout markedly easier, which is the point. → Construction Management
closeout sub-network inside the CPM
the commissioning chain, the regulatory queues, the documentation collect-by milestones, and the training sessions, loaded as real activities with real logic, real durations, real resources, and a named closeout manager. → Construction Management
CM as agent
CMa, "agency CM," or "CM advisor" — is construction management where the CM never takes construction price risk at all. The CM is a professional service provider, paid a fee, acting as the owner's agent. → Construction Management
CM as agent (CMa)
A construction manager engaged as the owner's professional advisor, holding no trade contracts and taking no construction risk. Fees are lower and so is accountability; the owner still holds every trade contract and every gap between them. See [Chapter 3](../part-01-foundations/chapter-03-project-de → Appendix I — Glossary
CM at Risk
Northgate — the design still belongs to the owner and H+P, so the same allocation holds, but your GMP was set on incomplete documents, which moves the fight to whether an item was *reasonably inferable* at GMP. Under **design-build**, you own the design, so a design error is your problem and your pr → Construction Management
CM at risk (CMAR)
A two-phase arrangement in which the construction manager advises during design and then converts to a construction contract, typically at a guaranteed maximum price, holding the trade contracts and the cost risk. It is Northgate's delivery method and the most common negotiated structure on institut → Appendix I — Glossary
Coastline Drywall
owner **Reggie Prosser**, crew lead **Ines Duarte**. One six-person crew on Colton's line, budgeted at **six days per house** for hang, tape, finish, and texture at **$1.42 per square foot** across about 6,800 square feet of board: **$9,656** a house. Coastline hangs for other builders too. It is no → Construction Management
COBie
described by function, because that is what matters — is a standardized, spreadsheet-shaped way of carrying exactly that non-geometric facility data: spaces, zones, systems, equipment types, individual components, warranties, spares, and maintenance jobs, structured so a facility-management system c → Construction Management
Code and listing
periodic inspection and testing | At the damper, per the damper's listing; identified and labeled | | Balancing valve | 2 | Yes | Service and re-balancing | At the valve | | Sprinkler inspector's test connection | 3 | Yes | Testing | At the connection | | Sanitary cleanout | 1 | Yes | Code and servi → Appendix J — Answers to Selected Exercises
Code-required working clearance at the switchboard
space no other trade may occupy | | Elevator and machine space | 1 | 130 | — | Hydraulic, 3,500 lb, 2 stops | | Stairs (2) | 2 | 200 ea | — | Enclosed, rated; steel pan with concrete fill | | Circulation and corridors | — | 1,610 | — | 6'-0" clear minimum | | **First-floor total** | | **14,000** | | → Appendix K — The Willow Street Community Center Project Package
a negotiated contract between a contractor, or a contractors' association, and a local union — the contractor agrees to wage rates, fringe benefit contributions, work rules, and jurisdiction, and in return gets access to the union's labor supply. → Construction Management
commercial project with residential finishes
institutional owner, real contract, submittal log, RFIs, schedule of values, retention, pay applications, OAC meetings, a lender wanting monthly reports. Almost everything in the first thirty-six chapters applies directly. The one genuinely residential thing it borrows is **unit repetition**, which → Construction Management
commercially useful and reliable
the people whose forecasts hold and who can be moved to any job without a transition cost. Be one of those three. Be flexible about assignment and geography, because "I'll go" is a very short sentence with a very long shelf life. Do not job-hop into a contracting market for a small raise; last in is → Construction Management
Commissioning
**Cx** — is the systematic verification that the building performs as designed and as the owner intended. On Northgate, Meridian engaged **Amara Boateng** directly as their commissioning agent, which is the right structure: the CxA works for the owner, not for the contractor, so their findings are c → Construction Management
Commissioning (Cx)
The process of verifying that installed systems actually *perform* as designed, through documented functional testing rather than visual inspection. It is a six-month process that routinely gets scheduled as a two-week activity, and the difference is where occupancy dates die. See [Chapter 40](../pa → Appendix I — Glossary
Commissioning agent (CxA)
The party who plans and executes commissioning, usually engaged directly by the owner so that the verification is independent of the contractor. See [Chapter 40](../part-08-closeout-and-career/chapter-40-project-closeout/index.md). → Appendix I — Glossary
commitment
money you have promised, whether or not you have spent it. From that day forward the questions change: → Construction Management
Committed cost
Money you have contractually promised to spend — signed subcontracts and purchase orders — whether or not it has been invoiced. It is the most under-used column on a cost report, because it is the only one that tells you what the job will cost before the money leaves. See [Chapter 28](../part-06-pro → Appendix I — Glossary
Committed cost, failure mode 3
a distressed subcontractor (§28.6) | Warning signs were in the field, not in the report | | | **Total** | **1,900,000** | | | → Construction Management
Common Struggles
the places students reliably get stuck, and how to unstick them. - **Teaching safety without turning it into a rules list.** - **Running field simulations and role-plays** — bid day, the coordination meeting, the change-order negotiation, and the claim. → Full Outline
Compacted measure (CCY)
Soil volume after placement and compaction, in compacted cubic yards. Structural fill is bought in bank or loose measure and paid for in compacted measure, and the conversion is **shrinkage**. See [Chapter 8](../part-02-means-and-methods/chapter-08-sitework-and-structure/index.md). → Appendix I — Glossary
Comparable: the Fairhaven Ambulatory Care Center
104,000 SF, outpatient clinics plus imaging plus ambulatory surgery (the same program mix as Northgate), final construction cost **$36,600,000**, construction midpoint **34 months ago**, in a metro with a published city cost index of **99.2** against Rivermont's **103.8**. Assumed escalation over th → Construction Management
comparison
overlaying two issues of a sheet and highlighting the differences — which is the highest-value capability in this category and the one that finds the change nobody told you about. Whether markups are layered and attributable, so an RFI markup by the architect and a field note by your superintendent → Appendix H — Software and Tools Directory
Competent person
Someone who is capable of identifying existing and predictable hazards in the work and who has **authorization to take prompt corrective measures.** Both halves matter: knowledge without authority is not a competent person, and the designation is activity-specific — a competent person for excavation → Appendix I — Glossary
Complementary bidding
also called courtesy or cover bidding — is a contractor submitting an intentionally high or deliberately defective bid so a designated competitor wins, while the tab still shows "competition." **Bid rotation** is a group taking turns being low across a series of projects. **Market allocation** is co → Construction Management
Complete
contains everything the checkpoint asked for | | ☐ | **Consistent** — reconciles with the previous deliverables | | ☐ | **Basis stated** — assumptions, sources, and exclusions written down | → Grading Rubrics
complete but not conforming or not acceptable
a scratch, a misaligned reveal, a paint holiday, a door that binds | The contractor, at its own cost | Generally does **not** prevent substantial completion, if it does not impair the owner's beneficial use | | **Incomplete work** | Work that is **not finished**. Missing hardware. An uninstalled fix → Construction Management
complete, Zone B exam-room pod only
corridor 3-C excluded by RFI 214 | All 8 clear for the split scope | | 4 | Cardinal Mechanical | Ruben Ochoa | Duct mains **complete, Level 2 Zone D** — Zone B deferred pending RFI 214 | Workable backlog; all 8 clear | | 5 | Vantage Fire | Ellis Baird | Zone A sprinkler main **complete to the corrid → Construction Management
Completeness error
measuring only the sheet in front of you | Plan count 139, schedule total 148 | Reconcile counts against schedules; maintain a sheet index and tick every sheet | | **Reading error** — line-skip on a wide schedule | F-6 carried at F-5's thickness | A physical control: straightedge on paper, highlight → Construction Management
composite cleanup crew
laborers carried in Kestrel's general conditions whose cost is then allocated back to the trades. On Northgate, the composite crew and containers are budgeted at **$388,000** across the job. Two ways to handle the money: → Construction Management
Compressing a week is not extending it
three 12-hour days is 36 hours and usually carries no weekly premium at all. → Construction Management
compression premium
overtime, second crews, expedited fees, temporary documentation staff, the second clean — at roughly **$52,600.** The rest was work that had to happen anyway and would have appeared in the budget regardless. → Construction Management
Compute an available ceiling cavity
floor-to-floor minus total structural depth minus required finished ceiling — and run the plan-width check alongside it. 2. **Coordinate the maintained envelope rather than the catalog dimension**, and say why a 4-inch cable tray occupies roughly 16 inches of cavity. 3. **Apply the routing priority → Chapter 10 — Instructor Notes
Compute and use a burden multiplier
1.2005 at Northgate SD — and explain why chasing $4 million of work closes a $4.8 million gap. 5. **Classify a proposed saving** as genuine VE, a legitimate program decision, or one of the four traps, using the function-first decision test. 6. **Write a qualifications and assumptions page** and say → Chapter 11 — Instructor Notes
Concrete design mixes
due to Kestrel **March 13, Year 1**, because they gate first footing placement on May 18. 2. **Curtain-wall shop drawings** — due **May 26, Year 1**. The extrusion, anodizing, glass, and panel-assembly chain runs 180 calendar days after release, and the first unit has to hang January 5, Year 2. 3. * → Construction Management
Concurrent delay
Two or more delays affecting the same period, one owned by each party. The general principle is that where an owner delay and a contractor delay are truly concurrent, the contractor gets time but not money — but the tests for what counts as concurrent vary by jurisdiction and by contract, and this i → Appendix I — Glossary
Conditional lien waiver
A waiver that becomes effective only when payment actually clears. Give conditional waivers when you are being paid and require them from your subcontractors; the unconditional version should follow only after the money is in the account. See [Chapter 5](../part-01-foundations/chapter-05-constructio → Appendix I — Glossary
Connectors and hold-downs
hangers, straps, ties, anchor bolts — are engineer-specified, matter enormously in wind and seismic design, and are the number-one framing inspection failure. And **weather is the enemy:** wet framing lumber shrinks as it dries, causing nail pops, drywall cracks, and squeaks, and standing water on a → Construction Management
Consolidation
vibrating the fresh concrete — removes entrapped air and lets the mix fill around reinforcement. Too little leaves honeycombing and voids; too much causes segregation, where heavy aggregate sinks and paste rises. Both show in the finished work, and honeycombing at a structural connection is a repair → Construction Management
constant field modification
because they are in the way of the work and everybody knows they are temporary — and **failure that is sudden rather than progressive.** A permanent structure warns you. A form blows in under two seconds and a trench wall gives no notice at all. → Chapter 22 — Instructor Notes
Constraint
(1) In lean planning, anything that prevents work from being *ready*: missing information, material, prerequisite work, labor, equipment, permit, approval, or access. (2) In CPM software, a date imposed on an activity that overrides calculated logic. The two meanings are unrelated and both are impor → Appendix I — Glossary
Constraints outside Kestrel's control
Meridian's imaging-vendor decisions, medical-equipment coordination, H+P design answers, vendor delivery dates | Roughly a third | Only by escalating harder and earlier; not by planning better | | **One subcontractor systematically over-committing.** Anchor Point Systems' project manager would not l → Construction Management
Constructability review
Reading design documents the way somebody who has to build them would: looking for sequences that cannot happen, details that cannot be installed, tolerances that cannot be held, and access that does not exist. It is worth the most at design development and almost nothing after bid. See [Chapter 11] → Appendix I — Glossary
Construction contingency
See **contingency**. Specifically the reserve carried inside a GMP for identified risk within the defined scope — subcontractor default, buyout shortfall, minor field conditions. **It is not for scope changes**, and the owner who assumes it is has a difficult board meeting coming. → Appendix I — Glossary
construction contingency went up
from $1,307,001 to $1,320,000 — while the design contingency went to zero and escalation fell by $2.2 million. Why would a contractor *increase* the construction contingency at the moment the design is complete and most of the work is bought? → Construction Management
construction cost
what you will pay a contractor to build the thing. Your project will cost substantially more, because a construction contract does not include the people who designed it, the equipment that goes in it, the fees to be allowed to build it, the money to pay for surprises, or the cost of moving in. → Appendix E — The Owner's Companion: For Owners, Developers, Facility Managers, and Homeowners
construction management is the management of risk
that every contract type, schedule sequence, and contingency line exists to decide who owns which risk and what it costs. → Midterm Examination
Construction management students
as a primary text for a one- or two-semester sequence. - **Project engineers and assistant PMs** — the book teaches what nobody has time to explain in the first two years on the job. - **Superintendents moving toward project management**, and **project managers who came up through the office and nee → Construction Management: Building the Built World
Construction observation
the CxA walks installations as they happen and writes issues while they are still cheap | Monthly from Feb, Year 2 | | Rough-in | **Prefunctional checklists** filled out by the installing trades as they install, and spot-verified by the CxA | Mar–Jul, Year 2 | | Startup | Vendor startup of major equ → Construction Management
construction put in place
the industry's term for the dollar value of work actually installed in a given period — runs well over a trillion dollars a year. I am deliberately not giving you a precise figure, because it moves every month and any number I print here will be wrong by the time you read it. The U.S. Census Bureau → Construction Management
Contemporaneous cost records for the delay period
daily reports showing crew counts, areas, and idle or redeployed labor; labor distribution coded below the trade level; and the general-conditions cost detail supporting the daily rate. Even with a stipulated rate, you will be asked to show the field overhead was actually incurred. → Construction Management
contemporaneously
as events occur, in the ordinary course of running the job — carry weight that reconstructed records cannot, for four compounding reasons. First, they were created *before* anyone knew there would be a dispute, so the author had no incentive to shade anything. Second, they were made by a person with → Construction Management
Contingency
A priced reserve for identified risk. Three different contingencies live on a typical job and confusing them is a career-limiting move: the *contractor's* contingency hidden inside a lump-sum price; the *construction (GMP) contingency* inside the guarantee, for risk within the defined scope; and the → Appendix I — Glossary
continuing effect
periodic updates while the impact persists, sometimes with a requirement to submit costs at stated intervals. A single notice on day 1 of a 90-day condition may not preserve days 30 through 90. Build the follow-up into your log the same day you send the first letter. → Construction Management
continuity across every trade boundary
precast to curtain wall, wall to roof, wall to foundation, every slab edge, every penetration | Nobody owns the transition. Each subcontractor stops neatly at its own scope line, an inch short of the next one | | **Insulation installation quality** | Insulation installed so that it actually achieves → Construction Management
continuity and evidence
whether the specified control layers are actually continuous across every transition, and whether there is a contemporaneous record proving what was built. A student who gets there and can name the slab edge as the example has the chapter. → Chapter 36 — Discussion Guide
continuous insulation (CI)
insulation uninterrupted by framing. Energy codes drove this change. When you put all your insulation between metal studs, the studs themselves become **thermal bridges**: steel conducts heat roughly four hundred times better than the batt beside it, so a wall with R-19 batt in steel studs may perfo → Construction Management
continuous work
house after house without gaps — or they leave. A CPM schedule optimized for shortest total duration will happily produce a plan in which the framers work for six days, sit idle for four, and work six more. That plan is arithmetically valid and operationally suicidal. Line of balance treats **crew c → Construction Management
contract day 300.
**(a)** Run the forward and backward pass. State the project duration, the critical path, and the total float on activity E. - **(b)** Now update at a **data date of day 130.** A finished on day 34. B finished on day 84. C is in progress with **18 CD remaining.** Nothing else has started. Recalculat → Construction Management
Contract documents
The full set that governs the work: agreement, general conditions, supplementary conditions, drawings, specifications, addenda, and post-execution modifications. They are read together, they always conflict somewhere, and the **order of precedence** decides which one wins. See [Chapter 7](../part-01 → Appendix I — Glossary
contract documents indicated
logs, profiles, notes, plans. **Type II** requires an **unknown** condition of an **unusual** nature, differing from what is ordinarily encountered in work of that character. **Always analyze Type I first:** it is a document compared to a measurement. Type II is an argument, and it is a much steeper → Construction Management
contract markups
write your own Division 01 markup schedule for a municipal lump-sum job and *state it at the top of each pricing sheet*; **time**, with the days you are requesting, the float you absorbed, and extended general conditions at $1,600/CD; and **a substantiated impact component** on at least one of the t → Construction Management
Contract milestones
dates the contract names, with consequences attached. On Northgate: substantial completion September 18, Year 2, and final completion November 17, Year 2. - **Owner-imposed operational milestones** — dates the owner needs for reasons that have nothing to do with your contract. Meridian's interim cli → Construction Management
Contract time
The duration allowed for the work, usually stated in calendar days from a defined start such as notice to proceed. It is a contract term with liquidated damages attached, not a target. See [Chapter 4](../part-01-foundations/chapter-04-construction-contracts/index.md). → Appendix I — Glossary
Contractor
contingency | Owner | **Contractor** | | Differing site condition | Owner if the DSC clause survives; **contractor** if it was deleted | Owner, per the clause | Owner | Owner | | Owner-directed scope change | Owner | Owner | Owner | Owner | | Delay caused by the contractor | **Contractor** — LDs and → Construction Management
Contractor's QC
on Northgate: Margo Deacon, Dani, the trade superintendents, and me | Kestrel (in general conditions, inside the GMP) | Runs the quality management plan; verifies subcontractor work against the contract documents; first-line acceptance; issues nonconformance reports; runs pre-installation conference → Construction Management
the baseline every actual cost is measured against | Project manager | Cost reporting, cost-to-complete forecasting, variance analysis | [Chapter 28](../../part-06-project-controls/chapter-28-cost-control/index.md) | | The **cost code structure** — the accounts field costs get charged to | Project a → Construction Management
controlling
which means an owner or agency CM that in practice directs sequence and controls access can find itself in the controlling-employer position regardless of what its contracts say. The fix is not a clause; it is one site safety plan, one orientation, one named competent person, and participation made → Construction Management
Convert a correction into a question
take a situation where they are demonstrably right and produce the opening two sentences that get the outcome without a status contest. 3. **Run the three diagnostic questions** — *what's in your way · what else · what would it take* — and check their own house (released work, answered questions, pa → Chapter 41 — Instructor Notes
Corbin Life Sciences Building
86,000 SF, three stories, office and wet laboratory, a private developer owner, lump-sum contract. Illustrative composite, like everything else in this book. → Construction Management
The account structure that costs are charged to, forming the skeleton of the cost report. Too coarse and it tells you nothing; too fine and nobody codes correctly, which is worse because it tells you something wrong. See [Chapter 28](../part-06-project-controls/chapter-28-cost-control/index.md). → Appendix I — Glossary
cost estimate classification system
which ties estimate class to the level of project definition and to an expected accuracy range — is the most rigorous public framework for the question "how good is this number, and how do I say so honestly?" It is what turns "we think it's about $47 million" into a defensible statement with a state → Construction Management
cost incurred
labor charged to the code, material received, sub work performed and approved, equipment consumed. Getting this right is Chapter 28's job, and the usual failure is timing: invoices arrive weeks after the work, so a naive AC understates cost and flatters your CPI. If you do not accrue uninvoiced work → Construction Management
Cost loading
Assigning budget dollars to schedule activities so the schedule can produce a cash-flow curve and support earned value. It is also how a schedule of values gets tied to a real plan instead of to a guess. See [Chapter 14](../part-03-preconstruction/chapter-14-scheduling-cpm/index.md). → Appendix I — Glossary
Cost of the work
On a cost-reimbursable contract, the defined set of costs the owner reimburses at actual: subcontracts, direct craft labor with an agreed burden, material and equipment incorporated, rentals, freight, permits attributable to the work. What is *in* and what is *out* is defined by a schedule in the co → Appendix I — Glossary
cost of the work actually went up $233,310
VE removed $2,521,700 of raw work and design development added $2,755,010 back. → Construction Management
Cost slope
The cost of shortening an activity by one day: the difference between crash cost and normal cost divided by the days gained. You crash the cheapest slope on the critical path first, and you re-run the network after every crash because the critical path moves. See [Chapter 29](../part-06-project-cont → Appendix I — Glossary
cost to complete
the forecast of the remaining work — because cost-to-date is history and a job that is 60 percent billed and 75 percent spent is already in trouble while every column looks defensible. This chapter gave you a second, independent way to produce that forecast: `ETC = EAC − AC`. When the cost report's → Construction Management
Cost to complete (CTC)
The forecast of what remains to be spent. It is the only number on a cost report that requires judgment, and it is the number that tells you whether you are making money. See [Chapter 28](../part-06-project-controls/chapter-28-cost-control/index.md). → Appendix I — Glossary
Cost to date
What has been spent so far. Useful, backward-looking, and dangerous when used alone: a job 60% billed and 75% spent is already in trouble, and cost-to-date is what makes that look normal. See [Chapter 28](../part-06-project-controls/chapter-28-cost-control/index.md). → Appendix I — Glossary
Cost variance (CV)
In earned value, `EV − AC`. Positive means the work performed cost less than budgeted; negative means it cost more. It measures cost efficiency, not whether you are over budget in absolute terms. See [Chapter 30](../part-06-project-controls/chapter-30-earned-value-management/index.md). → Appendix I — Glossary
cost-loaded schedule
the baseline schedule with dollars attached to activities (Chapter 14 §14.9). If your budget lives only in cost codes and never touches a schedule activity, you cannot compute PV at all, and roughly half of the failed earned-value implementations I have seen died right there. More on that in 30.7. → Construction Management
Cost-plus
The owner reimburses actual cost and pays a fee, with no cap. The fee structure decides whether the incentives are neutral (fixed fee), perverse (a percentage of cost), or aligned (incentive or shared savings). Treat cost-plus as a bridge to a GMP, not a destination. See [Chapter 4](../part-01-found → Appendix I — Glossary
Cottonwood Creek Bridge Replacement
$18,700,000 for a state DOT, 210 working days, superintendent Del Ferraro, project engineer Ingrid Sørensen — is our window into it, in [Chapter 38](../../part-07-specialized-practice-and-technology/chapter-38-heavy-civil-construction/index.md). → Construction Management
could you show the owner the rows?
**Five buckets, five sets of rules:** estimating contingency, construction contingency, owner's contingency, escalation allowance, management reserve. Mixing them is the most common money mistake in preconstruction. - **Size it two ways and reconcile in writing.** The reconciliation is the deliverab → Construction Management
cover board
a dense, hard layer between the insulation and the membrane 5. Fully adhered 60-mil TPO membrane → Construction Management
CPI (cost performance index)
`EV ÷ AC`. Below 1.00 means you are getting less than a dollar of budgeted work for every dollar spent. It is the single most-quoted earned value number and the one most often computed on badly coded data. See [Chapter 30](../part-06-project-controls/chapter-30-earned-value-management/index.md). → Appendix I — Glossary
A scheduling technique that calculates the earliest and latest each activity can occur, and therefore the float on each and the longest path through the network. The key word is *calculated*: the critical path is an output of the logic and durations you entered, not a management opinion. See [Chapte → Appendix I — Glossary
CR-03
the imaging vendor had not been selected. When you know a decision is still open, the cheapest thing you will ever own is the option to accommodate it. $117,600 to hold an option on a $3,640,000 equipment package nobody has chosen yet is not a cost. It is insurance at a price you should be delighted → Construction Management
Crashing
Shortening the project by adding resources to critical activities, chosen by lowest cost slope. It buys days at an increasing price and only works on the critical path — money spent on a non-critical activity buys nothing at all. See [Chapter 29](../part-06-project-controls/chapter-29-schedule-contr → Appendix I — Glossary
Crew
A named, balanced group of workers and equipment that performs an activity: so many journeyworkers, so many apprentices, a foreman, and the machine they need. Productivity rates are crew-specific, and adding a person to an unbalanced crew can lower output per hour. See [Chapter 20](../part-04-field- → Appendix I — Glossary
crew composite
Kestrel's carpentry composite is **$58.40/MH** and its concrete-crew composite is **$54.00/MH** — is the weighted average cost of a man-hour from a mixed crew including its foreman, and it is what you use to price a change order. A **site-wide blended rate** — Northgate's is **$66.00/MH** across eve → Appendix C — Estimating Reference: CSI Divisions, Unit Costs, Productivity, Waste Factors
Critical or non-critical
did it affect the critical path, or consume float? (2) **Excusable or non-excusable** — does it entitle the contractor to a time extension? (3) **Compensable or non-compensable** — does it also carry money? Every delay gets all three labels, and they are decided in that order. Non-critical usually e → Construction Management
Critical path
The longest chain of dependent activities through the network; the sequence with the least float, where a day lost is a day lost on the project. There can be more than one, and it moves as the job progresses — which is precisely why a delay analysis has to follow the schedule over time. See [Chapter → Appendix I — Glossary
critical path test
100 days added to a critical activity must move the finish 100 days. 6. Then, and only then, form an opinion about the durations. The checks find defects. Judgment finds lies. → Construction Management
CSI MasterFormat
maintained jointly by the Construction Specifications Institute and Construction Specifications Canada — is the numbering system that organizes it. It is the industry's filing cabinet, and its adoption is close to universal in North American building construction. → Construction Management
Cumulative
565 of them on Northgate, forming a continuous, internally consistent narrative of an entire project. → Construction Management
current liability
a loan from the owner, repayable in work rather than in cash. Note what it is not: it is not revenue and it is not profit. Billings do not appear anywhere in the percentage-of-completion profit calculation. → Construction Management
Current payment due = $579,500.
(b) Work on the 3rd → falls in a period ending roughly the 25th (22 days) → owner pays 30 days later (55 days) → subcontractor paid 7 days after that = **approximately 62 days**. Accept 60–65 with a shown build-up. - (c) 680,000 ÷ 425 = **$1,600.00/CD**. Total exposure = 1,600 + 1,200 = **$2,800/CD* → Final Examination
Curtain wall
A non-load-bearing exterior wall system, typically aluminum and glass, hung from the structure. Unitized systems are shop-assembled and set as panels; stick systems are assembled in place. It is usually the longest procurement chain on a commercial building. See [Chapter 9](../part-02-means-and-meth → Appendix I — Glossary
Curtis Boone
fifteen years in the business, wins work by bidding it lean, runs a small staff, manages by force of personality, and is genuinely good at getting people to do things. He is not a villain. He is skilled, well-liked, and wrong about the model. → Construction Management
cut Del's revenue on this item nearly in half
while his cost per foot went up by a factor of six on every foot of rock he had to cut. The contract paid him *less* for work that cost him *more*. → Construction Management
D
D is a gate, not a score
if you cannot name the person and the decision, kill it whatever the total. → Construction Management
daily crane pick schedule
including the crane-move line, the debris-down pick, and a held-open contingency block. 3. The **hoist plan** — capacity in minutes per day, allocated in advance, not by whoever reaches the call button first. 4. The **housekeeping and cleanup responsibility matrix** — traceable, cell by cell, to sub → Construction Management
daily exposure
the Willow Street equivalent of Northgate's $10,650. Write it at the top of your daily report form. Every impact statement you write is measured against that number, and everyone on your team should know it by heart. → Construction Management
daily exposure number
$1,200/CD in liquidated damages plus the student's own extended general conditions from the Chapter 13 estimate — because a schedule argument without that number is an argument about adjectives. → Chapter 14 — Instructor Notes
Daily report
The field record of who was on site, what work was performed where, weather, deliveries, equipment, visitors, inspections, and — the part that matters in a dispute — anything that impacted the work. It is the most valuable half-page on the job and it takes fifteen minutes. See [Chapter 26](../part-0 → Appendix I — Glossary
DART
cases involving Days Away, Restricted, or Transferred — uses the same formula. Northgate had **1**: (1 × 200,000) ÷ 412,000 = **0.49**. DART is the more useful of the two, because it filters out minor recordables and tracks the injuries that actually took somebody off their job. → Appendix F — Safety Reference: OSHA Focus Four, Checklists, Competent-Person Duties
DART rate
Cases involving Days Away, Restricted, or Transferred duty, per 200,000 hours worked. It is more useful than TRIR because it filters out minor recordables and tracks the injuries that actually took somebody off their job. See [Chapter 24](../part-04-field-operations/chapter-24-safety-management/inde → Appendix I — Glossary
Data date
The cutoff date of a schedule update: everything before it is actual, everything after it is forecast. Every schedule statement is meaningless without one, and the most common schedule argument in the industry is two people comparing updates with different data dates. See [Chapter 29](../part-06-pro → Appendix I — Glossary
said out loud in the room before the topic changes, so the person can object to the date now | | Skipping the commitment read-back at the top of the meeting | Twice in a row and the whole discipline evaporates | Read last week's items aloud, first item, every week, without exception | | Decisions at → Construction Management
dated schedule-impact sentence
"WRB installation at the north wing begins in 12 work days; a response after that date will require a resequence of the exterior envelope work." That sentence converts a technical question into a documented notice, and it is worth more than the rest of the RFI if this ever becomes a dispute. → Construction Management
Davis-Bacon Act
The federal statute requiring payment of locally prevailing wages and fringe benefits on federally funded construction. Most states have their own versions covering state and local work, with different thresholds and rules — verify which one applies to your project. See [Chapter 20](../part-04-field → Appendix I — Glossary
DBB
design errors become change orders. - **DB** — the owner under-specified performance and got exactly what it asked for. - **CMAR** — the GMP was set on drawings too incomplete to price. - **CMa / multiple prime** — scope gaps between trade contracts land on the owner. - **IPD** — the team wasn't mat → Construction Management
DBE (disadvantaged business enterprise)
A firm certified under a public program as owned and controlled by socially and economically disadvantaged individuals, used in participation goals on publicly funded work. Programs, definitions, certifications, and goals vary substantially by jurisdiction and funding source. See [Chapter 16](../par → Appendix I — Glossary
decay
how a meeting that works in month one stops working by month eleven without anyone deciding to break it. → Construction Management
December 9, Year 1
nine weeks after the October 6 model freeze, with 41 of 59 modules already built — Meridian's clinical operations group added a second negative-pressure isolation exam suite off the level 3 corridor. It needed a medical-air branch and a relocated zone valve box in a corridor segment that existed as → Construction Management
Decide how to package scope
by trade, system, area, or phase — and name the seam each choice creates. 2. **Write a scope sheet** in four parts (included, excluded with a named home for each item, clarifications, schedule and manning obligations) and run the twenty-item seam checklist against a trade, forcing a yes or no on eve → Chapter 16 — Instructor Notes
decision log
a standing document carried meeting to meeting, listing every open decision the owner or designer owes the project. → Construction Management
decisions, commitments, and facts
and nothing else. (a) is a guess about another person's interior state, written by a 24-year-old field engineer, that may one day be read aloud to that owner under oath. (b) is filler that records nothing. (d) is the worst of the four: an unbounded acceptance of responsibility for an issue whose cau → Construction Management
decompression
turning a set into quantities, sequences, risks, and money. When you read "forty-two punched aluminum windows in four types totaling 900 square feet," you do exactly the work a real sheet would demand: decide the unit, decide the waste factor, decide whether the frame perimeter belongs to the window → Appendix K — The Willow Street Community Center Project Package
defensible
soils, dewatering, steel acceleration, an embed misplacement, rock in a trench, winter protection, every dollar nameable and front-loaded — but defensible is not comfortable. The dangerous version is the drawdown nobody can itemize, because that is contingency being used as a slush fund for overruns → Construction Management
Deferred submittal
A design component the building official permits to be designed and submitted *after* the permit is issued — often sprinkler layout, curtain wall, or metal stud engineering. It carries a permit review of its own with its own queue, which people routinely forget to back-schedule. See [Chapter 25](../ → Appendix I — Glossary
deferred submittals
portions of the design not submitted at permit issuance, submitted later for review — including who must review them before they reach the building official. **Whether a given component may be deferred at all, and how long review takes, varies by jurisdiction and by building official.** This is the → Construction Management
Delay X
the City's water utility takes until day 17 to approve relocating the existing 8-inch water main. Live **days 1–17.** - **Delay Y** — your masonry subcontractor is short four masons and a tender. Live **days 12–26.** → Construction Management
Delegate one whole problem
outcome, constraint, authority with a dollar number, reporting deadline, what you will check — and then do not correct the method. 9. **Post next week's assignments and hours on Thursday.** Twenty minutes. In Case Study 2 it is one of the twelve practices separating 11% turnover from 34%. 10. **Writ → Construction Management
Delegated design
Design responsibility assigned by the documents to a contractor's engineer rather than the design professional of record: excavation support, scaffolding, cold-formed framing, sprinkler layout, precast connections. It is a submittal with a stamp, a review cycle, and therefore a lead time. See [Chapt → Appendix I — Glossary
Deletable
LVT 640 SF @ $6.40/SF · casework 18 LF @ $286/LF · AV conduit and backboxes $1,340 · door hardware set $980 | direct cost | | Demolition production | board removal 0.012 MH/SF · framing removal 0.28 MH/LF · grid removal 0.006 MH/SF · haul, protect, clean 6.0 MH LS | | Disposal | $760 | | Cardinal Me → Construction Management
Delete
3 standard door and frame assemblies, direct cost | $1,860 | | Schedule | The work adds 4 CD to a path carrying 4 CD of float | → Construction Management
Demolition permit
often requires a hazardous-materials survey and written confirmation that utilities are disconnected and capped. - **Grading / land-disturbance permit** — from the local engineering or public-works department; typically requires an approved grading plan, geotechnical report, and erosion-control desi → Construction Management
Describe both ladders
office and field — name the gating skill at each rung, and explain why the people who go furthest *borrow* between them rather than switch. 2. **State what actually gets people promoted**, in order: reliability, forecasting honestly and early, being the person who writes things down, making other pe → Chapter 42 — Instructor Notes
described drawing set
a real sheet index, and then written descriptions of the sheets that carry the information you need, at the level of detail a takeoff actually requires: dimensions, elevations, schedules, quantities of countable things, and the notes that matter. → Appendix K — The Willow Street Community Center Project Package
Design the process for that person.
**In renovation, the customer experience is the product.** Dust control, working hours, daily close-out, the bathroom plan, pets, keys, and noise warnings decide whether you get the referral. None of them appears on a quality inspection form. - **OSHA applies to a house.** 29 CFR Part 1926 has no sm → Construction Management
Design-bid-build (DBB)
The sequential default: the owner hires a designer, the design is completed, contractors bid the finished documents, and the low responsive bidder builds it. The owner carries the design risk, and design errors arrive as change orders. See [Chapter 3](../part-01-foundations/chapter-03-project-delive → Appendix I — Glossary
design-build
one contract, one entity responsible for both the drawings and the building, construction starting while design was still running. "Ten months earlier occupancy," their principal said, and said it twice. "That is ten months of clinic revenue you are planning to leave on the table." → Construction Management
Design-build (DB)
One contract covering both design and construction, giving the owner a single point of responsibility. The owner trades away design control and the ability to compare finished prices, and gets exactly what the criteria documents asked for — which is why the criteria documents are the whole game. See → Appendix I — Glossary
detail
the foreman needs to know it is Zone C, level 3, north half, and that the in-wall electrical rough must be inspected first. Job #1 wants **brevity** — nobody reviews 1,340 activities inside a three-week submittal window. Job #4 wants **traceability** — every relationship documented, every duration j → Construction Management
detailed preconstruction is overhead
that owners do not pay for it and that the money is better spent on field staff who actually build things. → Midterm Examination
Dewatering
Removing or controlling groundwater so excavation and foundation work can proceed: sumps, well points, deep wells, cutoffs. It carries permit obligations, discharge requirements, and a failure mode — the pump that stops overnight — that has ruined more than one foundation pour. See [Chapter 22](../p → Appendix I — Glossary
dewatering runs 24 hours a day
fuel, generators, standby pumps, and somebody responsible at 3 a.m. It is a general-conditions cost that keeps running while everything else stops. Full treatment is in [Chapter 22](../../part-04-field-operations/chapter-22-temporary-structures/index.md). → Construction Management
Difference: $95,880
paid to the contractor because the job ran over. Note the shape of the cumulative curve: only $939,680 through month four, which is why the owner did not see the problem until month five. → Construction Management
different measures
the canon now says so explicitly, because two agents collided on it. - **Ridgeline Regional Library** ($31.4M hard bid) as the composite for competitive lump-sum bid-day scenes, since Northgate is CM at Risk and cannot host one. - **Willow Street derived rates:** general conditions $680,000 / 425 CD → Generation Checkpoint
differing site condition
not a claim, not a number, just the facts, the date, the location, the fact that work is stopped, and the contract article I am giving notice under. Twenty minutes to write, and it is the single most valuable thing I do that day. My contract requires written notice promptly after discovery. Sit on i → Construction Management
Differing site conditions
likely Type II if the pipe appears in no document at all, possibly Type I if the plans affirmatively depicted the corridor as clear; it requires prompt written notice, non-disturbance, an inspection opportunity, and documentation of the actual condition. (2) **Force account / extra work** — for what → Construction Management
Differing site conditions (DSC)
Subsurface or concealed conditions that differ from what was represented or reasonably expected. **Type I** is materially different from what the contract documents indicated; **Type II** is unusual and not ordinarily encountered in work of that character. If the clause is present the owner generall → Appendix I — Glossary
differing site conditions clause
and was it edited in the supplementary conditions? 3. Is there a **no-damage-for-delay clause**? Price it or negotiate it out. On Northgate one 30-day delay is a $154,500 difference. 4. What are the **notice periods**, and did you calendar every one on day one? 5. Are **liquidated damages** tied to → Construction Management
diffusion of responsibility
the felt obligation to act shrinks as the number of people who could act grows. "Cardinal Mechanical" spreads the obligation across a company with 140 employees and therefore across nobody; the item cannot be called, reminded, or held, and next week's answer is "we're still looking into it." → Construction Management
Digital twin
A model connected to live operational data — building automation, sensors, work orders — so that it reflects the building as it is running, not as it was built. Most projects that say they are delivering one are actually delivering a well-organized as-built model with asset data, which is valuable a → Appendix I — Glossary
Direct cost
The cost of the work itself: labor, material, equipment, and subcontracts that become the building. Distinguished from indirect costs — general conditions, insurance, bonds, fee — that support the work without becoming it. See [Chapter 13](../part-03-preconstruction/chapter-13-detailed-estimating/in → Appendix I — Glossary
direct cost of
work
it is the only denominator that compares construction to construction. Fee percentages, contingency policy, and escalation allowances vary wildly between jobs and delivery methods, so a GMP-based percentage tells you as much about the contract as it does about the building. State your denominator ev → Construction Management
A standing panel of neutrals, appointed at the start of a project, that hears disputes as they arise rather than years later. Common on large civil work; its value is that it resolves problems while the memories and the leverage are still fresh. See [Chapter 33](../part-06-project-controls/chapter-3 → Appendix I — Glossary
Disruption makes the work less efficient
the same scope, done by the same people, at a worse rate, because of interference, out-of-sequence work, trade stacking, crew size changes, learning-curve loss from restarts, rework, dilution of supervision, or overtime fatigue. → Construction Management
Distinguish a duration from a ceiling
the point at which a trade's capacity falls below the line rate and annual output stops being `WIP ÷ cycle time` and becomes `365 ÷ days per house`. 5. **Diagnose a constraint from the site**, reading a row of houses standing at the same stage as a queue. 6. **Name what production residential does n → Chapter 37 — Instructor Notes
Division 01 (General Requirements)
The administrative division of the specifications: submittal procedures, substitutions, quality requirements, temporary facilities, cleaning, closeout, warranties, and payment procedures. It is where the money is, it is the division nobody reads, and it routinely makes documentation tasks into condi → Appendix I — Glossary
Do all five:
**(a)** Run the forward pass. Give ES and EF for every activity, and state the project duration. - **(b)** Run the backward pass. Give LS and LF for every activity. - **(c)** Compute **total float** and **free float** for every activity. - **(d)** Identify the critical path. - **(e)** Del wants to f → Construction Management
Do not cut §12.7
the unit-cost build-up is the chapter — and **do not cut §12.9.3.** If you cut markup versus margin because you are behind, you will pay for it on the final and your students will pay for it on a change order in three years. → Chapter 12 — Instructor Notes
do not exist
months 6 through 9 of a twenty-month job, the stretch where his record goes silent. Suppose he had run them. → Construction Management
do not memorize point values, look them up
but the scope underneath them is stable across versions and across systems. → Construction Management
do not reread the book
pick the four worst misses, reread only those chapters, and re-take the list in a week. **Rereading everything feels productive and teaches almost nothing.** → Chapter 42 — Instructor Notes
Do not skip the Spaced Review sections
they are short, they feel redundant, and they are the reason you will still know this material in a year. → How to Use This Book
documentation
a real cost with a real administrative burden. | | **01 91 00 Commissioning** | Cx scope, contractor's role, systems included, functional testing participation | Your labor to support functional performance testing across every system ([Chapter 40](../../part-08-closeout-and-career/chapter-40-projec → Construction Management
documentation outcome.
**Notice is the single most common claim-killer, and it is entirely preventable in about ten minutes per event.** The clock usually starts at the **event** or at the point a reasonable contractor would have recognized the condition — not when you quantify it. **You give notice of the event, not of t → Construction Management
drawing field
the actual plan, section, or details. The right one-fifth is a vertical stack of information blocks: the architect's logo and address at the top, then consultant identification, then a **key plan** (a tiny diagram of the whole floor with the portion shown on this sheet shaded), then the **revision b → Construction Management
Drawings
The graphic contract documents. They govern **quantity, location, dimension, and configuration** — how many, where, how big, in what relationship. What they do *not* govern is quality and product, which belong to the specifications. See [Chapter 7](../part-01-foundations/chapter-07-reading-construct → Appendix I — Glossary
dried in by March 28, Year 2
the milestone that lets the interior finish trades start in earnest and that turns off roughly **$1,950 a day** of temporary heat. → Construction Management
Dried-in
The state at which the building envelope keeps weather out well enough for interior work to start. It is achieved by *area*, not by building, and it is a decision somebody makes rather than a date that arrives. See [Chapter 9](../part-02-means-and-methods/chapter-09-enclosure-and-interiors/index.md) → Appendix I — Glossary
Duration
How long an activity takes, derived from quantity ÷ (crew size × production rate), not guessed. Durations built without a crew and a rate cannot be defended, resource-loaded, or recovered. See [Chapter 14](../part-03-preconstruction/chapter-14-scheduling-cpm/index.md). → Appendix I — Glossary
Duration and logic at the activity level
"Interior rough-in Level 3, 22 WD, FS from deck complete" | A 22-day activity tells a foreman nothing about which room to be in on Tuesday. The unit of management is the crew-week, not the activity. | | **Monthly updating** | The job changes daily. A model refreshed every 30 days is 29 days stale fo → Construction Management
duration with margin
the structure carries its full design load every one of those days, and a short service life means *less* margin, not more. And it **licenses casual treatment**: the plank Milo Serrano stepped on was moved by two skilled electricians who would never have touched a permanent guardrail. The word did t → Chapter 22 — Instructor Notes
duration, an owner, and a status you can report.
If the vendor slips, **the delay propagates** and the schedule tells you what it costs. - The 12 days of float on the concrete chain are visibly *sponsored by* the delivery chain, so when the delivery date moves, the float moves with it and everyone can see it happen. → Appendix B — CPM Scheduling Workbook
during design
on Northgate, sixteen months before NTP — under a preconstruction services agreement that later converts to a construction contract with a GMP. Under design-bid-build no contractor sees the project until the documents are complete and bidding opens. On Northgate that means no constructability review → Construction Management
during preconstruction, before NTP
the award cannot wait for mobilization. This is the single most common long-lead failure on commercial projects: the team treats buyout as a post-NTP activity and discovers in month four that the switchgear release date has already passed. Note also that this arithmetic collapses entirely if the ven → Construction Management
E
EAC (estimate at completion)
The forecast total cost of the work. Several formulas exist — `AC + ETC`, `BAC ÷ CPI`, and others — and they give different answers, so state which one you used. See [Chapter 30](../part-06-project-controls/chapter-30-earned-value-management/index.md). → Appendix I — Glossary
Early start / early finish (ES/EF)
The earliest an activity can start and finish given the logic and durations, produced by the forward pass. See [Chapter 14](../part-03-preconstruction/chapter-14-scheduling-cpm/index.md). → Appendix I — Glossary
early-warning thresholds
green, yellow, orange, red — using a four-week rolling average, plus one line stating which trades are on your critical path and therefore get a tighter threshold. → Construction Management
Earned schedule
A technique that converts schedule variance from dollars into time by asking when the earned value achieved was *supposed* to have been achieved. It addresses earned value's worst weakness — that SV and SPI are stated in dollars and say nothing about the critical path. See [Chapter 30](../part-06-pr → Appendix I — Glossary
Earned value (EV)
The budgeted value of the work actually performed. It is the hinge of the whole method, and it is only as honest as the percent-complete measurement behind it. See [Chapter 30](../part-06-project-controls/chapter-30-earned-value-management/index.md). → Appendix I — Glossary
effective rate
burdened ÷ productive-hour fraction, roughly **1.165×** — is used only when a crew must be pulled off other productive work to perform added scope. **Do not apply both.** That mistake inflates a change order by about 16% and it is the single most common double-count in this business ([Chapter 20](.. → Appendix K — The Willow Street Community Center Project Package
eighty-one consecutive working days
the entry reads *worked on site.* Three words | | Written notice at the time of each event | **Nine letters, all dated inside a four-day window in month thirteen**, referencing events from months six, seven, eight, nine, and eleven | | Meeting minutes recording the delays | The architect's minutes s → Construction Management
electrical permit
which cannot be pulled until a licensed electrical subcontractor is under contract on the project. → Construction Management
Electrocution
One of OSHA's Focus Four categories, covering contact with power lines, energized equipment, and unsafe temporary power. Lockout/tagout, assured grounding, and clearance from overhead lines are the controls that actually prevent it. See [Chapter 24](../part-04-field-operations/chapter-24-safety-mana → Appendix I — Glossary
electrocution
is one of OSHA's Focus Four
the four hazard categories responsible for the large majority of construction fatalities (falls, struck-by, caught-in/between, electrocution). Four disciplines are non-negotiable: → Construction Management
Element A
a 100-foot wall, 12 inches thick, 10 feet tall — contains `100 × 1.0 × 10 = 1,000 CF = 37.04 CY`. Its formwork is **both faces of the wall**: ``` 100 LF × 10 ft × 2 faces = 2,000 SFCA ``` → Construction Management
Element B
a pad 20 × 15 × 3'-4" — contains `20 × 15 × 3.333 = 1,000 CF = 37.04 CY`. Its formwork is **the perimeter only**: ``` perimeter = 2 × (20 + 15) = 70 LF 70 LF × 3.333 ft = 233 SFCA ``` → Construction Management
elevation 1,206
fifty-six feet apiece, bearing on competent rock with a nominal four-foot seat. The bid schedule carries the item as **616 LF of 36-inch drilled shaft at $412/LF = $253,792**. There is no separate pay item for shaft excavation in rock, which matters enormously and which Ingrid did not notice until d → Construction Management
elevation 1,243
the same nominal four-foot seat, just forty-one feet higher. Each of those shafts is now **19 LF** instead of 56 LF. → Construction Management
elevation 1,247
forty-one feet above the top of rock shown on the logs. The crew fought it for eleven hours and got nowhere. Same on 2-4, and 2-5. → Construction Management
elimination
the highest level — and it removes the exposure entirely rather than protecting against it. It required **Meridian Health System** to agree, because it changed how their patients enter their operating clinic for six weeks, which means it was negotiated by Pri Sethi and Ray, not by a foreman and not → Construction Management
Embodied carbon
Greenhouse gas emissions associated with a material's extraction, manufacture, transport, installation, replacement, and disposal. It is spent **before the building opens** and cannot be recovered by good operation later, which is why it has moved from a consultant's report into specifications and p → Appendix I — Glossary
Emphasis Program
falls, trenching, silica, and heat have all been emphasis subjects | Planned and thorough | | **Follow-up** | Verifying you abated a prior citation | Narrow and unforgiving | → Construction Management
Employee interviews
management interviews may have your representative present; non-management employee interviews are private, and that is not negotiable and not an insult. **Document review**: your written programs, training records, inspection records, the OSHA 300 log. Then a **closing conference**. → Construction Management
EMR (experience modification rate)
A multiplier applied to a contractor's workers' compensation premium based on its loss history relative to peers, where 1.00 is average. Many owners will not let a contractor on site above a stated EMR, so it is simultaneously a safety metric, an insurance cost, and a market-access credential — and → Appendix I — Glossary
an actual form attached to the actual policy. Two versions matter: **ongoing operations** (during construction) and **completed operations** (afterward, when the leak shows up in year three). **You need both, and they are frequently separate endorsements.** 2. **Waiver of subrogation.** Subrogation → Construction Management
endorsements
ongoing *and* completed operations — actually attached. 4. Waiver of subrogation on general liability **and** workers' compensation. 5. Workers' comp effective **on or before** the first day on site. No gaps, ever. 6. Named insured matches the subcontract entity, character for character. 7. Bonds fu → Construction Management
Enforceability varies significantly by state
some enforce clearly drafted clauses, some refuse on public-policy grounds, some require unmistakably explicit language, and some limit the clause by statute or by its interaction with prompt-payment, lien, or payment-bond rights. Verify governing law for your specific project; never carry one state → Construction Management
The first of the three proofs in a claim: does the contract or the law actually give you a right to recover for this? Being harmed is not entitlement; a clause, a statute, or a legal doctrine is. See [Chapter 33](../part-06-project-controls/chapter-33-claims-and-delay-analysis/index.md). → Appendix I — Glossary
Environmental monitoring
temperature and humidity in a space being conditioned for flooring installation, concrete internal temperature during a mass placement, silica and dust monitoring, noise, vibration monitoring adjacent to a sensitive neighbor. This category is underrated, because several of these feed decisions that → Construction Management
EPD (environmental product declaration)
A standardized, third-party-verified report of a product's environmental impacts across a defined life-cycle scope. **It is not a certification and not a performance claim** — it reports impacts without saying they are good, and two products can both hold EPDs and differ enormously. See [Chapter 36] → Appendix I — Glossary
this is why Northgate's escalation line falls from $2,801,338 at schematic design to **$575,200** at GMP: 84 percent of the work is under subcontract at fixed prices and those subcontractors now own their own escalation. And **escalation is not contingency.** Contingency covers risks that *might* ha → Appendix A — Construction Math Reference
Escalate today
in writing to the subcontractor's project manager — and fix the physical condition now. Escalation starts at the rung that can actually fix it, not at your VP. → Appendix J — Answers to Selected Exercises
The increase in cost between the date you priced work and the date you buy it. Escalation is priced on the *commodity-exposed portion* of the work, not on the whole contract, and it belongs as a visible allowance rather than buried inside unit rates where nobody can audit it. See [Chapter 11](../par → Appendix I — Glossary
your own assumption about weeks and percentages, stated out loud so somebody can argue with it. 4. **Pull rework and recordables** if you have them by crew or by job. If you do not have them at that level, that is itself the finding. 5. **Then build the practice table.** Twelve rows. What does the b → Construction Management
ETC (estimate to complete)
The forecast cost of the remaining work; the forward-looking half of EAC. See [Chapter 30](../part-06-project-controls/chapter-30-earned-value-management/index.md). → Appendix I — Glossary
The loading dock slab placement (schedule activity S-4410, 74 CY planned) was scheduled for 0700. At 0705 the ready-mix supplier called: a plant breakdown at 0640. First truck arrived 0925. The concrete crew of nine plus the foreman stood by from 0700 to 0930. The pump truck stood by as well, at $18 → Construction Management
every constraint on it has been removed
design information, submittals, materials, prerequisite work, labor, equipment, permits, and inspections. The CPM tells you what *should* happen; the constraint log tells you what *can*. → Construction Management
Every file carries valid YAML front matter.
**No misspelled canonical cast surname** and **no organization-name variant** (Meridian Health System, Halvorsen + Pike, Caldwell Structural, Trellis Engineering, Kestrel Construction Group, Ironbridge Steel, Cardinal Mechanical, Halcyon Electric are spelled identically everywhere). → Consistency Audit — *Construction Management: Building the Built World*
units complete, weighted milestones, fixed formula, judgment, or level of effort — and general conditions sits in its own row **outside the index**. The reported EAC comes with the one-sentence justification, and if the student chose formula #2 they have named the closed, non-recurring event. And th → Chapter 30 — Instructor Notes
Every reason gets a category
one of the eight constraint categories, plus weather, plus a genuine "other." 3. **Categories are counted and trended,** not just listed. Six weeks of data, sorted by frequency: a Pareto. 4. **The top two or three categories get a countermeasure with a name and a date** — not a discussion. → Construction Management
Every scaffold on the job has an owner
the company that erected it — and a **named competent person**, both printed on the tag and both listed in the temporary-structures register (§22.9). 2. **No trade touches another trade's scaffold. Period.** Not a plank, not a brace, not a tie, not a guardrail section. 3. If a trade **needs** a modi → Construction Management
Every weight ticket
dated, with hauler, container number, destination facility, and net weight | The tickets *are* the credit. The log summarizes the tickets; it does not replace them | | The **waste management plan**, with the target, the streams, the responsible parties, and the calculation method | Reviewers check t → Construction Management
Everything else
the other six jobs on Nadia's board plus the small-projects group: **$71,800,000** of remaining value, of which **$33,600,000** is bonded. → Construction Management
excess
the amount the delay cost you that the contract never contemplated. (c) Kestrel holds 5 percent retention on **$5,120,000** of subcontracts. Those subcontractors are smaller companies borrowing at a higher rate; use **11 percent.** Compute what the same excess delay costs *them* collectively, and wr → Construction Management
excusable but non-compensable
you get time, not money. That last point is the one that surprises people: an excusable non-compensable day protects you from liquidated damages, but you still burn **$5,150 a day** of extended general conditions out of your own pocket. → Construction Management
excusable but not established
it did not accept that Kestrel had proved those days were caused by the change and were on the longest path, and it raised **concurrency**, arguing that some of that window overlapped with Kestrel's own steel-submittal delay. The four granted days were **excusable and compensable**: caused by the ow → Construction Management
Excusable delay
A delay for which the contractor is entitled to a time extension. *Excusable and compensable* means time and money (typically owner-caused); *excusable and non-compensable* means time only (typically abnormal weather or force majeure); *non-excusable* means neither, plus liquidated damages. Learn th → Appendix I — Glossary
Excusable, non-compensable
time, no money | | 6 | RFI-041 returned in 16 CD against a 10 CD contractual review period (W2) | **Excusable and compensable** — owner-side, through the architect | | 3 | Re-nailing panels installed to a superseded detail (W2) | **Non-excusable** — Kestrel's own | | 3 | Crew pulled off; short truss → Construction Management
executes and documents
barriers, negative pressure with HEPA-filtered exhaust, tacky mats, dedicated routes and carts, and a daily signed pressure log. → Construction Management
Exhibit A to an executed contract
a document a subcontractor's lawyer will read in month fourteen. That is why a scope sheet used at buyout must name the trade that carries each excluded item, not merely record that the bidder excluded it. Leveling that ends with "adjusted for parity" is estimating. Leveling that ends with "and item → Construction Management
Expected monetary value (EMV)
Probability × impact, summed across a set of risks, used to size contingency against a named register rather than a percentage guess. It is a planning tool, not a prediction: no single risk ever costs its expected value. See [Chapter 6](../part-01-foundations/chapter-06-risk-management/index.md). → Appendix I — Glossary
a 10'-6" × 10'-6" × 36" footing under a heavily loaded interior column — after a hand-penetrometer check finds soft, gray, organic-smelling silt where the report calls for medium-dense sand. → Construction Management
facility's infection prevention team
not the contractor — performs the assessment. It crosses the **type of construction activity** (from minor inspection through major demolition) with the **risk group of the adjacent patient population** (from office areas through immunocompromised and surgical areas) to produce a required **precauti → Construction Management
Fact
a controlled document | | 2 | **Committed** | The value of executed subcontracts and purchase orders, including executed changes to them | Contract and PO log | **Fact** — signed agreements | | 3 | **Cost to date** (actual) | Invoices received and payroll posted, **plus accruals** for work performed → Construction Management
Fade
Deterioration in a job's forecast gross profit between reporting periods. A little fade is normal; a pattern of late fade — profit that holds until the last two reports and then collapses — is what sureties and lenders read as a management problem, and they are usually right. See [Chapter 34](../par → Appendix I — Glossary
Fair Oaks Water Plant Expansion
a $16.2M job in the backlog — has a 26-foot-deep excavation for a new clearwell and pump station. Groundwater sits about 9 feet below existing grade; the design requires drawdown to 2 feet below subgrade, so **19 feet of drawdown**. The soil is a silty sand. The specialty dewatering contractor propo → Construction Management
Fall-protection anchorage design
tie-off points, horizontal lifelines, and their attachment to the structure. - **Scaffold engineering** — any scaffold outside the manufacturer's standard configuration, and any scaffold over the height where your jurisdiction requires a registered professional engineer's design. - **Shoring and res → Construction Management
Falls
The leading cause of construction fatalities by a wide margin, and the first of OSHA's Focus Four. Guardrails and floor-hole covers beat harnesses, because a control that works without a worker remembering to use it is a better control. See [Chapter 24](../part-04-field-operations/chapter-24-safety- → Appendix I — Glossary
False
or at least, that is not the one that bites most projects. The dominant construction-phase risk is **moisture**. Exposed panels that sit in rain cup, check, stain, and can delaminate, and because the panel is often the exposed architectural finish, a water stain is a defect you cannot cover. Real ma → Construction Management
False positive / suppress by rule (4):
**#1** — 0.4-inch insulation-to-steel overlap. Below the agreed tolerance; duct insulation compresses and the trapeze adjusts. Suppress by rule, but *record the rule*, do not delete the item. - **#8** — 0.2 inches between two Cardinal hangers. A self-clash. Real, and Cardinal's detailer fixes it ins → Construction Management
while the crane is still available and before the roof and penthouse enclosure are complete. Working backward, using the lead time Cardinal's vendor quoted at buyout: → Construction Management
Buy America requirements on certain materials, wage and civil rights compliance, DBE program obligations, and specific reporting duties — and if your project has federal participation, those requirements apply regardless of what your state normally does. Second, FHWA's technical material on work-zon → Construction Management
Fee
The contractor's compensation for home-office overhead and profit, expressed as a percentage or a fixed dollar amount. On a cost-reimbursable contract, the fee is what the owner does **not** reimburse separately: executive salaries, corporate rent, marketing, and profit. See [Chapter 4](../part-01-f → Appendix I — Glossary
fee and contingency are percentages
on Northgate, contingency is roughly 3% of direct cost + GC + insurance, so moving a cost between two lines that are both inside that base changes nothing, but moving it *outside* the base would. Second, **general conditions are time-driven and direct costs are quantity-driven.** A temporary elevato → Construction Management
fee expressed as a percentage of construction cost
commonly somewhere in the mid single digits to low teens depending on building type, scope of services, and complexity; healthcare and laboratories run high, warehouses run low. Sometimes it is a fixed fee derived the same way. The percentage matters less than three structural facts about their busi → Construction Management
fee is not
it is a negotiated fixed amount or percentage with nothing behind it to inspect. That distinction is exactly why the boundary between general conditions and fee is negotiated so carefully. → Construction Management
fee is not auditable
it is a fixed amount or a fixed percentage the parties negotiated, and there is nothing behind it to inspect. That distinction is exactly why the boundary between general conditions and fee is negotiated so carefully in a GMP: every item you move from fee into general conditions becomes reimbursable → Construction Management
FIDIC
The contract document family published by the International Federation of Consulting Engineers, dominant on international projects. Its engineer's role, claims machinery, and dispute adjudication differ substantially from U.S. forms. See [Chapter 4](../part-01-foundations/chapter-04-construction-con → Appendix I — Glossary
Field notes
what each entry is actually for. 4. **The field that decides a dispute** — and why it is usually filled in badly. This is the part that makes the appendix worth having. → Appendix D — Forms and Templates Library
Field order (minor change in the work)
The architect's direction to make a change asserted to carry no cost and no time impact. Used honestly it saves paperwork; used loosely it is where free work hides, and the fix is a same-day written response saying it is not a no-cost change. See [Chapter 31](../part-06-project-controls/chapter-31-c → Appendix I — Glossary
field-cured cylinders
cylinders cured on the deck, next to the member, under the same temperature and moisture history — or an accepted **maturity method** correlating temperature history to strength. The lab cylinder is for acceptance. The field cylinder is for stripping. Two different questions, two different sets of c → Construction Management
Final completion
The point at which everything is done: punch closed, closeout documents delivered, warranties and O&M manuals in hand, final lien waivers collected, remaining retention released. It is not the end of warranty obligations, and nobody schedules it, which is why it drifts. See [Chapter 40](../part-08-c → Appendix I — Glossary
Finish-to-start (FS)
The default schedule relationship: the predecessor must finish before the successor starts. The others are start-to-start (SS), finish-to-finish (FF), and the rarely justified start-to-finish (SF). See [Chapter 14](../part-03-preconstruction/chapter-14-scheduling-cpm/index.md). → Appendix I — Glossary
Firestopping
Sealing penetrations through rated assemblies with tested, listed systems so the rating survives the hole somebody drilled through it. It is among the most commonly failed inspection items on a commercial job, because dozens of trades each make their own penetrations. See [Chapter 9](../part-02-mean → Appendix I — Glossary
pull the log and check whether the 9 weeks includes a week you sat on their proposal. If it does, say so and fix it. **Second, tell them exactly where it is**, with the date it went to the owner and the date the owner's response is contractually due. Silence is what turns a delay into a stoppage. ** → Construction Management
fit testing
an unfit-tested respirator is a costume. 5. Fall protection equipment inspected before each use; **removed from service permanently after any arrest event**; within the manufacturer's service life. 6. Harnesses correctly fitted and adjusted, with suspension relief straps. 7. Cut-resistant, chemical- → Appendix F — Safety Reference: OSHA Focus Four, Checklists, Competent-Person Duties
five different clocks
the live risk on this job | | 8 | Payment terms | 1 | 1 | **1** | Apply by the 25th, paid in 30 | | 9 | Retention | 1 | 1 | **1** | 10% to 50% complete, then 5% | | 10 | Pay-if-paid | — | 3 | 0 | n/a as prime; score it when you are the sub | | 11 | Float ownership | 1 | 2 | **2** | Float is a shared → Appendix G — Contract Clause Decoder: The 25 Clauses That Decide Who Pays
Five things to carry out of this chapter.
**Earned value is measured at budget rates.** If actual cost leaks into EV, your CPI is 1.000 forever and you have built an expensive way to learn nothing. - **SPI is not schedule.** A job can post 1.02 and be thirty-four days late, and the mechanism — non-critical work completed early, a front-load → Construction Management
Fixed events you cannot move:
**Concrete pour**, level-four deck topping, east half, **180 CY** of lightweight structural topping at **$206/CY** delivered. Pump truck on the east drive from **5:45 to 11:30**; the pump occupies half the gate throat. Ready-mix trucks arrive every **12 minutes from 6:30 to about 10:30** (20 loads). → Construction Management
Fixed price: $740,000
about $190 a square foot. **330 calendar days.** Their bank approved a construction loan of **$790,000**: the contract plus a $50,000 cushion Doug was quietly proud of. → Construction Management
float
specifically, whether the subcontractor's 6-day slip and the 4 rain days were on the **critical path**, and how much total float those activities carried at the *first* data date. > > If the subcontractor's activity carried 9 days of float and used 6, it consumed float but drove nothing, and it is n → Construction Management
Float (slack)
The amount of time an activity can slip without delaying something. **Total float** is the slip available before the project finish moves; **free float** is the slip available before the *next activity's* early start moves. Float is a shared, consumable project asset, and your contract assigns it to → Appendix I — Glossary
Subcontract language that binds the subcontractor to the prime contract's terms as they apply to its work. It is your leverage: if you owe the owner seven-day notice, your subcontractors must owe you five, or you cannot pass a claim through. See [Chapter 16](../part-03-preconstruction/chapter-16-pro → Appendix I — Glossary
Focus Four
OSHA's framing of the four hazard categories responsible for most construction fatalities: falls, struck-by, caught-in/caught-between, and electrocution. It is a prioritization device, not a complete hazard list. See [Chapter 24](../part-04-field-operations/chapter-24-safety-management/index.md). → Appendix I — Glossary
Force majeure
Contract language excusing performance for events beyond a party's reasonable control. What counts is defined by the clause, not by the phrase, and the usual remedy is time without money. Read the list in your own contract; they vary enormously. See [Chapter 4](../part-01-foundations/chapter-04-cons → Appendix I — Glossary
Forecast a self-perform code by unit rate
actual unit rate = cost to date ÷ quantity installed; cost to complete = quantity remaining × that rate — and say why the estimated rate is the wrong input. 3. **Decompose a labor variance into productivity and rate**, computing a productivity factor, and state which one is fixed in the office and w → Chapter 28 — Instructor Notes
Forecast at completion
The projected final cost of a cost code, a division, or a job: cost-to-date plus cost-to-complete. It is the output of the cost report that anybody senior actually reads. See [Chapter 28](../part-06-project-controls/chapter-28-cost-control/index.md). → Appendix I — Glossary
foremen and detailers both present
the detailer because they will make the change, the foreman because they know whether the change can actually be installed. Two hours, weekly, screen on the wall, and a hard rule that a company sending someone without authority to move their own work has not attended. → Construction Management
forensic schedule analysis
(RP 29R-03)
describe it, do not quote section text from memory — which matters here because it governs the schedule half of the question earned value cannot answer. *For: project controls staff, estimators, and anyone who has to say how sure they are.* → Construction Management
form cycle
how many times a formwork set can be stripped and reused, and how fast — sets the crew's repeating rhythm and therefore the floor-to-floor duration. → Construction Management
Formwork
The temporary structure that shapes and supports concrete until it can carry itself. It resists lateral pressure that depends on placement rate and temperature, and it is measured in **SFCA** — square feet of contact area — not in cubic yards of concrete. See [Chapter 22](../part-04-field-operations → Appendix I — Glossary
perforated pipe in washed stone, wrapped in filter fabric, draining to daylight or a sump — is cheap now and impossible later. The **under-slab vapor barrier**, a polyethylene sheet commonly 10 to 15 mil, lapped and sealed at penetrations, stops water vapor from migrating up through the slab and des → Construction Management
four million dollars of actual work
$3,998,920, if you want it exact — and the markups will hand us the rest. Every number in the log I'm about to show you is already burdened. Don't do that math twice." → Construction Management
four of them have nothing to do with scaffolds
the safety impact review on any acceleration above $25,000 or 3 calendar days, a weekly leading-indicator dashboard with the schedule pressure index, a rule that recovery expectations go in writing or they do not exist, and near-misses investigated on **potential severity** rather than actual outcom → Chapter 24 — Discussion Guide
Four sentences worth memorizing
**A surety is not an insurer.** It expects repayment, and you signed the indemnity agreement that lets it collect. - **A certificate of insurance is not coverage.** The endorsement is coverage. - **A performance bond is a money instrument, not a schedule instrument.** It pays for the delay; it does → Construction Management
Four things to carry out of this chapter:
**Delivery method, contract type, and selection method are three decisions.** Never let someone tell you one and assume you know the other two. - **The bid-day price and the final price are different numbers, and the delivery method lives in the gap.** On Northgate the hard-bid number was $1,650,000 → Construction Management
fourteen-point schedule assessment
a framework that originated in U.S. government program management and is now widely used in construction and elsewhere. Its checks map closely onto what you just read: logic (missing predecessors and successors), leads, lags, relationship types, hard constraints, high float, negative float, high dur → Construction Management
Fragnet
A small fragment of network logic representing a change or a delay event, inserted into an accepted schedule update to measure its effect on completion. It is the mechanism inside a time impact analysis. See [Chapter 31](../part-06-project-controls/chapter-31-change-order-management/index.md). → Appendix I — Glossary
free haul distance
the distance beyond which additional payment applies. Material moved farther earns **overhaul**, historically paid in units like station-yards or cubic yard-miles beyond the free haul limit. Many modern agencies have dropped separate overhaul items entirely and simply require the contractor to inclu → Construction Management
frequency drives it more than severity
ten small claims hurt more than one catastrophic one. It is a **company** number: a loss on one project raises the insurance cost embedded in every other project's bid for three years. It has nothing to do with OSHA. → Construction Management
front-loading
inflated value on early activities so billings run ahead of costs. It is not always dishonest; construction is a working-capital business and the first four months are the hardest. But it means you are financing the contractor interest-free, and that the money to finish the last 10% of the building → Appendix E — The Owner's Companion: For Owners, Developers, Facility Managers, and Homeowners
G
Gantt chart (bar chart)
A time-scaled bar diagram of activities. It is the output everyone reads and a terrible input: a bar chart with no logic underneath it cannot calculate a critical path, cannot be updated meaningfully, and cannot support a delay analysis. See [Chapter 14](../part-03-preconstruction/chapter-14-schedul → Appendix I — Glossary
gate question 5
*what has to be true here before it works at all, and who owns it on a Tuesday when the champion is on vacation.* → Construction Management
general conditions
the cost of running the job itself: trailers, project staff, temporary power, dumpsters, cleanup, safety supplies. Northgate's general conditions are $2,900,000. Northgate's general contractor is Kestrel. Context tells you which. Ask when you are not sure; nobody worth working for will think less of → Construction Management
General conditions (GC)
Used in two completely different senses, and the ambiguity causes real confusion. (1) **The cost sense:** the project-specific indirect costs of running the job — site staff, trailers, temporary utilities, hoisting, cleanup, safety program, small tools. (2) **The contract sense:** the standard claus → Appendix I — Glossary
General contractor (GC)
The party holding the prime construction contract with the owner and the trade subcontracts below it. Its three jobs are to assemble and price the work, to coordinate the trades, and to carry the risk between them — and it usually self-performs only a fraction of the work. See [Chapter 19](../part-0 → Appendix I — Glossary
General requirements
The specification counterpart to general conditions costs: Division 01, which tells you what the project *requires* administratively and therefore what your general-conditions budget has to buy. People use "general conditions" and "general requirements" interchangeably; the precise usage is that Div → Appendix I — Glossary
geography
and a 1 or 2 on nearly everything that determines whether you keep the money. Self-perform is the seduction. It is a genuine competitive edge, and it is the single most common reason a contractor bids a job it should have walked away from, because it is the one number on the page that *feels* like a → Construction Management
geotechnical report
the "soils report" — is the most consequential document on a project that almost nobody on the contractor's team actually reads. → Construction Management
Get the current
edition of anything here
several of these have been revised many times and a stale edition on scheduling or law is actively misleading. → Bibliography and Further Reading
Get your real burdened rates from accounting
current fringe contributions, current payroll tax effective rates, current workers' comp manual rates by class code, and your company's EMR. Build one classification from scratch. Most estimators are using rates two years stale. 3. **Reconcile a count against a schedule total** on something you are → Construction Management
GIVEN
a controlling quantity for this project. Use it. If your takeoff disagrees, your takeoff is what changes. - **TAKE OFF** — you compute it from §K.5. The package gives you the geometry; you supply the method, the waste factor, and the assumption. → Appendix K — The Willow Street Community Center Project Package
Given:
Historical project: **$38,200,000** final construction cost, **118,000 SF** outpatient clinic, comparable program mix - **Substantially complete 3 years ago**; construction duration was **20 months** - Located in a metro with a published city cost index of **94.8**; Rivermont's is **103.8** - Escala → Construction Management
GMP (guaranteed maximum price)
Cost of the work plus a fee, capped, with the books open to the owner. **The guarantee is on the contractor's exposure, not the owner's cost:** scope changes, design errors, and covered site conditions still move the number. Say that out loud before anyone asks. See [Chapter 4](../part-01-foundation → Appendix I — Glossary
GMP under CM at
Risk.
*Yes, but the owner has nobody to audit* → hire the owner's rep **first**, or wait and use a negotiated lump sum. → Construction Management
A reinforced concrete beam spanning between footings, piers, or piles, carrying wall loads down to the deep support below. Often partly earth-formed, which is why its formwork quantity is not what a beginner assumes. See [Chapter 8](../part-02-means-and-methods/chapter-08-sitework-and-structure/inde → Appendix I — Glossary
Gravity drainage
sanitary, storm, condensate | Essentially zero | Slope is fixed by code and physics; invert elevations are set at both ends by connection points. A 4" line at ¼"/ft drops 15" over 60 ft. You cannot negotiate with gravity. | | 2 | **Large ductwork** — mains and trunks | Low | Cross-sectional area is → Construction Management
guaranteed maximum price amendment
the moment Kestrel stops being a consultant and becomes the party that eats the overrun. → Construction Management
guidance rather than law, and binding nowhere
but it gives a common vocabulary to people who would otherwise argue past each other, and it is frequently cited in international practice. *For: a rigorous, non-U.S.-centric second opinion on how these arguments actually get evaluated.* **Read the current edition itself; do not rely on anyone's sum → Construction Management
Gymnasium roof structure
function: *span the gym clear and carry roof and equipment loads.* Compare steel joist and joist-girder, long-span joists, glulam, and panelized systems; the structural depth also interacts with building height and enclosure area. - **Mechanical zoning strategy** — function: *condition zones with ra → Construction Management
H
habit
the inspection had always been requested one zone at a time, so nobody thought to ask whether it had to be. → Construction Management
half Northgate's size and half its congestion
a $24,000,000, 70,000 SF, three-story medical office building with no imaging suite, no surgery, no medical gas beyond four exam-room outlets, a 42-inch typical ceiling cavity, and an open site. → Construction Management
Harbor Ridge
a 34-lot subdivision built by **Tessa Bright Homes**. Superintendent **Colton Reyes** runs eleven houses at a time on a 92-calendar-day per-house cycle. Here is the cycle for one house, compressed to eight activities. → Appendix B — CPM Scheduling Workbook
has a name and a mechanism
a late quote on complete scope, a plug replaced by a leveled number, a retired risk, a schedule improvement, a duplication found, an executive fee decision made on the record. Buying the job has none. Curtis shaved $465,000 in a forty-minute meeting; it cost $998,000, or $2.15 back for every dollar → Chapter 13 — Instructor Notes
hazard fixes
a tag regime, a scaffold modification-control procedure requiring re-inspection by the erecting contractor. - The corrective action for finding three is a **system fix** — a standing **safety impact review** as a required step in every acceleration decision, with named questions: what hazards does t → Teaching Safety
Hazards this decision creates:
**Illumination.** Interior finish work at night, in a building with no permanent lighting energized on the finish floors, means temporary lighting at task levels in areas designed around daylight and permanent fixtures. Inadequate lighting is a fall, struck-by, and quality hazard simultaneously. - * → Construction Management
health-code requirements
separation, labeling, backflow prevention, and sometimes signage and permitting. In a healthcare building the review is stricter still | → Construction Management
Heavy civil
also called heavy/highway, infrastructure, or horizontal construction — is the part of the industry that builds the things that are not buildings. The work is linear or site-wide rather than stacked; the product is usually public; the money usually comes out of a government budget; and the dominant → Construction Management
hidden float
his private buffer against a slab edge that might not be ready and against being leapfrogged by the precast crew, which had historically cost him a day and a half per remobilization. He traded it for a guaranteed continuous elevation with nobody else on it. → Construction Management
Hierarchy of controls
The ranked order for controlling a hazard: eliminate, substitute, engineer, administer, then personal protective equipment. Higher controls work whether or not a worker remembers them, which is why "make sure he's tied off" is usually the fifth-best answer to a question. See [Chapter 24](../part-04- → Appendix I — Glossary
hierarchy of evidence
why records made at the time outrank reconstructions, and how tribunals actually weigh them — is the best plain-language statement I know of the threshold concept in §25.9. It is also refreshingly candid about the limits of after-the-fact analysis. *For: a rigorous second opinion, and for the argume → Construction Management
High
audit the open book, police contingency draws, review the savings reconciliation | **Very high** — approve costs, control scope, verify invoices, forecast monthly | Medium-high — **measure and certify every quantity** | | **Contractor makes money by** | Beating the estimate; buying subs below the ca → Construction Management
Highest
it is a contract | Misses pending changes, backcharges, and a subcontractor in distress | | **Unit rate / productivity** | Cost to complete = quantity remaining × **current actual** unit rate | Self-perform work with a countable unit | **High, once enough quantity is installed** | Applied too early; → Construction Management
his private buffer
protection against a slab edge that wasn't ready, against being leapfrogged by the precast crew, against demobilizing and returning. In the session he received something that made the buffer unnecessary: a guaranteed continuous elevation with nobody else on it. He traded hidden float for a reliable → Construction Management
Hold it while the team is still assembled
about two weeks after substantial completion, not after final completion. If you wait until the team disperses, you are interviewing individuals about a collective memory that no longer exists. 2. **Structure it around specific decisions, not general observations.** Never "how did the submittal proc → Appendix D — Forms and Templates Library
Hold point
A point in an inspection and test plan where **work may not proceed** until the designated party has attended and released it. Mislabeling a hold point as a witness point is how a reinforcing inspection gets missed and a certificate of occupancy gets held. See [Chapter 23](../part-04-field-operation → Appendix I — Glossary
hold points, not labor
waiting on a cylinder break, an inspection, or an MEP sleeve sign-off — and **a stripping criterion the mix cannot meet on schedule**, which is a mix-design decision made in preconstruction that shows up as a schedule problem in month eight. Neither one is fixed by adding carpenters, which is why th → Construction Management
hour overage charge
exceed the band and you pay per hour, sometimes painfully, and a machine that is genuinely busy can blow the band in year two. - A **capital or finance lease** is a financed purchase wearing a lease costume, usually with a bargain purchase option at the end. You carry the asset, you take the residua → Construction Management
Housekeeping
is the site clean, are walkways clear, materials stacked, debris removed, cords off the floor? This is the best single proxy for how the job is being run. **Safety** — edges guarded, holes covered, ladders secured, trenches protected? You are not inspecting; you are forming an impression, and if som → Appendix E — The Owner's Companion: For Owners, Developers, Facility Managers, and Homeowners
148 spread footings, 38,500 SF of curtain wall | **What quality** — 4,000 psi concrete, Class 1 anodized finish | | **Where** — grid E-4, elevation 112'-6" | **What product** — three named manufacturers, or a performance criterion | | **How big** — 6" studs, 3'-0" × 7'-0" door | **How installed** — → Construction Management
how much you are entitled to rely on an element
it is a property of reliance, not of how detailed the picture looks. You may not take a dimension or a clearance from an element whose level of development does not support it. On mass timber this stops being an abstraction: panels arrive CNC-cut with openings and connections already made, and there → Construction Management
if it does not, every field entry is a guess and the foreman knows it, and no platform fixes that. Whether the system produces **cost-to-complete**, not just cost-to-date, because cost-to-date tells you nothing about whether you are making money. Whether the WIP schedule is generated from the ledger → Appendix H — Software and Tools Directory
Human health and occupant wellbeing
air, water, light, movement, thermal comfort, sound, nourishment, mind. Includes on-site performance verification and requires periodic recertification | Corporate interiors and offices; increasingly healthcare and multifamily | | **Green Globes** | Green Building Initiative | Broad environmental pe → Construction Management
I
ICRA (infection control risk assessment)
The regime governing dust, negative air pressure, barriers, and traffic when building in or next to an operating healthcare facility. It is a logistics problem with a medical consequence: construction dust genuinely kills immunocompromised patients, and the penalty for a propped-open anteroom door i → Appendix I — Glossary
Identifies what is being settled
the specific direct scope, by reference to the proposal, drawing, or directive number. > 2. **Identifies what is not being settled** — cumulative impact, disruption, productivity loss, extended performance, or acceleration arising from this change and from the aggregate of changes. > 3. **States tha → Construction Management
Identify which of the four sources
contract, statute, regulation, common law — governs a given question, and say who can change the rule. 2. **Sequence a lien-waiver exchange** correctly: conditional for the current period, unconditional for the prior period, one tier at a time, one month behind. 3. **Find the defects in a certificat → Chapter 5 — Instructor Notes
If it goes badly
if he threatens a claim, hangs up, or starts on a version of history you disagree with — do not argue and do not match his temperature. *"I understand. Everything I've said is in the letter that's going out this afternoon, and if you want to talk again in a couple of days I'll take the call."* Then → Construction Management
if it is accompanied by three priced options
resequence, accelerate, or request time — and a recommendation. The milestone shape that reconciles with the schedule-control exercise in [Chapter 29](../part-06-project-controls/chapter-29-schedule-control/index.md): → Appendix K — The Willow Street Community Center Project Package
who, where, how long in computed labor hours, why with a reference and a date, and **why no other work was available** | Every disruption and delay claim. Almost always blank | | **Confirming letter** | **"What we advised"** — that this is a change, that no price is established | Whether a verbal di → Appendix D — Forms and Templates Library
in a sequence that never lets the slab deflect
a small area at a time, so the slab is never asked to carry even its own weight alone. Backshores are typically installed before the slab has reached the strength required for reshoring. → Construction Management
in actual calendar time
they are happening on the same days | The two delays affect the **same period of project completion**, but do not necessarily overlap day-for-day on the calendar | | Example | Owner suspension April 9–15 and the elevator crew absent April 6–15 — Window 3 on Northgate | An owner delay in March and a → Construction Management
in full
it sits outside the 75/25 savings split, because it is a reserve, not a savings opportunity. | → Construction Management
within your contract's notice period, which is often seven to fourteen days but varies and is unforgiving; find yours and calendar it ([Chapter 31](../../part-06-project-controls/chapter-31-change-order-management/index.md)). → Construction Management
missing sheets, missing calculations, missing product data for an accessory | Largest single cause | Contractor | Pre-submittal review by the GC against a completeness checklist | | **Unflagged deviation** or an undeclared substitution | Common | Contractor | Deviation cover letter; substitution req → Construction Management
A promise to defend and hold another party harmless against certain claims. Its practical limit is your insurance: if you promised more than your policy covers, you have an uninsured obligation. **Anti-indemnity statutes in many states limit how far this can go**, especially indemnity for the other → Appendix I — Glossary
insisted on the original completion date
by direction, by threat of liquidated damages, or by conduct; 5. The contractor **actually accelerated** and incurred cost as a result. → Construction Management
Inspection
One quality-control activity: a person examining work against a stated criterion and recording the result. It is not quality assurance, and a program made entirely of inspections is a program that finds problems at the most expensive possible moment. See [Chapter 23](../part-04-field-operations/chap → Appendix I — Glossary
Instructor notes for Semester I
**Week 5 is where you localize the course.** Chapter 5 hedges every deadline deliberately. A session on your state's lien statute, licensing, and prompt-payment act is the highest-value local content in the sequence. Invite a construction attorney. - **Week 13 is the markup-versus-margin week.** Stu → Syllabus — Construction Project Management I and II
Instructor notes for Semester II
**Read `safety-teaching-guide.md` before week 6.** If the class leaves believing safety is a compliance topic owned by the safety department, the course has failed regardless of exam scores. Run the scaffold near-miss investigation as a role-play — specifically the argument over whether to write dow → Syllabus — Construction Project Management I and II
Integrated Project Delivery (IPD)
the multi-party agreement described in [Chapter 3](../../part-01-foundations/chapter-03-project-delivery-methods/index.md), with shared risk, shared reward, and often a waiver of claims among the parties — is the delivery method most closely associated with lean construction. The two grew up togethe → Construction Management
interfering float
spending it consumes a downstream party's room without moving the completion date. This is exactly how the Northgate steel procurement chain got emptied out. → Construction Management
interior trim clears it by 4.5 percent
45.6 against 43.64. Framing and drywall have 39 percent headroom; paint has 67 percent. Trim is one bad month from being the ceiling, and nobody is watching it because it has never failed. → Construction Management
Interleaved practice
Part M of every exercise set explicitly mixes the current chapter with named earlier ones. - **Metacognitive check-ins** (`🪞`) every three chapters. → Instructor Guide
internal
money inside your own price, not a line the owner sees. Say in one sentence how that changes who benefits from an underrun. → Construction Management
internal debrief memo
half a page, to Kestrel's operations leadership — answering three questions: → Construction Management
internal rental rate
the rate the equipment division charges a job — is the owning-and-operating cost plus a load for shop overhead, transport between jobs, and the weeks the machine sits idle between assignments. Kestrel uses 15%: → Construction Management
and it is a document, not a habit. It ties directly back to the logistics work in [Chapter 18](../chapter-18-site-management/index.md) and the equipment planning in [Chapter 21](../chapter-21-equipment-management/index.md). → Construction Management
IPD (integrated project delivery)
A multi-party contract binding owner, designer, and builder into shared risk and shared reward, usually with a pooled contingency and waivers of claims among the parties. Widely admired, rarely attempted, and genuinely hard to do on a public procurement. See [Chapter 3](../part-01-foundations/chapte → Appendix I — Glossary
is any of those dates already in the past?
--- title: "Case Study 25.2 — The Autopsy: Reconstructing CO #14 Eight Weeks Late" chapter: 25 type: case-study --- → Construction Management
Is it excusable?
meaning does the contractor get *time*. And **is it compensable?** — meaning does the contractor get *money*. The two are independent, which produces four categories: excusable and compensable (owner-caused), excusable but non-compensable (weather, most force majeure), non-excusable (contractor-caus → Construction Management
Is it hours or rate?
Already answered: hours. PF is 0.886 with a favorable wage rate. Stop looking at payroll and go look at production. 2. **Is it the crew, the conditions, or the design?** Pull the last three weeks of daily reports ([Chapter 26](../../part-05-communication-and-documentation/chapter-26-meetings-and-fie → Construction Management
Is the design complete?
*Yes, and the market is competitive* → **lump sum** (hard bid on public work, negotiated on private). - *No* → go to 2. → Construction Management
Is the property publicly owned?
**Yes** → no lien. The claim runs against the **payment bond**: Miller Act federally, that state's Little Miller Act for state and local work. - **No** → **mechanic's lien** available, on three sequential jurisdictional deadlines. → Construction Management
Isolation
eating alone, stopped talking at breaks, dropped out of the crew's social pattern | Withdrawal from an established pattern is a change; the pattern itself is not the point. | | **Injuries and near-injuries**, especially uncharacteristic ones | Impairment, fatigue, distraction, and despair all look t → Construction Management
It does arithmetic on labels
"3 × 4 = 12" looks like math, but those are rank positions, not quantities, and a score of 12 is not twice as bad as a score of 6. **It compresses ranges**: R-01's impact is $420,000 and R-02's is $310,000, and both score "4." **It ranks things backwards, and you can watch it happen** — R-11 scores → Construction Management
It is almost never the architect first
but "out for review" is visible on a log and "never asked for" is not. The effect of publishing the report is not informational; it is social. Nobody wants to be the top row. - **Rank the aging report by what each item gates, not by days out.** Twelve days out on an item with float is fine. Nine day → Construction Management
It is defensible
for a public agency, the bid tab answers every "did you get a fair price" question, and that value does not show up in a cost model. **It is simple to administer**, requiring far less owner staff than CM-as-agent or IPD. And **when the documents are genuinely complete and the building is genuinely c → Construction Management
It is the owner's money if it is not spent
because the GMP is a *maximum*, unused contingency does not become contractor profit; on Northgate it flows into the savings split, 75% owner and 25% Kestrel. And **it cannot be used for scope changes** — contingency covers risk within the agreed scope, while an owner's change is a change order to t → Construction Management
it muddies the single point of responsibility
because now there is a design the owner furnished, and arguments about whether a problem originated in the owner's bridging documents or the design-builder's completion of them are exactly the arguments design-build was supposed to prevent. → Construction Management
it now has 6 days of
float instead of 15
but the completion date is unchanged, no extended general conditions were incurred by anyone, and there is nothing to compensate. If he had an entitlement argument about the late layout, it is an argument about *disruption and inefficiency* ([Chapter 20](../../part-04-field-operations/chapter-20-lab → Construction Management
It weights frequency more heavily than severity
ten small claims hurt a mod more than one catastrophic one, which means a company can have had a fatality and a mod under 1.00. Do not use it as a moral scoreboard. **It is a company number and it lags** — this year's mod reflects claims from roughly four to two years ago, so a company that fixed it → Appendix E — The Owner's Companion: For Owners, Developers, Facility Managers, and Homeowners
item 5
workers' comp effective 04/15 when Sightline started on site 03/12, a 34-day gap — and **item 6**, the entity mismatch between "Sightline Interiors LLC" and "Sightline Acoustical Systems, Inc." Item 5 is where the `⚠️ Safety alert` lives, and it converts an administrative exercise into a worker's me → Chapter 5 — Instructor Notes
ITP (inspection and test plan)
The signature quality artifact: a table listing what gets inspected or tested, against what criterion, by what method, at what frequency, by whom, whether it is a hold or witness point, and what record it produces. If your quality plan is prose, you do not have one. See [Chapter 23](../part-04-field → Appendix I — Glossary
J
January 12 through February 20, Year 2
twenty-seven working days for fifty-nine modules, in corridors that had been enclosed by area ahead of the March 28 dry-in milestone. → Construction Management
A task broken into steps, with the hazard of each step named and a control assigned. Written before the work, by the people doing it, it is what makes a safety plan operational instead of decorative. Also called a JSA (job safety analysis) or an AHA (activity hazard analysis) — the same tool under t → Appendix I — Glossary
job borrow
funding the front end of each new project with mobilization and early billings from the *newest* projects. That works as long as new work keeps arriving. New work stopped arriving in Month 12. Within ninety days Argosy was sixty days slow to every subcontractor on every job. → Construction Management
join one, locally, and actually do something in it
a committee, the student competition, the same monthly meeting for two years — so that four dozen people in your market know what you are like when nothing is at stake (§42.9.3). → Construction Management
Joinder and consolidation
without a joinder right you can win against the owner and lose the identical issue against your subcontractor in a different forum, paying twice to litigate one fact. **Venue**, which can put your dispute a thousand miles from your office. Governing law, which decides every jurisdictional question i → Appendix G — Contract Clause Decoder: The 25 Clauses That Decide Who Pays
Joint check
A check made payable jointly to your subcontractor and its supplier or lower tier, so that the money cannot stop at a party in trouble. It is a practical remedy when payment is slipping, and it has legal consequences worth understanding before you use it routinely. See [Chapter 5](../part-01-foundat → Appendix I — Glossary
Joint checks
a check made payable jointly to your subcontractor and one of their suppliers — are a legitimate tool when a lower tier is at risk of not being paid. Use them when you have a preliminary notice from a supplier and a reason to worry, and get a written joint-check agreement that says exactly what the → Construction Management
joint layout
control joints sawcut early, within hours of placement and before shrinkage stresses build, in panels sized at roughly 24 to 36 times the slab thickness, aligned with columns and clear of re-entrant corners. → Construction Management
July 20, Year 2
sixty calendar days before substantial completion on September 18. Those sixty days are not a buffer. They are the work. → Construction Management
June 19, Year 1
the morning after the shop drawings came back Revise and Resubmit. Nobody has yet calculated the schedule impact. → Construction Management
June 9, Year 1
barely three months after notice to proceed on March 3, and long before anybody on the job is thinking about air handlers. Miss the June 9 award and you do not lose a week. You lose a manufacturing slot, and the vendor's next slot is wherever it happens to be. → Construction Management
jurisdictional dispute
two trades each claiming the same work — is a real schedule risk with a defined resolution process. In an open-shop environment, jurisdiction is whatever your contract and your judgment say it is, which is more flexible and occasionally more chaotic. → Construction Management
Just-in-time (JIT) delivery
Bringing material to site as it is needed rather than stockpiling it. It reduces double handling, damage, and congestion, and it transfers risk to the supply chain — which is fine until a truck is late and there is no buffer. See [Chapter 18](../part-04-field-operations/chapter-18-site-management/in → Appendix I — Glossary
K
Keep a revision log even though nobody makes you.
## 37.7 The Money: Draws, Purchase Agreements, Options, Allowances, and Carry → Construction Management
Keep records the pricing mechanism requires
usually daily time-and-material records with the owner's representative's signature. 3. **Give notice of time impact separately**, because the CCD almost never grants time. 4. **Convert it.** A CCD that sits unpriced for four months becomes a claim. Push it to a bilateral change order. → Construction Management
Keep relationships warm before you need them
a two-line email when you see somebody's project in the news costs nothing and is remembered for years. **Pay people on time**, which in this industry is an act of character, not accounting, and is the most durable reputation you can build ([Chapter 32](../../part-06-project-controls/chapter-32-prog → Construction Management
Keep the estimate file
withdrawal depends entirely on contemporaneous documentation: the quotes as received, the spreadsheet as it stood at 1:25 p.m., the recap sheet, the bid-day log. A contractor who cannot reconstruct its own bid has no remedy, whatever the truth is. **And act the same day** — notice periods are short, → Construction Management
every segment, its minute count, and who is speaking. Allocate minutes in proportion to the point weights, name the person on the team who owns each segment, and write the **two-minute close** verbatim. Then mark the one segment you would cut first if the panel ran fifteen minutes late, and say why → Construction Management
actual, not estimated, with the backup organized in the order you will hand it over | The moment you are unsure of a number, every number is suspect | | **Know your entitlement** — which clause, which source, what notice you gave and on what date | Entitlement questions asked mid-negotiation feel li → Construction Management
known quantity
you have built it eleven times — and estimating collapses into two much narrower questions: *did the unit rates move?* and *did the options mix change?* The whole apparatus of bid tabs, scope sheets, and buyout that occupies weeks on a commercial job is replaced by a spring conversation about whethe → Construction Management
L
Labor
the same work with fewer crew-days | 7 WD × 7-person crew × 10 hr × ~$54/MH burdened | **$26,460** | | **Form rental / ownership time** | 7 fewer days on two sets of gang forms | Real, modest | | **Float preserved** | 9 CD of float not consumed — which mattered enormously **five weeks later**, when → Construction Management
Lag
A delay imposed on a schedule relationship: pour the slab, then wait seven days before loading. A lag is a modeled waiting period, and lags used to force a date rather than to model a real constraint are one of the classic ways a schedule quietly stops meaning anything. See [Chapter 14](../part-03-p → Appendix I — Glossary
Lagging
by the time it moves, the cause is weeks old | | Baseline dates vs. actual dates, activity by activity | Which activities slipped | Lagging, and noisy — most of them do not matter | | **Total float, this update against the last five** | Which chains are being consumed, and how fast | **Leading** — m → Construction Management
The lean production-control system built around making work ready: pull planning, a look-ahead that screens constraints, weekly commitments made by the people who will do the work, and PPC measurement with reason codes. The "last planner" is the foreman — the last person who can still decide what ac → Appendix I — Glossary
Late start / late finish (LS/LF)
The latest an activity can start and finish without delaying the project, produced by the backward pass. See [Chapter 14](../part-03-preconstruction/chapter-14-scheduling-cpm/index.md). → Appendix I — Glossary
wall lines, door openings, in-wall equipment, floor penetrations | Slab clean and dry; control lines transferred from the structure; model coordination signed off | Kestrel field engineering (Dani) with the carpenter foreman | 3 | | 2 | **Metal stud framing** — track, studs, headers, shaftwall, soff → Construction Management
Lead
A negative lag: allowing a successor to start before its predecessor finishes. Leads model overlapping work honestly when used sparingly and hide broken logic when used to compress a schedule somebody did not want to re-plan. See [Chapter 14](../part-03-preconstruction/chapter-14-scheduling-cpm/inde → Appendix I — Glossary
Lead-time chains do not stretch, they snap
hence the rule Kestrel adopted afterward: any chain terminating at something you cannot buy back is managed as critical regardless of its float. → Chapter 29 — Discussion Guide
leading indicators
observations made, JHAs reviewed, corrections closed within the day — and not only the lagging incident count, since a tool that only counts injuries measures the thing you are trying to prevent after it happens. Whether **near misses** are as easy to record as inspections, and whether recording one → Appendix H — Software and Tools Directory
Lean construction
A body of practice focused on flow, reliability, and the elimination of waste, adapted from manufacturing but not identical to it. Its central insight for a builder is that *variability*, not slowness, is the enemy — an unreliable four-day activity costs more than a reliable six-day one. See [Chapte → Appendix I — Glossary
LEED
Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design — developed and administered by the **U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC)**, with certification handled through **Green Business Certification Inc. (GBCI)**. Learn LEED's structure first, because most other systems are organized similarly enough that onc → Construction Management
Left the critical path
gained a day of float | | C | 4 | **0** | 0 | 0 | **Became critical** — spent all its float | | D | 4 | **0** | 0 | 0 | **Became critical** | | E | 0 | **1** | 0 | 0 | **Left the critical path** | | F | 4 | **0** | 4 | **0** | **Became critical**; its free float is gone too | | G | 0 | **1** | 0 | 0 → Construction Management
legible
you know what it includes, what it does not, and what reserve rides on it. B's is either the same estimate with the risk hidden inside it or a genuinely riskier promise, and *neither you nor B's own project manager can tell which on day one.* → Chapter 12 — Instructor Notes
less capacity
the longer radius row and the longer boom column. Interpolation is not inherently wrong on charts that permit it, but interpolating *in your favor* is, and a textbook rule that always works is better than a judgment call made under schedule pressure. Software is a tool, not an authority. → Construction Management
letter of intent
one page, a signature, a capped exposure. A **gating-submittal list** with a 48-hour internal clock. Tracking the **release-to-mill date** instead of the approval date, which would have produced an alarm on April 4 rather than a phone call on April 21. And a **pre-negotiated seven-day review** on fo → Chapter 16 — Discussion Guide
Level 3, Zone B
the east clinic pod, about 7,400 SF — and to build the constraint log for the six weeks ahead. → Construction Management
level of development
a model built for spatial coordination says nothing reliable about stud gauge or whether a wall runs to deck. Whether clash results can be **grouped, prioritized, and assigned**, because a raw clash report of fourteen thousand intersections is noise, not information. Whether a shared origin and coor → Appendix H — Software and Tools Directory
Levels 3 and 5 are the system
and they are the two that get skipped, because they are boring and require somebody's actual time. → Construction Management
Leverage after payment
retention and lien waivers are the mechanical reasons a contractor comes back to finish. And **coordination above the ceiling**, before the duct and the sprinkler main try to occupy the same space. → Construction Management
a private, revocable permission to use the airspace on stated terms. Not a permit. No government issues it. There is nothing to appeal and nobody to escalate to. Ardmore can simply say no. → Construction Management
Lien rights die on three deadlines
preliminary notice, recording, foreclosure. All jurisdictional. All walls, not targets. On the day after, the right does not exist. - **Public property generally cannot be liened**, so the payment bond is the substitute: the **Miller Act** federally (90-day notice for claimants without a direct cont → Construction Management
Lien waiver
A document giving up lien or bond-claim rights for work through a stated date. Four combinations exist: **conditional progress**, **unconditional progress**, **conditional final**, and → Appendix I — Glossary
Life-cycle cost
Total cost of ownership over a defined study period: first cost plus energy, maintenance, replacement, and disposal, usually discounted to present value. It routinely justifies decisions that first-cost budgeting rejects, which is a structural incentive problem rather than an analytical one. See [Ch → Appendix I — Glossary
life-safety system
head-of-wall firestopping in neither subcontract, found by a fire marshal in month nineteen for $230,530. [Chapter 28](../../part-06-project-controls/chapter-28-cost-control/index.md) inherits the bought budget as the control budget. → Chapter 16 — Instructor Notes
lifts
typically 8 to 12 inches loose, per specification — and compacted to a specified percentage of a laboratory maximum dry density. The **Proctor test** (standard or modified) establishes in the lab the relationship between moisture content and dry density for that soil, producing a curve with a peak: → Construction Management
Limited assurance
nothing came to their attention. | Middle | Mid-size programs; many banks | | **Audit** | Testing, confirmation, examination of evidence, an opinion on whether the statements are fairly stated. **Reasonable assurance.** | Most | What sureties want for a program of consequence | → Construction Management
Line of balance (LOB)
A scheduling technique for repetitive work that plots unit or station against time, so each trade becomes a sloped line whose slope *is* its production rate. It answers the question CPM cannot: which trade's rate is lowest, and where will crews collide? See [Chapter 37](../part-07-specialized-practi → Appendix I — Glossary
Line up the three percentages
time elapsed, EV ÷ BAC, AC ÷ BAC. The gap between the last two is the cost problem, and you can state its dollar size before you read another line. 3. **Go to the package level and sort by cost variance.** Then sort each package into one of three bins, because they are three different management pro → Construction Management
line-of-sight
his job's margin, his check: motivating and volatile, because one bad job is *his* bad job. Yolanda's base rose within a published band and her bonus became structured and diluted: steadier, less responsive. *Facilitation note:* neither is superior; they are priced for different risk appetites. **Wh → Chapter 42 — Discussion Guide
linear
real incidents have several interacting chains, and one "why" ladder finds one of them and makes it look like the answer. It is vulnerable to **hindsight** — once you know the outcome, every prior decision looks obviously wrong; it was not obvious on Tuesday. And most importantly, **it stops where t → Appendix F — Safety Reference: OSHA Focus Four, Checklists, Competent-Person Duties
Liquidated damages (LDs)
A stated daily amount owed for each day of unexcused delay past substantial completion. They must be a reasonable pre-estimate of the owner's actual loss made at contract time — a provision that operates as a punishment is generally unenforceable, though the specific test varies by state. They usual → Appendix I — Glossary
live operational data
building automation, sensors, meters, the work-order system — so that it reflects the building's *current state* rather than its designed state. Not a 3D model. Not an as-built model. A model with a live feed. → Construction Management
Locates mark public utilities, not private ones
the abandoned service to the old building on your site is nobody's responsibility but yours. **Locates have a tolerance and an expiration** — a tolerance zone on either side of the mark, and a validity period measured in days or weeks; inside the tolerance zone you hand-dig or use vacuum excavation. → Construction Management
LOD stamp
one sentence, Grace's format — for five extractions: footing concrete at 300; steel tonnage at 400; gypsum board at 300; sprinkler pipe length at 350; and slab-on-grade concrete for a purchase order. For the last, say what the stamp must additionally warn about and why the model cannot know it. → Construction Management
Logic
the relationships between them — is the grammar, and it is where schedules get honest or dishonest. → Construction Management
long-lead identification
the earliest place the schedule and the budget become the same conversation, Theme 2 showing up before there is a schedule. → Construction Management
Long-lead item
Anything whose procurement chain is long enough to drive the schedule: structural steel, curtain wall, switchgear, elevators, air handlers, generators. You back-schedule from the required on-site date through fabrication, approval, and submittal preparation to find the date the submittal must be iss → Appendix I — Glossary
Look-ahead schedule
A short-window extract of the schedule, commonly six weeks, used to screen upcoming work for constraints and make it ready. It is not a shorter Gantt chart; its purpose is to find what would stop the work and remove it in advance. See [Chapter 27](../part-05-communication-and-documentation/chapter-2 → Appendix I — Glossary
Loose measure (LCY)
Soil volume after excavation, in loose cubic yards — what actually rides in the truck. Converting bank to loose is the **swell** calculation, and forgetting it is how truck counts come out twenty-five percent low. See [Chapter 8](../part-02-means-and-methods/chapter-08-sitework-and-structure/index.m → Appendix I — Glossary
lowest rate
because when the same logic repeats 34 times and each crew must work continuously, the constraint is capacity, not sequence. Same input. Completely different governing question. That single shift is what makes production housing a different discipline rather than a smaller one. → Construction Management
lowest responsive, responsible bidder
"responsive" meaning the bid complied with the requirements, "responsible" meaning the bidder is qualified, licensed, bondable, and not debarred. - Bid bonds, payment bonds, and performance bonds are required. - Prevailing wage requirements often apply. - Everything is a public record, including you → Construction Management
Lump sum (stipulated sum)
One price for the whole defined scope, delivered whatever it costs. The owner buys certainty and pays a premium for it; the contractor's contingency is invisible, unaudited, and non-refundable. See [Chapter 4](../part-01-foundations/chapter-04-construction-contracts/index.md). → Appendix I — Glossary
lump-sum scope clause
the contractor's obligation is the work shown in the contract documents, and an addendum issued before bid is a contract document. There is no doctrine that rescues a bidder from a scope item they were given and did not price. The remedy for a bid mistake is → Construction Management
M
maintained envelope
object plus > insulation plus hangers plus required access — never the catalog dimension. → Construction Management
Make yourself replaceable on purpose
train a successor and say out loud that you have. **Keep one foot in the general work**: run a small job, take an interim assignment, sit on a pursuit team. And **ask the direct question in your review**: "What would I have to demonstrate in the next two years to be considered for X?" If the answer → Construction Management
man-hours
242 of them, or about six full working weeks of one person's life, compressed into nineteen days across seven people. → Construction Management
an accurate number that shows a subcontractor at full strength all week. Then the follow-up that carries the lesson: *how does a true number become harmful evidence, and what is the fix?* The fix is not hiding it; it is breaking 22 into trades and areas so the idle six are visible inside the total. → Chapter 26 — Discussion Guide
because the manufacturer's warranty on the air barrier system is at stake. The envelope consultant should review. The owner should be informed | | 3 | **Use as is** | Accept the 1½ in. laps and the four reversed laps as installed | **H+P in writing**, with the envelope consultant's technical concurr → Construction Management
manufacturing decisions
Ray's opening scene is fourteen professionals for ninety-one minutes producing zero decisions and roughly $3,000 of professional time, and the same agenda producing eleven logged decisions in forty minutes the following week after four free structural changes. The documentation half is about **manuf → Chapter 26 — Instructor Notes
March 3, Year 1
notice to proceed. The durations come from experience. The regulatory queues come from a phone call to the AHJ. The collect-by milestones come from reading Division 01. The commissioning chain comes from the commissioning plan, which existed before the GMP was set. Nothing in it required information → Construction Management
margin
a 17.65% markup. It exceeds the contract cap by **$2,224** and it will be presented to you, sincerely, as "fifteen percent." > > Markup is a percentage *of cost*. Margin is a percentage *of price*. They are different numbers describing the same transaction and people use the words interchangeably al → Construction Management
market price testing
there is no bid tab, and the defense (independent estimate, open-book buyout, savings split) is a *constructed* defense rather than a market one, requiring staff to run it. Meridian **paid a higher fee**: 4.0% negotiated exceeds a hard bidder's competitive overhead and profit by roughly $856,550, pe → Construction Management
Markup on markup through the tiers
a sub-sub marks up, the sub marks up that, the GC marks up that. Your contract should cap the total. 3. **Quantities with no takeoff behind them.** "Approximately 40 linear feet" is not a quantity. 4. **Labor rates that do not match the agreed schedule.** Ask for the build-up: base wage, burden, and → Appendix E — The Owner's Companion: For Owners, Developers, Facility Managers, and Homeowners
bond beams, lintels, and grout carried by neither the mason nor the concrete sub | $318,000 | | **Mechanical rework** — a bid-shopped low-tier sub; rework, re-inspection, punch, and re-testing | $402,000 | | **Roofing subcontractor default** — replacement contractor hired at market, mid-job | $286,0 → Construction Management
Mass timber
cross-laminated timber, glue-laminated members, nail-laminated and dowel-laminated panels — is simultaneously a structural decision and a carbon decision, and it changes your job in ways that have nothing to do with carbon: → Construction Management
MasterFormat
The Construction Specifications Institute's classification of construction work by *trade and work result*, organized into numbered divisions and six-digit sections. It structures the project manual, the estimate, and most cost accounting. See [Chapter 7](../part-01-foundations/chapter-07-reading-co → Appendix I — Glossary
Match its voice
Ray Alvarez, practitioner, direct about money, concrete before abstract. → Finisher Brief
Material and tool tracking
tags on tools, tags on pallets, readers at gates and gang boxes. It works well within one organization's own property (your gang boxes, your tools, your yard) and runs straight into the Simultaneity Trap the moment it depends on fourteen subcontractors' suppliers. Adopt it for what you control. Be s → Construction Management
materially unbalanced
meaning the unbalancing creates a reasonable doubt that the agency will end up paying the lowest ultimate cost — can be rejected as non-responsive. Federal-aid work and most state programs have specific policies on this; they differ by agency, and the review is done by people who compare your rates → Construction Management
four weeks later, converting 5 days of float into **33**. Note what bought the float. Not a faster fabricator: a decision made during design about which drawings exist before award. → Appendix J — Answers to Selected Exercises
Means and methods
The construction techniques, sequences, procedures, and temporary works by which the contractor achieves the specified result. They belong to the contractor, and the design team's standard disclaimer of responsibility for them is both a protection for the architect and a definition of your job. See → Appendix I — Glossary
Means of egress
a ladder, stairway, or ramp — in trenches 4 feet deep or greater, within 25 feet of lateral travel of every worker. - **Water, atmosphere, and adjacent structures** are all separate hazards with their own requirements: no work in accumulated water without controls, atmospheric testing where a hazard → Construction Management
Measured mile
The most defensible way to prove lost productivity: compare the same crew doing the same work in an *unimpacted* period against an impacted period on the same project. It cancels out everything you would otherwise have to argue about — crew quality, estimate realism, detail difficulty — because both → Appendix I — Glossary
measured performance
a test, or a year of utility bills. Those are fundamentally different contracts for a builder. Under the first kind, excellent documentation of adequate work certifies. Under the second kind, nothing certifies until the building actually behaves. If your owner has chosen a measured-performance stand → Construction Management
measuring both, in separate meetings
fade against month three for the behavior, margin against bid for the estimate — and who require a month-3 forecast materially below bid to carry a named cause, have found the working answer. Ask them who reviews that cause, because the answer cannot be the project manager. → Chapter 28 — Discussion Guide
Mechanic's lien
A statutory claim against real property securing payment for labor or material furnished to improve it. Its power is that it clouds title, which converts a legal claim against a possibly broke company into commercial pressure on a solvent one. **Every deadline and every requirement varies by state** → Appendix I — Glossary
and most other boxes unchecked with a defensible sentence. The origin paragraph should read as if it were binding, because it is. The 4D sequence must state the one conflict the student found by building it; the Danforth Elementary blackout window of roughly 9:15 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. and the RTUs-befor → Chapter 35 — Instructor Notes
mechanism
a physical or organizational reason it changes output. Learn the mechanism, not the number. The numbers are planning heuristics; the mechanisms are how you diagnose a job you have never seen before. → Construction Management
Mediation
Non-binding facilitated negotiation before a neutral third party. It is where most construction disputes actually settle, and it works best when both sides arrive with an honest assessment of their own weaknesses. See [Chapter 33](../part-06-project-controls/chapter-33-claims-and-delay-analysis/inde → Appendix I — Glossary
memo to every project manager in the company
not a report on Curtis, who is a good project manager who inherited a reporting structure nobody had examined. Two pages, and it has to survive being read by people who are busy and slightly defensive. → Construction Management
MEP
Mechanical, electrical, and plumbing — usually stretched to include fire protection, fire alarm, low voltage, and controls. MEP is typically the largest cost block on a commercial building and → Appendix I — Glossary
Meridian Interiors
a drywall bidder appearing in a bid tab **on the project Meridian owns** (`ch-13/index.md:382`) · Meridian Point Hotel | | **Summit** | Summit Roofing (Northgate) · Summit Interior Systems (Northgate) | | **Bellweather** | Bellweather Interiors (Northgate sub) · Studio Bellweather (interior architec → Consistency Audit — *Construction Management: Building the Built World*
99,000 SF of it on Northgate — is placed, cut, and welded or screwed down as erection proceeds. **Shear studs** are welded through the deck to the beam flange so slab and beam act as a composite section; stud placement is inspected, commonly with bend testing of a sample, and missing studs are a str → Construction Management
Metal panel
insulated metal panel (IMP) or plate/composite | Factory panel spanning between supports, or a fabricated plate system | 12–22 wk | Sequence with structure; thermal movement; joints and reveals; sealant color approval | | **EIFS** | Exterior insulation and finish system: insulation board with a rein → Construction Management
middle
the point where the frame looks finished enough that people begin removing braces, but the permanent lateral system has not yet been completed and released. That is when the two curves cross, and it is when somebody decides a brace is in the way of a pour. **Every brace removal is a structural act, → Construction Management
Milestone
A zero-duration schedule event marking a state: notice to proceed, dried-in, substantial completion. Contract milestones can carry their own liquidated damages, so read whether yours are merely informational or enforceable. See [Chapter 14](../part-03-preconstruction/chapter-14-scheduling-cpm/index. → Appendix I — Glossary
mill release date of April 18
the last day Hank Duffy could commit steel against a reserved rolling slot. Three days of margin existed between those dates and nobody at Kestrel knew, because nobody had asked to see Ironbridge's production schedule. Approval landed April 21. The slot was gone; the next opening was five weeks out. → Appendix D — Forms and Templates Library
Miller Act
The federal statute requiring payment and performance bonds on federal construction contracts above a statutory threshold, giving subcontractors and suppliers a bond claim in place of the lien they cannot file against public property. Every state has its own version — a **"Little Miller Act"** — wit → Appendix I — Glossary
Milo Serrano
Ch. 27 29". He appears in Chapters 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 9, 12–16, 19, 20, 22–24, 26–29, 38, 40–42, three appendices and four instructor-guide files. Incomplete, not wrong. | | m-13 | `part-01-foundations/chapter-02-the-construction-industry/index.md` | 574 | Rivermont Elementary "Est. completion **~5 mont → Consistency Audit — *Construction Management: Building the Built World*
Minute 10–15: logic quality.
**Relationship types.** What fraction are finish-to-start? A heavily FS schedule is normal for building work. A schedule dominated by SS and FF pairs with lags is often a bar chart wearing a network's clothes — the relationships were added to make the bars line up, not because they describe the work → Appendix B — CPM Scheduling Workbook
Minutes
Record **decisions, commitments, and facts.** Never narrative, characterization, blame, or speculation. - Last names and companies. Separate fact from position. Never accept responsibility in your own minutes. - Many contracts deem minutes accepted if not objected to within a stated period — **find → Construction Management
Misclassification
usually inherited rather than chosen. You did not classify anyone; your labor broker did. Which is exactly why you have to look. Ask the class where the exposure actually bites, and make sure somebody names the uninsured injury, which is the largest of them. → Chapter 20 — Discussion Guide
mitigate
redirect the crew, expedite a decision, change the sequence — while the problem is still cheap. A claim delivered eight months later, when the concrete is poured and mitigation is impossible, asks the owner to pay for a decision it was never given the chance to make. That is why courts enforce these → Construction Management
Mobilization
Getting the project physically started: fencing, trailers, temporary power and water, access, survey control, signage, and the first deliveries. It has its own schedule, it costs real money, and treating it as a single bar is how the first three weeks get lost. See [Chapter 17](../part-03-preconstru → Appendix I — Glossary
Mockup
A sample assembly built and reviewed before production work starts, so that "acceptable" is agreed while it is still cheap. A **field mockup** establishes appearance and workmanship; a → Appendix I — Glossary
Modification control
see §22.9. No exceptions, no verbal approvals | | **Vibration and impact** | A power buggy hitting a shore; a concrete bucket landing on the edge form | Traffic routes on the deck plan; buggy speed rules; landing zones | | **Wind on a tall form or a flying table** | A gang form or table left unsecur → Construction Management
Modular and volumetric offsite housing
building whole rooms or half-houses in a factory and setting them on a foundation — has been about to transform homebuilding for roughly seventy years. It works. It is real. It produces good houses. And it has never taken over, and the reasons are boring and structural rather than technological: → Construction Management
Month 11
and computable at Q3 by anyone who ran the remaining-cash line | | 6 — Surety reduces the program | $200M/$70M → $85M/$30M; $61,000,000 of work gone | Not in the WIP. **Caused by** the WIP | | 7 — Working capital negative, covenant trips | $9,100,000 → $(1,701,400) | The restated balance sheet, one → Construction Management
month-6 data date
the same data date as the Chapter 28 cost report and the Chapter 29 schedule update. Six parts: cost-load the schedule to a stated BAC; the three measures; an eight-to-twelve package table that foots; all four EACs with VAC and TCPI and a written justification for the one reported; the three-curve S → Chapter 30 — Instructor Notes
moves
you watched it move twice in this chapter: once when a 23-day procurement slip took it off the concrete chain, and once inside the crashing exercise when four days of compression on the enclosure branch made the MEP branch co-critical without anybody touching the MEP work. → Construction Management
multi-trade rack
a forty-foot section of corridor ceiling with duct, sprinkler, medical gas, domestic water, conduit, hangers, and support steel, assembled in a shop on a jig and lifted in as a unit — does not. If the model is wrong, or if the building does not match the model, **you have manufactured the error fort → Construction Management
multiple critical paths
two or more chains with zero float. This is not an error. It happens naturally when a schedule has been compressed, and it happens constantly on jobs where the finish date was fixed before the durations were. Its practical meaning is uncomfortable: **you now have to accelerate all of them to gain a → Construction Management
Muster points — primary and secondary
located away from the building, out of the way of emergency access, and reachable from every work area. 2. **Evacuation routes** from every level and every area, updated as the building changes. 3. **A headcount procedure** with named responsibility by crew, and a way to report a missing person to o → Appendix F — Safety Reference: OSHA Focus Four, Checklists, Competent-Person Duties
mutual
a waiver edited to run only in the owner's favor is a common supplementary-conditions move. Whether liquidated damages are carved out (they should be). Whether the waiver survives termination. And **whether it flows down to your subcontracts** — if you waive against the owner and do not obtain the s → Appendix G — Contract Clause Decoder: The 25 Clauses That Decide Who Pays
N
Nadia Haddad as executive sponsor
because the design freeze can only be enforced by someone who can call the owner | | **Window** | Model freeze date through rack installation complete | | **Success criterion (pre-registered)** | (a) Site labor **at or below 4.5 MH/LF** against the stick-built control section; (b) **no more than 2 o → Construction Management
Name the four control layers
water, air, vapor, thermal — in order of consequence, and locate each one in the Northgate service-wing wall section. 2. **Trace a control layer across a transition and find the reverse lap**, then say what fails, where the water shows up inside, and roughly when. 3. **Compute the true cost of an en → Chapter 9 — Instructor Notes
Name the four failure modes
Simultaneity Trap, Displaced Burden, Repeatability Assumption, Unread Dashboard — and diagnose a described technology proposal with them in under five minutes. 2. **Apply the five gate questions** to a live proposal and identify which gate it fails, quoted, with a one-sentence answer. 3. **Score a p → Chapter 39 — Instructor Notes
Name your rate and your source
ENR's cost and material indices, published producer-price data, your own bid history, and what your subcontractor market is telling you. 2. **State the effective date** the estimate is priced to, on the cover sheet. 3. **Escalate to the midpoint**, always, and show the calculation. 4. **Do not prete → Construction Management
named person who controls the crew
not a company, not a PM relaying it? | It is a topic | | A **specific, finishable deliverable** — "top track complete, all 47 partitions," not "work in Zone B"? | It cannot be scored | | A **date**, which is this Friday? | It will lose to everything urgent | | Made **out loud, in front of the trades → Construction Management
named, specific, physical change
not effort. "We'll get it back" is not a plan; it is a mood. Acceptable answers: the first floor included one-time layout, mockup, and learning-curve cost that will not repeat (quantify it); we are adding a second crew whose production rate is known; the detail that caused the rework has been change → Construction Management
Names, classifications, and hours
not "5 laborers, 8 hours." *Which* five, at what classification. Certified payroll and the daily report must agree with the ticket, because somebody will eventually compare them. - **Equipment by unit number**, with hours operated and hours standing by, separately. - **Material with quantities and d → Construction Management
naming an owner for it
in writing, on the project org chart, with a protected percentage of that person's time. → Construction Management
NCR (nonconformance report)
The written record that something was built or supplied not in accordance with the contract documents, and the vehicle for deciding what happens next. Four dispositions exist — **rework**, **repair**, **use-as-is**, and **reject** — and only some of them are yours to approve. See [Chapter 23](../par → Appendix I — Glossary
Near-critical path
A path with a small amount of float, close enough to critical that a modest slip makes it critical. Managing only the critical path and ignoring paths with three days of float is how a schedule gets away from a team. See [Chapter 14](../part-03-preconstruction/chapter-14-scheduling-cpm/index.md). → Appendix I — Glossary
Near-miss reports submitted
yes, pay for reports, and watch the number climb | | Days since last incident | Pre-task plan completion rate, spot-audited | | A crew-level injury count | Corrective actions closed within 14 days | | A "safety record" sign at the gate | Hazards identified and closed by *that crew* | | The absence o → Construction Management
neat
no waste factor applied. Apply your own from [Appendix C](c-estimating-reference.md) §C.6 and show it on every line, which is the actual assignment in [Chapter 12](../part-03-preconstruction/chapter-12-estimating-fundamentals/index.md). → Appendix K — The Willow Street Community Center Project Package
neat line
a theoretical prism defined by the plans (say, the footing footprint plus two feet, on a defined slope) — regardless of how much you actually dug. If you over-excavate for working room, or because the bank sloughed, you moved that dirt for free. Your unit price has to carry it. - **Plan quantity ver → Construction Management
negative
Wei Chen's December update forecast dry-in on April 8, eleven calendar days past the March 28 milestone. Negative float is not float; it is a deficit. The pull plan's two sequence changes recovered 8 work days and put the forecast at March 27, restoring the path to slightly positive float. → Construction Management
negative $108,525
the contractor lost about $108,500 to gain about $38,500. The two costs you cannot compute: the loss of discretionary cooperation (early retention release, stored-material approvals, schedule relief, the benefit of the doubt on a disputed percentage), and the professional consequence of having been → Construction Management
Float below zero, meaning an activity must finish earlier than logic allows for the project to hit a required date. It is not a failure of the software; it is the schedule telling you the current plan does not meet a constraint, and the fix is a re-plan, not a deleted constraint. See [Chapter 14](.. → Appendix I — Glossary
never filler, never padding, never restating.
[ ] All seven files written, with the exact filenames. - [ ] No placeholders, TODOs, template variables, "Lorem ipsum," or bracketed `[insert X]` anywhere. - [ ] No source code of any kind. No `code/` directory. - [ ] Every canonical name, date, quantity, and dollar figure matches `_continuity.md` e → Chapter Agent Brief
if you have paid 70% and 50% is built, you have lost your leverage and taken on the risk. **Hold retention**, 5% to 10%, until punch is genuinely complete; if your contract has none, ask for it. **And get lien waivers**, including from major subcontractors and suppliers, with every draw. Yes, on a h → Appendix E — The Owner's Companion: For Owners, Developers, Facility Managers, and Homeowners
never revisited
the fleet was matched to an 18.3-minute cycle that no longer existed. One is a planning story; the other is a monitoring story, and the second is the more common failure by a wide margin. → Chapter 21 — Discussion Guide
new seam at the area line
and area seams are worse than trade seams, because two subcontractors doing identical work each assume the other one handled the transition. The classic casualties are the shaft walls that run continuously through all four levels, the top track at the Level 2 ceiling, the stairwell enclosures, and a → Construction Management
she sells hours and judgment, not construction. Look at the cash-trough table in §42.6.8 and note that she deliberately built a company that never touches it. 3. Verified what licensing her state required for cost consulting rather than contracting, and structured the work so she was never holding a → Construction Management
no contract with you
no liquidated damages, no schedule obligation, its own budget and backlog. Your remedy, if any, runs against the owner through the delay provisions, and many public contracts limit the agency's liability for utility delay or grant time but not money. → Construction Management
No contractual obligation
each subcontract incorporated the subcontractor's own proposal as an exhibit, and the work was outside what those proposals named, so Curtis's own document proved their case. And **no 48-hour written notice**, because he had already directed Vessel to install the grease line on time and material bef → Chapter 16 — Discussion Guide
No direct cost
and real risk and rework exposure | Rework, coordination, claims | | **4. Changed means and methods** | Do the work a different way — prefabricate, change formwork, change lift method | Mobilization and re-engineering; can be a net *saving* | Requires lead time you may not have | → Construction Management
No injury
entirely by luck. Bea Salgado stopped work on that elevation for the day and ran the investigation. → Construction Management
No other released work available in Area B
Area C is not released pending in-wall inspection. Crew redeployed 1130 to Area D at reduced efficiency. Photos 0416-B-01 through -03." → Construction Management
A clause providing that the contractor's sole remedy for delay — even owner-caused delay — is an extension of time, with no compensation. It is the single clause that changes your risk position the most. Courts in many jurisdictions recognize exceptions and several states limit it by statute, partic → Appendix I — Glossary
nobody but Nadia moves the number
and on this day the rule bent because a flight was delayed and a deadline was not. That is a governance failure, and it is the one Kestrel actually fixed. The policy now reads: if the authorized executive is not present, the bid goes in at the built-up number or it does not go in. → Construction Management
nobody stands behind or in line with the jack
a strand or anchor failure sends steel out of the anchorage at lethal velocity, and the area behind the jack must be barricaded and cleared. Afterward, the hazard changes but does not disappear: **cutting or coring into a stressed tendon can release it explosively.** Any coring, drilling, or saw cut → Construction Management
nobody works with their back to live traffic.
**The buffer space is empty on purpose.** It is the distance an errant vehicle travels before it reaches a worker. Storing material in it, parking in it, or letting the crew creep upstream into it is the most common violation and the one with the most direct line to a funeral. - **Trench collapse gi → Construction Management
Non-compensable
time only, no money | **Compensable** — time **and** money | |---|---|---| | **Excusable** — contractor gets a time extension | **Excusable, non-compensable.** Unusually severe weather beyond the contract's allowance. A market-wide labor strike. Certain force-majeure events. An owner-caused delay th → Construction Management
Non-excusable
contractor's own | | Apr 9 – Apr 15 | 7 CD | Elevator crew absent **and** owner suspension, both critical | **Concurrent** — excusable, **not** compensable | | **Window total** | **10 CD** | | | → Construction Management
none
all four are verification of work that already exists. The QA for that wall happened weeks earlier in the approved submittal, the rated assembly listing, the pre-installation conference, the benchmark, and the sequence. → Chapter 23 — Instructor Notes
None of them decides.
Deciding **who owns which risk** and pricing it — Chapters 3, 4, 6. - **Estimating judgment**: knowing which of a hundred assumptions is the one that will move — Chapters 12, 13. - **Scheduling logic**: knowing what actually drives the date, as opposed to what the software calculates — Chapter 14. - → Construction Management
none of them, yet
two of the three conflicting documents are architectural sheets and the clause is the complementary type, which explicitly reserves interpretation to the architect. → Chapter 7 — Instructor Notes
Normal and often healthy
the contractor is financing the job with the owner's money rather than its own. Excessive overbilling is a warning: it borrows cash from work not yet performed, and it reverses. - **A4.** A comparison of productivity in an unimpacted period against an impacted one on the same work, used to prove **l → Final Examination
normal-weather assumption
how many adverse days per month are already inside the contract time, and against what record they are measured. Whether a time extension requires a time impact analysis run on the current accepted schedule update. Whether concurrent delay bars compensation entirely, or only bars it for the concurre → Appendix G — Contract Clause Decoder: The 25 Clauses That Decide Who Pays
Northgate Outpatient Pavilion
a $47,500,000, 132,000 square foot, four-story medical office building delivered under a CM at Risk contract with a guaranteed maximum price and 565 calendar days of contract time. It is followed from the first conceptual estimate through the guaranteed maximum price, the schedule, buyout, a 23-day → Full Outline
Northgate, worked:
Estimate is priced at current-day costs. - Time to NTP: **16 months**. - Contract time: **565 calendar days** ÷ 30.44 days/month = **18.56 months**. Half of that: **9.28 months**. - Time from today to the midpoint of construction: 16 + 9.28 = **25.28 months = 2.107 years**. - Escalation assumption: → Construction Management
not
that continues under whatever statute of limitations and statute of repose applies, and those vary substantially by jurisdiction in both the length of the period and the event that starts the clock. Do not repeat a number you heard on a job site; look up your state's current law and bring the questi → Construction Management
not a contract document
see §K.7 | | Special inspections & testing | **Rivermont Materials Testing** | — | **Engaged and paid by the City** | | Commissioning agent | **Bluestem Commissioning** | **Hal Ferreira-Quinn** | Engaged directly by the City | → Appendix K — The Willow Street Community Center Project Package
Not covered in class:
**Part II (Chapters 8–10, means and methods).** Assumed to be handled by a separate construction materials and methods course. **If your program has no such course, this omission is serious** — substitute the two-semester syllabus, or drop Chapters 30, 34, 36, and 39 from the schedule below and inse → Syllabus — Construction Project Management
Not reimbursable
the acceleration was Kestrel's recovery from Kestrel's own delay, not owner-directed | | Estimator's time pricing owner change orders 7–11 | $6,800 | **Depends on the contract**, which is silent. "Decent argument" is what you say when you failed to negotiate it | | Re-pouring a deck section where Ke → Appendix G — Contract Clause Decoder: The 25 Clauses That Decide Who Pays
nothing changed
no work plan, no job hazard analysis, no route, no gate, no laydown area, no crew size. It failed on decision linkage, not on function. Bea Salgado did not need a count of proximity events; she needed a route change, and no device produces a route change. → Construction Management
Notice
Written notification of a condition, event, or claim within a period stated in the contract — often 7, 10, 14, or 21 days. **It voids more valid claims than any other clause**: real condition, clear entitlement, proven damages, and you lose because you noticed on day 22. Calendar every notice deadli → Appendix I — Glossary
Notice first, work second
a backcharge for work you performed without giving them the contractual opportunity to cure is very hard to defend. And **actual cost, tracked separately** — a backcharge computed as "call it two grand" invites a dispute; a backcharge supported by 18.5 hours of tracked labor at a defined rate plus $ → Construction Management
notice provision
a number of days within which you must notify the owner in writing of any event you believe entitles you to more money or more time. Miss it and you may forfeit an otherwise valid claim, and how strictly that is enforced varies by jurisdiction and by how the clause is written. Read your changes clau → Construction Management
The owner's written authorization to begin, which usually starts contract time. Know whether your contract time runs from NTP, from execution, or from a stated date, because those are three different clocks. See [Chapter 17](../part-03-preconstruction/chapter-17-preconstruction-planning/index.md). → Appendix I — Glossary
sixty days of closeout after substantial completion, which is realistic and which surprises every first-time owner. [Chapter 40](../../part-08-closeout-and-career/chapter-40-project-closeout/index.md) lives in those sixty days. → Construction Management
November 22, Year 1
and then run it *forward* from November 22 to confirm it closes. The forward check is what makes students trust the method. → Chapter 25 — Instructor Notes
November 4
day **62**. Add three days for the subcontractor's own funds to clear, and the second tier — the mill, the bolt supplier, the trucking company — is another week to ten days behind that. → Construction Management
**Notice to Proceed**, the owner's written instruction that starts contract time — was March 3 of Year 1. This was mid-February. The Northgate site was 6.2 acres of frozen mud, a cracked asphalt lot, and a boarded-up single-story annex that Meridian had emptied out the previous fall. There was nothi → Construction Management
O
O&M manuals, as-built drawings, and warranties
and did you have to chase them?" 8. "Did their **subcontractors get paid on time**? Did any of them call you?" 9. "Was the schedule they gave you at the beginning the schedule they actually ran, and did they update it honestly when it slipped?" 10. "Would you hire them again for the same project? Wo → Appendix E — The Owner's Companion: For Owners, Developers, Facility Managers, and Homeowners
OAC meeting
owner, architect, contractor — which is the one recurring event on this project where everybody who can actually change the outcome sits in the same room at the same time. → Construction Management
OAC meeting (owner–architect–contractor)
The recurring project meeting among the three principal parties. It is a **decision meeting, not a status meeting**: status is distributed in advance and read, and the agenda is organized around what has to be decided and by whom. See [Chapter 26](../part-05-communication-and-documentation/chapter-2 → Appendix I — Glossary
Obeya
Japanese for "big room" — or **co-location** means putting the project team, and often key trade partners and designers, in one physical space. → Construction Management
Observation and inspection
structured walks producing findings with a location, a responsible party, a due date, and a photograph. **Job hazard analysis** — building, issuing, and acknowledging the JHA for a task before it starts. **Incident tracking** — recording near misses, first aids, recordables, and lost time, with the → Appendix H — Software and Tools Directory
Observed condition, stated factually
prevents "verify field conditions," especially if you measured something. 3. **The specific question** — prevents an answer to a different question. 4. **Your proposed solution, with a reason** — prevents the reviewer having to design an answer; this is what converts weeks into minutes. 5. **Quantif → Construction Management
occupy and use the work for its intended purpose
on a healthcare project, generally a certificate of occupancy plus whatever the health authority requires. At substantial completion, liquidated damages **stop** accruing; risk of loss and responsibility for utilities, security, and maintenance generally **shift to the owner**; retention is typicall → Construction Management
OCIP (owner-controlled insurance program)
A wrap-up in which the owner buys liability and often workers' compensation centrally for all enrolled contractors. It changes whose loss history absorbs a claim and requires bids to be adjusted for insurance no longer carried — it does not change who is responsible for the hazard. See [Chapter 5](. → Appendix I — Glossary
October 1 lease expiry
in no schedule, no contract, no cost report; Margo wrote it in the margin of a set of minutes in month one — and ask again. Margo's line does the work: *"One day isn't margin. One day is a coin flip you're calling in September of next year."* Kestrel bought six days of margin for $2,100. Close with → Chapter 29 — Instructor Notes
October 1 of Year 2
thirteen days of margin. Push substantial completion 223 days and you land near the end of April in Year 3. → Construction Management
the TIA answer, reproduced by a different route, which is exactly the cross-check you should always run. → Construction Management
October 6, Year 1
roughly twenty weeks earlier than the same information would have been needed under a stick-built sequence. → Construction Management
Odessa Pruitt
Ironbridge's crane operator on Northgate, twenty-six years in the seat — refused a pick at 3:40 on a Friday afternoon. Gusts were running above the limit for the piece and the crew wanted to finish the sequence and go home. Hank Duffy's foreman pushed. She said no. **Neil Bhandari**, Ironbridge's li → Construction Management
on a budget that had already been set too low
which is exactly how a bid error becomes a management crisis. When there is no room in the number, every recovery decision gets made under pressure: you buy the cheapest mechanical sub, you push the crews, you skip the T&M tickets because there is no time, and you accelerate at premium rates to prot → Construction Management
On general conditions alone it is a close call
the effort must save nearly the entire projected remaining slip to pay for itself. **The moment liquidated damages are live it is not close at all**, at under seven days. That asymmetry is why make-ready looks like overhead on a job with float and like the cheapest thing on the page on a job without → Appendix J — Answers to Selected Exercises
On the schedule arithmetic alone, no
you would be spending $74,000 to avoid $31,360. The city has to want those eleven days for a reason worth $42,640, and if the grant-funded programming start is genuinely worth that, this becomes a change order conversation about who pays for acceleration, not a Kestrel decision. → Appendix B — CPM Scheduling Workbook
on top of the face of the WRB
the membrane's upper edge sits on the outside of the WRB. Specification Section 07 27 00 (Air Barriers) and the manufacturer's published installation instructions both require the WRB to lap **over** the top leg of the head flashing membrane, shingle fashion. Sheet A-321, the wall sections, shows it → Construction Management
once, as a physical location
five feet outside the building line — and then assigns *everything* on each side of it, rather than listing systems by name. Curtis's gaps all came from list-based scope ("sanitary, storm, and domestic water") that failed the moment a fifth system existed. **Boundary-based scope survives systems you → Construction Management
one
the OSHA construction standard is the highest-value single choice — and spend twenty minutes in it this week, looking up something specific about a building you can see. The habit of going to a primary source instead of to somebody's summary of it is the difference between a manager who knows things → Construction Management
one named signer
not the foreman, not the project manager, not you. A signature is where pressure lands, and a rule naming exactly one signer means the pressure has exactly one place to go and that person knows it is coming. → Chapter 22 — Discussion Guide
a queue, which is your constraint made visible on the ground, at full size, for free. A row of houses at the same stage is never a coincidence and never bad luck. Then price the six weeks: 42 days at the broken rate cost **$22,500 of gross margin**, about a third of one house's margin, spent on a di → Chapter 37 — Discussion Guide
so no pads and no moves, but a hard limit of roughly **50 productive picks per day.** → Construction Management
one-page memo in week 22
before she asked, which is the entire point. It said: here is the 23-day slip, here is the submittal chain that produced it, **eleven of those days are ours in the most literal sense — the package sat on a desk in our office** — here is the recovery plan, here is the $168,000 we are spending on it, → Construction Management
one-page-per-community revision log
date, what changed, which lots are affected, who was told. Twenty minutes per revision, and it is the cheapest insurance in residential construction. → Chapter 37 — Instructor Notes
open ends
activities with no successor, which the calculation will treat as unimportant because nothing depends on them. An activity with no successor gets enormous float and disappears from your attention until the week it stops the job. → Construction Management
Open shop (merit shop)
A labor model in which the contractor hires directly rather than through union referral, sets its own wage structure, and trains through its own or industry programs. Contrasted with the union model; each has genuine advantages, and many contractors run both depending on the market and the owner. Se → Appendix I — Glossary
essentially a tie, which means the decision turns entirely on variance and on who absorbs it. → Construction Management
order 536 CY
Ready-mix arrives in whole loads, typically 10 CY: 536 ÷ 10 = 53.6 → **54 loads = 540 CY** → Construction Management
Order of precedence
The contractual rule deciding which document wins when the contract documents conflict. **There is no universal order** — some contracts say the documents are complementary with no hierarchy, some state an explicit ranking, and some say the most stringent requirement governs. Find your clause, copy → Appendix I — Glossary
OSHA
The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, whose construction standards are at 29 CFR Part 1926. Its **General Duty Clause** catches recognized serious hazards that no specific standard addresses, and its multi-employer worksite policy is why a general contractor can be cited for a haza → Appendix I — Glossary
**Rivermont Elementary School #12** — $22.4M, hard-bid **design-bid-build lump sum**, public owner, prevailing wage, 100% payment and performance bonds. Curtis Boone's job. Used to teach public bidding, bid shopping, prevailing wage, low-bid dynamics, and disputes. *(Derived in Ch 13 and now canonic → Continuity Tracker — *Construction Management*
Out-of-sequence progress
Work that started before its logical predecessor finished, showing up in a schedule update. It is not automatically wrong — the field often finds a better sequence — but it means the schedule no longer models reality, and how the software handles it (**retained logic** versus → Appendix I — Glossary
Outside Kestrel
**Priyanka "Pri" Sethi** — *Owner's representative, Meridian Health System.* Smart, fair, budget-constrained, answerable to a board and a hospital operations committee. Gave the verbal go-ahead on CO #14 and has to live with it too. - **Dale Whitcomb** — *Project Architect, Halvorsen + Pike.* Protec → Continuity Tracker — *Construction Management*
payroll administration, safety staff, training, the tool room — adds $2.20. That build-up lands at **$54.12** (factor 1.59). Neither is wrong. **Say which build-up your rate came from**, every time, and never move a rate between a private open-shop job and a prevailing-wage public job without rebuil → Appendix A — Construction Math Reference
overstate
asserting a large number early, which the other side then spends two years attacking, and every subsequent number you produce inherits that credibility problem. Or they **leave it blank**, which lets the other side argue that no impact was known at the time and the claim was invented later. → Appendix D — Forms and Templates Library
overstated
the existing abutment footings are shallower than the plans suggest, and actual will run closer to 11,100 CY. And the drilled shaft quantity is **understated** — the rock line is deeper on the east bank, so shafts will run closer to 3,910 LF. → Construction Management
Owner
implied warranty of the documents it furnished; may pursue the A/E for breach of the standard of care | **Design-builder** — it drew it and it builds it (owner still owns its own criteria and furnished data) | **Owner**, mostly — but the CM owns what its GMP assumptions and precon review covered | * → Construction Management
Owner's contingency
See **contingency**. The owner's own reserve, held *outside* the construction contract, for scope changes, design errors, and decisions the owner has not made yet. An owner carrying none is the owner value-engineering the lobby in month fourteen. → Appendix I — Glossary
owner's project requirements
a plain-language statement of how you expect the building to perform. Everything else is measured against it | | **Design and construction documents** | Reviews the design against those requirements, and makes sure the specifications actually require the testing, documentation, and training you will → Appendix E — The Owner's Companion: For Owners, Developers, Facility Managers, and Homeowners
Owner's representative
The person who acts for the owner day to day: reviewing pay applications, attending meetings, making or routing decisions, and protecting the owner's budget and schedule. Their authority is defined by the contract, and a verbal go-ahead from a well-meaning owner's rep is not a change order. See [Cha → Appendix I — Glossary
a $340,000 mobilization line on a $6.8 million job gets a phone call, and now the relationship starts with you explaining yourself. → Construction Management
Ownership
a log nobody has to check, and a question asked four weeks early | | Assistant project manager | 2–6 | One job's commercial machinery | **Forecasting** — owning a number and revising it honestly, on time | | Project manager | 5–12 | One job end to end, cost and client | **Delegation and hard convers → Construction Management
P
Part 1904
the recordkeeping rule — because it defines what a recordable case actually is, and half the arguments you will have about a TRIR are arguments about a definition somebody has never read. Finally, read the **General Duty Clause** in the Occupational Safety and Health Act itself; it is one sentence a → Construction Management
Part A
conceptual recall | No key. The answer is in the chapter, and looking it up is the exercise | | **Part D** — judgment and ethics | **No key by design.** The standard is in "What a strong Part D answer contains," above | | **Part M** — mixed and interleaved | Selected numeric parts are answered in th → Appendix J — Answers to Selected Exercises
Partly yours
construction activity pollution prevention is a prerequisite that you execute | | **Water Efficiency** | Indoor and outdoor water use, metering, process water | Almost none — design and product selection, though you install and commission it | | **Energy and Atmosphere** | Energy performance, commis → Construction Management
passes
the opposite of Northgate's corridor, which is exactly why you run both and never assume which will fail. (e) **The makeup air moves, not the grease duct.** Split it into two flatter runs on either side of the grease duct at the same elevation — you have 23 inches of spare width — and the crossing d → Construction Management
passive survivability
the building's ability to stay within survivable temperature limits for a defined period with no power at all, which is largely an envelope and thermal-mass question. → Construction Management
path
it is a **rate**. The interesting question is not "which activities are critical" but "**which trade's production rate is lowest, and is it lower than the rate the line needs?**" CPM has no vocabulary for that question. Line of balance is built out of nothing else. → Construction Management
Pay-if-paid
Subcontract language making the owner's payment to the general contractor a → Appendix I — Glossary
Pay-if-paid versus pay-when-paid
see below | | **Retention** | Withholds a percentage until completion | It is their profit, held | Statutory caps and release timing vary by state; public work often differs from private | | **Change orders** | Procedure for pricing and directing changes | No written direction, no payment | Whether → Construction Management
Pay-when-paid
Subcontract language about *timing*: the general contractor pays the subcontractor a reasonable time after being paid, but the obligation to pay survives regardless. One word separates it from pay-if-paid and that word is the entire risk of owner insolvency. See [Chapter 16](../part-03-preconstructi → Appendix I — Glossary
A surety bond guaranteeing that subcontractors and suppliers will be paid. On public work it substitutes for the lien rights that cannot attach to public property, and bond claims carry their **own** notice and suit deadlines that are frequently different from lien deadlines. See [Chapter 5](../part → Appendix I — Glossary
the architect does not work for the GC and the GC does not work for the architect, which surprises newcomers constantly and explains a great deal of friction. > > Below the general contractor, the structure fans out: fifteen to forty subcontracts, one per trade package. Below several of those subcon → Construction Management
Penalty maximums are adjusted periodically
they are inflation-indexed and they have moved substantially over the years. I am not going to print a number that will be wrong by the time you read this. Look up OSHA's current penalty schedule. What you should carry instead is the *shape*: willful and repeat sit roughly an order of magnitude abov → Construction Management
Percent complete
The fraction of work finished, measured five different ways — units installed, cost-to-cost, milestones, level of effort, or somebody's judgment — that give five different answers. Pick the method before the work starts and write it down, or the number will migrate toward whatever is convenient. See → Appendix I — Glossary
The accounting method that recognizes revenue and gross profit as work progresses rather than at completion, usually measured cost-to-cost. It is why a contractor's income statement depends on project managers' cost-to-complete forecasts, and why an optimistic forecast is an accounting problem and n → Appendix I — Glossary
Performance bond
A surety bond guaranteeing completion of the contract if the contractor defaults. It covers the cost to complete, generally does **not** cover your own impact costs or the weeks lost while the surety investigates, and it is not insurance — see **surety**. See [Chapter 5](../part-01-foundations/chapt → Appendix I — Glossary
performance mockup
a full-size assembly built off site and subjected to air, water, and structural testing before production release. Where does it go in the chain? Between approval and production release, and it can add several weeks. Add a 35 CD mockup-and-test step after step 5 and recompute. Notice what it does to → Construction Management
permanent lateral system
the connections *and* the diaphragm that delivers load to it — is complete and the erection engineer says so. → Construction Management
Permanent savings to the owner: $278,580
the fee compression; the contractor genuinely earns less. **Risk moved, not removed: $520,000** — the $330,000 of contingency the hard bidder does not carry plus the $190,000 escalation gamble. **Real added cost under DBB: $580,200** — the cold-pricing premium plus the longer general-conditions peri → Construction Management
Permanent services
the real ones. Northgate needs a **3,000 A, 480/277V** electrical service, a domestic water tap and meter, a fire service line with a backflow preventer, a sanitary connection, a natural gas service, and telecom. Every one of them is a formal *service application* with the utility, and every one has → Construction Management
Permissibility varies enormously by jurisdiction
some allow greywater reuse broadly, some restrict it severely, some are silent, and the rules change. Confirm with the AHJ and the health department before the system is designed, not after it is installed. → Construction Management
Permit matrix
every permit, authority, lead time, prerequisite | Dani Okonkwo (PE) | **NTP − 45** | You discover a 6-week permit on the day you needed it | | 2 | **Baseline CPM schedule** — submitted and accepted | Wei Chen | **NTP + 14** | Every later delay claim starts from a schedule nobody agreed to | | 3 | * → Construction Management
Phased turnover means phased everything
phased life safety, phased fire alarm, phased utilities, phased inspections, phased punch lists, and a written matrix showing exactly which areas are the owner's and which are yours on which date. The day an area becomes the owner's, your insurance, your security, and your housekeeping obligations c → Construction Management
physical
a mockup, and then a benchmark. 4. **The crew that will do the work must stand in front of the mockup.** Every crew change re-triggers the walk. 5. Every hold point needs a named party, a notification lead time, and a written release. If it lacks any of the three, it is not a hold point. 6. Close th → Construction Management
Pick one upcoming concealment event
a ceiling, a shaft wall, a floor topping, a backfill — and write the close-in release checklist for it. One page, one signature, twenty minutes per thousand square feet. 6. **Ask one foreman on your job:** *"Can I see the approved submittal you're installing from?"* Whatever the answer is, you have → Construction Management
pick schedule
a next-day list of what gets hoisted, by whom, in what order, built the afternoon before. This chapter gave you the number behind that discipline: **$621 per productive pick-hour**, and closer to **$989** with a raising gang standing under it. Twenty minutes of daily indecision is $47,800 over an el → Construction Management
Planned value (PV)
In earned value, the budgeted value of the work *scheduled* to be complete by the data date. It is the yardstick both EV and AC are measured against. See [Chapter 30](../part-06-project-controls/chapter-30-earned-value-management/index.md). → Appendix I — Glossary
plug
your own number to carry if no quote arrives | No plug means a blank on bid day and a panic decision | | **T − 2 days** | Confirm coverage: which divisions have at least two real bidders? Chase the gaps | A division with one quote is a division with no market | | **T − 1 day** | Bid form filled exce → Construction Management
plug number
a carried value for a package you do not yet have a real, leveled quote for. Plugs are legitimate and universal. They are also how people get hurt, so: → Construction Management
Plus what it costs that is not on the invoice:
Pad B occupies the east drive. Two level-topping pours must be resequenced or moved to Saturdays. - Two cranes with overlapping swing radii is a materially different risk picture. It requires a written plan, continuous supervision, and a discipline that a job under schedule pressure is exactly the w → Construction Management
point cloud
a dense three-dimensional measurement of everything the instrument could see, typically accurate to a small fraction of an inch at building ranges. → Construction Management
poor schedule instrument
SV and SPI are denominated in dollars of work volume and converge to zero and 1.000 at completion regardless of how late the job is — so the completion date comes from the CPM, and the honest answer to "give me one number" is that there are two, and here is why. → Construction Management
portable
a journeyman carries them from contractor to contractor — which is one reason craft workers stay in the trade. - **Apprenticeship.** Joint apprenticeship and training committees run multi-year programs funded by a per-hour training contribution. **You are not building and paying for a training syste → Construction Management
Pour and it goes wrong
plastic shrinkage cracking across 16,500 SF, evaluation by Caldwell Structural, epoxy injection and topping repair, plus delay to the floor covering | $40,000–$90,000 and unrecoverable schedule | | **Don't pour** — 12-person crew redeployed (not sent home), pump truck cancelled inside 24 hr, 20 read → Construction Management
PPC (percent plan complete)
Weekly commitments completed divided by commitments made, scored strictly: a task is complete or it is not, with no partial credit. Its purpose is not to measure production but to measure whether the plan can be **relied on by the next trade** — and ninety percent of a handoff is zero handoffs. Trac → Appendix I — Glossary
Preliminary notice
An early statutory notice a lien claimant must serve, often within days or weeks of first furnishing labor or material, to preserve later lien or bond-claim rights. It is not a threat and not an accusation; it is paperwork, and firms that treat it as an insult lose valid claims. → Appendix I — Glossary
Preparation
used the role brief; knew their own numbers and constraints | 20% | | **Argument quality** — reasoning grounded in the documents and the arithmetic, not volume | 30% | | **Listening** — responded to what the other party actually said and to their constraints | 20% | | **Debrief insight** — can artic → Grading Rubrics
Prequalification
Evaluating a contractor or subcontractor's financial capacity, safety record, experience, references, and current workload before allowing them to bid. It filters out failure modes price cannot see, and it does not tell you whether the specific crew that shows up will be any good. See [Chapter 16](. → Appendix I — Glossary
Prerequisite work not complete
the trade before us wasn't done | 21 | 24.4% | 24.4% | | 2 | **Material not on site**, wrong material, or damaged | 14 | 16.3% | 40.7% | | 3 | **Information** — RFI unanswered, or the answer was unusable | 12 | 14.0% | 54.7% | | 4 | **Labor** — crew reassigned, short-handed, or pulled to another zon → Construction Management
president or chief operating officer
because the estimator sees every job before it exists and learns the whole company's cost structure | | **Scheduling / project controls** | CPM development and maintenance, updates, time-impact analysis, earned value, cost-and-schedule integration, forensic schedule work. Wei Chen's world | Systems → Construction Management
Pressuring a crew to "make it up"
the subtlest and most damaging, because it never gets written down and it feels like leadership. *"I need this deck by Friday, I don't care how."* No directive, no plan, no added resources, no acknowledgment that the schedule slipped for reasons the crew did not cause. What has actually been communi → Chapter 20 — Discussion Guide
Prevailing wage
The wage and fringe rate that must be paid by classification on covered public work, set by a government wage determination. The classification follows the *work performed*, not the job title, and misclassification is the most common violation. See [Chapter 20](../part-04-field-operations/chapter-20 → Appendix I — Glossary
Prevention + appraisal = $482,000
36% of the total. This is the money you *choose* to spend. - **Internal + external failure = $846,000** — 64% of the total. This is the money the job spends on your behalf whether you choose it or not. → Construction Management
Pri did not do this
she was moving fast on a Thursday — and the distinction is the point of the section. Ask them for the tell: an owner's rep who consistently instructs by phone, never confirms in writing, and **becomes evasive when you send confirming letters.** The confirming letter is not just your record. It is yo → Chapter 31 — Discussion Guide
Price a change in five layers
direct cost at burdened rates, credits at the contract's reduced markup, contract markups on the correct base, time with extended general conditions, and substantiated impact. 5. **Prove disruption with a measured mile**, including the scrub, and state why giving back the hours that are yours makes → Chapter 31 — Instructor Notes
Price a pursuit
242 man-hours, roughly **$28,000** — and divide by the hit rate to get the real cost of a win. 4. **Read a bid tab as a diagnostic**, using the spread from low to second, and say what a 6-to-10 percent gap means about your own number. 5. **Write a qualifications page** that is honest and testable, a → Chapter 15 — Instructor Notes
Price an overtime hour correctly
burdened rate plus the *loaded half-time premium on base wage*, about 1.38×, not 1.5× the burdened rate — and then price the efficiency loss on top of it. 5. **Design a crew** using marginal cost per unit rather than headcount, and identify the point at which an additional person costs more per squa → Chapter 20 — Instructor Notes
Price every option twice
direct dollars and days at your daily exposure rate. Northgate: **$10,650/CD.** Willow Street: **$2,800/CD.** Know yours by heart. - **Price the options you intend to reject.** That is what turns a number into a decision. - **Do not quote a multiplier.** Give the shape: a detailer's afternoon in the → Construction Management
Price one identical scope four ways
lump sum, GMP, cost-plus, unit price — and say who absorbed the gap between expected and actual cost in each. 2. **State what is inside and what is outside a GMP guarantee**, with at least four items on each side of the ledger. 3. **Classify a cost** as cost of the work, general conditions, or fee, → Chapter 4 — Instructor Notes
pricing
run the eight questions, name the hazards, buy the controls, put their cost in the acceleration number, and watch the leading indicators weekly with a threshold that triggers a stop-and-rebalance. **The error at Northgate was never the acceleration. It was accelerating without pricing the hazard it → Chapter 24 — Discussion Guide
Print your two notice periods on a card
cost and time, separately — and tape it inside the front cover of your project notebook. Add the required addressee and delivery method from the notice clause. 3. **Open your change log and add two columns** if they are not there: *date identified* and *date notice given*, adjacent, so the gap is vi → Construction Management
Priyanka Sethi
Pri — Meridian's owner's representative. Meridian's outside construction counsel, who has read every word and flagged forty-one of them. Our chief estimator, → Construction Management
pro forma
a projection of what the finished asset will earn and what it will be worth — and their profit is the difference between what the asset is worth when stabilized and what it cost to create. Two numbers govern them: → Construction Management
procedure
a thing their hands do, repeatedly, correctly, under time pressure — rather than an idea they can hold. Everything else in the book can be learned by understanding it well. This one cannot. → Chapter 14 — Instructor Notes
procurement branch
structural steel, the gym floor system, kitchen equipment, and the rooftop units all have submittal-and-lead-time chains, and at least one of them will drive your job. → Construction Management
procurement chain
prepare a submittal, get it reviewed, have steel rolled and delivered. Neither chain touches the other until they merge at J, steel erection, which needs both a delivered building's worth of steel and a slab to run the crane on. That merge point is where the project's duration is decided. → Construction Management
product
buy this window, install this thickness. The performance path puts part of the requirement on an **outcome** — the assembled building has to behave a certain way. Products can be verified by submittal. Outcomes can only be verified by test. **So the performance path silently converts a procurement o → Construction Management
Product data
A submittal type consisting of manufacturers' literature, catalog cuts, and performance data for a specified product. Distinguished from a **shop drawing**, which is prepared specifically for this project. See [Chapter 25](../part-05-communication-and-documentation/chapter-25-submittals-rfis-documen → Appendix I — Glossary
Production is below the estimate
the operation is taking more hours per cubic yard than estimated (harder material, longer cycle, a fleet-matching error like [Case Study 2](case-study-02.md)). Your cost code should show *hours* against *quantity* and catch this immediately. 2. **Idle and standby time** — the machine is on site and → Construction Management
Production rate
Output per unit of labor input — square feet per man-hour, cubic yards per hour — and the basis of both estimating and scheduling. It comes from your own historical data first, a subcontractor's committed rate second, and a published table a distant third. See [Chapter 12](../part-03-preconstruction → Appendix I — Glossary
Productivity is the only one that is a prediction
it depends on crew skill, access, weather, congestion, sequence, and morale, none of which exist yet. It is where estimates go wrong, and it is why the Northgate slab-on-grade example in §13.6 is dangerous: an ordinary 20% productivity miss on one placement is $8,124, and Kestrel owns every dollar o → Construction Management
professional standard of care
the care and skill ordinarily exercised by design professionals on similar work — not a warranty that the result will be fit for the owner's unstated purpose. Those are very different standards. A warranty means "it will work." A standard of care means "we were not negligent." - **Insurance follows → Construction Management
Profit is an accounting opinion about the future
it is computed from a forecast of what the job will cost, produced by a project manager, and it is not money. **Cash is a fact about Friday** — it either is in the account or it is not, and no forecast changes it. A job can be profitable on every application and consume cash for twelve consecutive m → Construction Management
Progress override
A scheduling calculation setting in which out-of-sequence work is allowed to proceed without waiting for its predecessor, generally producing an earlier (and often optimistic) completion date. Compare **retained logic**. Know which setting your schedule uses, because it changes the answer. See [Chap → Appendix I — Glossary
project charter
your role, your stakeholders, and a written definition of what success means. Keep it open; this checkpoint sits on top of it and makes it specific. → Construction Management
project controls
cost, time, and money. [Chapter 28](../../part-06-project-controls/chapter-28-cost-control/index.md) builds the cost-code structure and the cost report, and asks the only question that matters at month six: are you making money, or do you just have a lot of cash in the account? Then [Chapter 29](../ → Construction Management
Project manual
The bound volume containing the bidding requirements, contract forms, conditions of the contract, and the specifications. "Specifications" and "project manual" are used loosely as synonyms; strictly, the specifications are one part of the manual. See [Chapter 7](../part-01-foundations/chapter-07-rea → Appendix I — Glossary
a document created in the ordinary course of the project's business, on the project's forms, kept in the project's files — and a **personal diary** kept by an individual. People will tell you confidently that one is discoverable and the other is not. Be careful with that advice. Whether a personal d → Construction Management
proposes a resolution with a reason
and the reason is expressed in terms the architect cares about (equipment clearance, approved casework, accessibility), not in terms the contractor cares about (it is easier). → Construction Management
Proprietary specification
A specification naming particular manufacturers or products. *Closed* proprietary specifications name products with no substitution permitted; *open* ones add "or approved equal." Closed specifications remove your pricing options and are sometimes restricted on public work. See [Chapter 7](../part-0 → Appendix I — Glossary
prototype
schedule 25 to 30 percent more time, walk it at every stage with the trade leads, write down every field change, and update the plan set and the price list before house two. About eight hours of somebody's attention. 2. **A plan revision mid-community.** A discontinued window, a changed truss bearin → Construction Management
Proximate
a condition present at the moment of the event | Shift-start tag verification added to the pre-task plan, initialed; red DO-NOT-USE tags stocked on every landing | Prevents *this* failure mode. Cheap, fast, verifiable. | | **2** | Scaffold modified by a trade that did not erect it, with no re-inspec → Construction Management
Public procurement law often forbids it outright
waiving claims and sharing profit pools does not fit most competitive-bidding statutes. **Insurance is complicated**, because standard professional and general liability policies were not written for a mutual waiver among project participants. And it **fails badly with an immature team**: a shared p → Construction Management
Publish what was learned
even one paragraph in a lessons-learned file. A pilot that produces a documented negative result is worth money, because it stops the same idea from being re-proposed by a vendor in eighteen months. - **Never let a kill land on a person's performance review.** Do it once and you will never get anoth → Construction Management
The list of incomplete or defective items remaining at substantial completion. Three things do not belong on it: incomplete *work* (that is a completion issue, not a punch item), damage caused after installation (that is a protection and backcharge issue), and design changes. Continuous punching by → Appendix I — Glossary
Purchase order (PO)
A contract for *goods* rather than services, governed in the United States by the Uniform Commercial Code rather than by common-law contract rules. The distinction matters for warranties, remedies, and what happens when delivery is late. See [Chapter 16](../part-03-preconstruction/chapter-16-procure → Appendix I — Glossary
Pursue formally
and price the pursuit honestly | | Proofs strong, number moderate | **Negotiate** with a position paper and a real range | | Entitlement strong, causation weak | **Negotiate early, expect a discount.** Consider time-only relief that releases liquidated damages | | Notice was blown | **Get advice imm → Construction Management
Q
Q3 close of Year 3
two months before Yusuf Adebayo forces the issue, with only the Q1, Q2, and Q3 columns above in front of you. Terrell Vance outranks you. Hollis Prine signs your paycheck and does not like conflict. → Construction Management
Qualifications and clarifications
The page of a bid stating what your number includes, excludes, and assumes. It is the most valuable page in any bid; a bid without one is a bid whose scope will be decided later by whoever argues better. See [Chapter 15](../part-03-preconstruction/chapter-15-bidding-and-proposals/index.md). → Appendix I — Glossary
qualifications page
numbered, enforceable, one line per open decision? | | 3 | Does every "TBD" on the drawings appear either as an allowance with a written definition or as an exclusion? | | 4 | Is the contingency **bottom-up** against a risk register, and is it sized for the documents I actually have? | | 5 | Is the → Construction Management
Qualified person
Someone who, by degree, certificate, professional standing, or demonstrated knowledge and experience, can solve problems relating to particular work. Distinguished from a → Appendix I — Glossary
Quality assurance (QA)
The **system that prevents defects**: planning, procedures, installer qualification, mockups, pre-installation conferences, submittal review, and getting approved documents to the people doing the work. QA happens *before* the work. See [Chapter 23](../part-04-field-operations/chapter-23-quality-man → Appendix I — Glossary
quality assurance program
three levels of increasing rigor, with the required inspection tasks and material verification listed for each — and your specification will name a level. It also carries the sampling and testing requirements for mortar, grout, prisms, and units. If you are building the Willow Street CMU inspection → Construction Management
Quality control (QC)
The **activities that verify conformance**: inspection, testing, measurement, checklists, punch walks. QC happens *during and after* the work and can only tell you what already happened. If your quality program is entirely QC, you have an inspection program. See [Chapter 23](../part-04-field-operati → Appendix I — Glossary
Quantity takeoff
Measuring and listing the quantities of work from the drawings, in the units the work is bought and installed in. It is the foundation of every estimate, and the most common error is not arithmetic but units — square feet of concrete instead of cubic yards, wall area instead of contact area. See [Ch → Appendix I — Glossary
Quantum
The amount of a claim; the third of the three proofs, alongside entitlement and causation. British and international usage more than American, but you will meet it in FIDIC-world documents and in expert reports. See [Chapter 33](../part-06-project-controls/chapter-33-claims-and-delay-analysis/index. → Appendix I — Glossary
R
raising gang
typically a connector pair, a hooker-on, a signal person, and a crane — sets steel; bolt-up and plumbing-up crews follow behind it. → Construction Management
a seasoned project manager with 22 years in commercial construction who has built schools, a hospital tower, two mid-rise office buildings, and a convention-center expansion. He started as a field engineer stacking submittals, got promoted too fast, lost money on a job, learned why, and has been tea → Continuity Tracker — *Construction Management*
Read a job in three percentages
time elapsed, EV ÷ BAC, AC ÷ BAC — and say what the gap between the second and third means. 3. **Explain why SV and SPI are not schedule**, including the mechanism by which they converge to zero and 1.000 at completion on a project that finishes a year late. 4. **Produce all four EACs** and, more im → Chapter 30 — Instructor Notes
Read a set of construction documents
locate information across disciplines, apply the order of precedence, and systematically identify conflicts between drawings and specifications. 3. **Perform a documented quantity takeoff** and **build a unit cost from first principles** (crew composition, production rate, burdened labor rate, mater → Syllabus — Construction Project Management
Read A201
in particular
the general conditions are where changes, claims, notice, indemnity, termination, and dispute resolution actually live, and most contract arguments resolve there rather than in the agreement. *For: anyone administering a building contract. Start here if you start anywhere.* → Construction Management
Read the actual document rather than a summary
including your own. ConsensusDocs and EJCDC publish two other widely used families of construction agreements with meaningfully different risk allocations on several points, and comparing the same clause across all three is the fastest way to understand that risk allocation is a *choice* rather than → Construction Management
Read the clash matrix, not the
total
it converts a meaningless number into four specific phone calls, three about process and one about the building. → Construction Management
Read the clause, not the summary of the clause
and if you are negotiating the contract, this is one of the highest-value sentences you will ever argue about. → Construction Management
Read the supplementary conditions
owner-retained on Northgate, contractor-retained on many jobs, and that single sentence is worth six figures | | Special inspections | Depends | Same question | | Permits and fees not paid by the owner | ✘ | | | Surveying, control, benchmarks, and the as-built survey | Mixed | | → Appendix C — Estimating Reference: CSI Divisions, Unit Costs, Productivity, Waste Factors
structured, paid, classroom instruction, a credential at the end, in both union and open-shop forms; **career-path clarity**, meaning a person can see on one page what it takes to go from helper to apprentice to journeyman to foreman, how long each step takes and what it pays (most companies cannot → Construction Management
Reality capture
Recording existing conditions as measured data: laser scanning, photogrammetry, and 360-degree walkthrough capture. It is the clearest success story in construction technology, because it solves a problem everybody already has — knowing what is actually there before it gets covered. See [Chapter 39] → Appendix I — Glossary
Reasoning on the scores that are not obvious:
*Proposal 1, C = 4 not 5:* it does add work — somebody has to carry a scanner and somebody has to process the data. It scores high because that work sits with the same team that consumes the output, which is the thing that matters. - *Proposal 3, A = 3:* the benefit is genuinely split three ways — o → Construction Management
reclassifies when conditions change
after rain, after vibration, after the sun bakes it | | Protective system choice | Sloping, benching, shoring, or shielding (trench box), selected for the actual soil type and depth | | Engineered design threshold | Excavations deeper than **20 feet** require a protective system designed by a regist → Appendix F — Safety Reference: OSHA Focus Four, Checklists, Competent-Person Duties
recommended
practices
including the widely used estimate classification framework that ties expected accuracy to design maturity, and **RP 29R-03 on forensic schedule analysis**, which is the standard reference for delay-analysis method selection. It administers cost and planning/scheduling professional certifications. * → Bibliography and Further Reading
the contract set redlined to actual conditions, incorporating RFIs, change orders, field routing | **Weekly**, redlined in a distinct color, initialed and dated; final set 30 CD before SC | Field engineer | Somebody reconstructs eighteen months of field changes from photographs and memory. It takes → Appendix D — Forms and Templates Library
Record drawings
The set showing what was actually built, including field changes, RFI answers, and routing that differs from the design. They are a **daily habit**, not a closeout task; a set reconstructed in the final month is a work of fiction that the owner will rely on for thirty years. See [Chapter 25](../part → Appendix I — Glossary
Record the call in Monday's daily report
date, clock time, that it was a phone call, who was on it, the exact scope, what Kestrel advised, the confirming letter number, and the ticket series opened. If no work is performed, record **"no work performed."** 6. **Get every ticket signed the same day**, with the signature block stating that si → Construction Management
record-creating instrument
frequently a self-executing one. Many owner-contractor agreements, many sets of general conditions, and many Division 01 administrative-requirements sections provide that minutes are **deemed accepted unless a party objects in writing within a stated period.** The period varies enormously: some cont → Construction Management
reduced subcontract value
split the package by area and give them half, with the second half optional on performance; (3) a **performance and payment bond** paid for by you as an add to the subcontract, if the arithmetic still beats the next bidder; (4) **weekly manpower reporting with a stated minimum**, backed by the suppl → Construction Management
Refuse #4
a CM who lets an owner "save" money by deleting the reserve for identified risk has done the owner harm. - **D3.** Strong answers: call the bidder and scope-check specifically rather than generally; compare against the other four to see whether the gap is one bidder low or four bidders high; check f → Midterm Examination
Regulatory certificates
occupancy, fire marshal, elevator, health department, backflow | At substantial completion | | **Software licenses, controls passwords, and administrator accounts in your name** | **At substantial completion, in writing, tested** | | **Final lien waivers** from all tiers, and consent of surety to fi → Appendix E — The Owner's Companion: For Owners, Developers, Facility Managers, and Homeowners
release gate
and, critically, whether that gate is *your approval date* or *the fabricator's release date*, which you will find out by asking. - The **submittal due date**, back-scheduled with one resubmittal cycle included. - The **name of the one person** who is responsible for it. → Construction Management
reliability
a condition you guarantee — but never for pressure. A general contractor who tries to take the five days by demanding them gets a foreman who says 26 and privately means 30. → Construction Management
Relocations and conflicts
the existing utilities in your way. Willow Street has an existing 8-inch water main crossing the site that must be relocated. That is not a task; it is a small project with its own design, its own approval, its own contractor, its own shutdown window, and its own set of people who must be notified b → Construction Management
Removing shores
anything that is holding up an elevated slab or beam — is a structural event. The moment the last shore under a bay is loosened, that slab carries its own weight, plus everything stacked on it, plus whatever is coming down through the shores from the floor above. The criterion is **specified strengt → Construction Management
Removing side forms
the vertical faces of a wall, a column, or a beam — releases nothing structural. The member is holding itself up already. The criterion is whether the concrete has enough strength to resist damage from the stripping operation itself: no spalling, no edge damage, no surface tearing. This threshold is → Construction Management
Renata Oyelaran
construction management degree, two internships, wanted to run projects from the day she arrived. - **Cass Petrelli** — construction management degree, four summers framing houses with an uncle, never comfortable in a chair. - **Marisol Ibarra** — civil engineering degree, quiet, unnervingly good wi → Construction Management
Rent
a fleet discount can move break-even past 4,000 hr/yr | | Your shop discipline is genuinely good (low repair reserve, PM on the hour meter) | **Own** — break-even drops hard | | Short duration, specialized machine, or you do not want the operator-qualification burden | **Operated and maintained rent → Construction Management
request for information
a written question from the contractor to the design team when the documents do not tell you something you need to know to build. You will send hundreds of them. [Chapter 25](../../part-05-communication-and-documentation/chapter-25-submittals-rfis-document-control/index.md) is about doing it well. I → Construction Management
collapse or a worker down in the trench | **Would-be rescuers are killed in trench collapses.** Untrained rescue is the most lethal step on this list | Written rescue plan **specific to this excavation**; 911 called immediately; **no untrained entry, ever**; crew briefed that the correct action is t → Appendix D — Forms and Templates Library
reserved mill rolling
slot
a discrete, external, unbuyable event. Margo said it in a meeting in month one, and I wrote it on the back of an agenda, and then buyout happened and nobody looked at it again. The question that would have surfaced it is a single sentence, asked at buyout ([Chapter 16](../../part-03-preconstruction/ → Construction Management
Reshoring
Shores installed *after* formwork is stripped, to redistribute load from newly placed floors above to floors below that have not reached full strength. It is not the same as leaving original shoring in place (**backshoring**), the difference matters structurally, and the reshoring layout is usually → Appendix I — Glossary
Resolve if convenient / route elsewhere (3):
**#5** — conduits through a rated wall with no firestop assembly modeled. Not a geometric conflict. It is a **specification and submittal item**: confirm the listed firestop system and who installs it. Log it against the submittal register, not the clash log. (This is exactly the scope gap Chapter 1 → Construction Management
resource histogram
how many people are on your site, over time. Northgate's total craft effort is roughly **412,000 man-hours**, peaking at **210 workers in week 61**. → Construction Management
Resource loading
Assigning crews, man-hours, or equipment to schedule activities so the plan shows what it will take to execute. Without it, a schedule is a set of dates nobody has checked against the number of people who can physically fit in the building. See [Chapter 14](../part-03-preconstruction/chapter-14-sche → Appendix I — Glossary
Resource the cycle completely before floor 1
the second half-floor form set and the third level of reshores if the cycle needs them, a testing agreement that includes weekend breaks, and a rule that MEP sleeve and hanger layouts are approved **one floor ahead** with a named due date per floor. Cost: on the order of $60,000 to $75,000, most of → Construction Management
Retainage
(a) on completed work, (b) on stored material | Contract percentage applied to each | | 6 | **Total earned less retainage** | Line 4 − Line 5 | | 7 | Less previous certificates for payment | Line 6 from the prior application, **as certified** | | 8 | **Current payment due** | Line 6 − Line 7 | | 9 | → Construction Management
Retainage (retention)
A percentage withheld from each progress payment until stated completion milestones. It is pure cash-flow cost, it flows down to your subcontractors, and **retention limits, reduction thresholds, and release timing are set by statute in many states and vary widely.** Check your jurisdiction before a → Appendix I — Glossary
Retained logic
A scheduling calculation setting in which out-of-sequence work must still respect its original predecessor relationships, generally producing a more conservative completion date. Compare **progress override**. See [Chapter 29](../part-06-project-controls/chapter-29-schedule-control/index.md). → Appendix I — Glossary
Retention
also called retainage — is a percentage of each progress payment that the owner withholds until the work is complete or nearly complete. It is the oldest and bluntest security device in construction. → Construction Management
Retention is at its maximum
$2,406,200 sitting on Meridian's balance sheet, earning Kestrel nothing. 3. **The remaining work is the least billable work there is.** Punch list, commissioning support, training, O&M manuals, as-builts, final cleaning. It costs money and it moves a percentage almost not at all. 4. **The staff is s → Construction Management
replace head extrusions and receptors, reset glazing, rebuild gypsum returns | | Approvals | H+P (design professional) approved the rework method and the revised shop drawing; Meridian (P. Sethi) accepted the schedule impact; Kestrel and Vantage executed a cost-sharing agreement | | Root cause | The → Construction Management
RFI
a **Request for Information** — that gets a usable answer in one round instead of three, run a drawing set so that no crew ever builds from a superseded sheet, and, the part that separates a project manager from a project administrator, create records today that will still be worth something eight m → Construction Management
RFI (request for information)
A written question about the contract documents, asking for a clarification or interpretation. A good RFI states the question, cites the documents, proposes an answer, and names a required response date — and an RFI response is generally an *interpretation*, not an authorization to change the work. → Appendix I — Glossary
RFI 214
corridor 3-C ceiling height; the duct main elevation conflicts with a structural brace. Issued **March 18**. No answer from Halvorsen + Pike. The main runs the full length of Zone B, so its elevation gates the whole run. 2. **RFI 219** — nurse-call device locations at exam-room casework. Issued **Ma → Construction Management
RFI 221 is unanswered
nobody has confirmed whether the shielding runs slab-to-slab or stops 6 inches above the ceiling, which means the quantity on the purchase order may be wrong. You could be 16 days late for the wrong amount of material. → Construction Management
right and it did not help
you had the document, the number, or the standard, and the conversation still failed. → Construction Management
right to left
from the milestone backward — the first time through. Then walk it left to right to check it. 6. Disagreements are resolved **at the wall, by the two trades involved,** not by escalation. → Construction Management
risk
the distribution of possible outcomes and who owns each one. Consider three ways to buy the same steel package on the same job: → Construction Management
risk management under uncertainty.
**Three activities run continuously:** *anticipation* (what will go wrong and how early can I see it), *allocation* (who owns this risk and what did they get paid to own it), and *communication* (does everyone who needs to know, know — and can I prove it). → Construction Management
Risk register
A table of named risks, each with a probability, an impact, an owner, a response, and a contingency amount. The discipline is the naming: a reserve without a named risk behind it is either fat or a lie. See [Chapter 6](../part-01-foundations/chapter-06-risk-management/index.md). → Appendix I — Glossary
risk-allocation instrument with a price attached
most people have that backwards, and the consequence of having it backwards is that they negotiate the price and accept the clauses. → Chapter 4 — Instructor Notes
Rivermont Elementary School #12
the $22.4M hard-bid public job. The classroom wings are clad in a fiber-cement rainscreen. Here is the assembly at a typical punched aluminum window, exterior to interior: → Construction Management
Rivermont's three general-conditions rates
$2,400.00/CD as bid (Ch 13), $2,642.62/CD as built (Ch 13, Ch 29 CS2), $2,100/CD field-only (Ch 30, Ch 33). §10a. Ch 29 CS2's **$5,142.62/CD** combined ($2,500 LD + $2,642.62 as-built GC) and Ch 30's **$4,600/CD** combined ($2,500 + $2,100) are two different, correctly-labelled measures — and both f → Consistency Audit — *Construction Management: Building the Built World*
Roles, responsibilities, and authority
must state **who can stop work**, by name and by role, and that it includes every worker on site. 3. **Competent- and qualified-person designations by activity, by name**, with employer and backup. 4. **Emergency action plan** — see §F.10. 5. **Medical and first aid** — supplies and AED location; tr → Appendix F — Safety Reference: OSHA Focus Four, Checklists, Competent-Person Duties
Root cause
the system that permitted it | Not "somebody was slow" | | **Fix** — a specific, describable change | A form, a rule, a sequence, a clause | | **Owner (a name)** | Company-level or project-level — say which | | **Due date** | | | Where it is written down going forward | A procedure, a template, a su → Appendix D — Forms and Templates Library
Rough-in
The stage at which systems are installed but not finished or connected: piping, conduit, duct, and boxes in place before walls close and before fixtures and devices are set. It is the phase where above-ceiling coordination either pays off or does not. See [Chapter 10](../part-02-means-and-methods/ch → Appendix I — Glossary
route change
and a route change requires a superintendent, a laydown decision, and two subcontractor conversations. The device measured a problem that was already known and did not touch the thing that would have fixed it. → Construction Management
Routing priority follows degrees of freedom
allocate to the constrained party first: gravity drainage → large ductwork → sprinkler mains → large pressure pipe → branch duct and small pipe → conduit and cable tray. → Construction Management
RTU delivery date
you have just pulled the set a week earlier, and if the units are not on site in week 37 you have made the schedule worse, not better. Get the delivery confirmed in writing from the manufacturer before you re-logic anything. → Construction Management
run a §21.6 load-chart check on the heaviest pick
the largest rooftop unit. Assume a weight, state where you got it, and say so in the plan. Establish the radius from your [Chapter 18](../chapter-18-site-management/index.md) logistics plan, choose a boom length that clears the parapet, deduct block and rigging, compute net capacity and percent of c → Construction Management
Run an update
actual starts, actual finishes, **remaining durations from the data date**, disclosed logic changes — and *calculate* the completion date rather than type it. 2. **Build a float erosion trend table** with a change-per-month column, and name the path that will be controlling before any report filtere → Chapter 29 — Instructor Notes
Run both checks
vertical stack and plan width — before anyone proposes a solution. 2. **Identify the constrained system** using the routing priority convention. It is not always the loudest voice in the room. 3. **Generate at least four options**, including one you expect to reject. Price each with *both* a direct → Construction Management
Run passes 2 and 5 on one assembly
your most expensive one. Put every document that touches it in one pile before you read anything. 5. **Start the discrepancy log today.** Ten fields, every field filled, a dollar figure on every row. A discrepancy with no number does not get attention. 6. **Stamp the prints.** One CURRENT — CONTROL → Construction Management
Run the cavity arithmetic Curtis never ran
12′-0″ floor-to-floor, 18 inches of structure, 9′-0″ ceiling. *(Do this live; it takes two minutes.)* 144 − 18 − 108 = **18 inches.** Then list what has to fit. Then ask at what cavity dimension they would insist on a model regardless of the specification. Make them state a number. → Chapter 10 — Discussion Guide
Run the three gates against yourself
entitlement, causation, damages — and write the finding for each in one sentence, as though you were the party being asked to pay. 4. **Price the pursuit.** Expected value against consultant, counsel, and internal hours at a loaded rate, netted out. → Construction Management
S
same finding as week 34 on the north elevation
a crew running under pressure, doing work nobody had re-planned for. `../safety-teaching-guide.md` asks you to examine every schedule decision for its safety consequence; this is the chapter where that habit gets its final rehearsal, and closeout is when schedule pressure is strongest and least ackn → Chapter 40 — Discussion Guide
same two numbers
quantity and production rate — which is why the schedule and the budget are one conversation and why $10,650 a day is a schedule number. 5. **The software calculates; it does not think.** Every wrong schedule was arithmetically perfect. → Construction Management
Saturday crane days
6 over 11 weeks, dedicated to Summit's roof loads and Crossline's bulk deliveries | 6 × (10 hr × $310 + 10 hr × $64 oiler/signal) | $22,440 | | Saturday premium for Summit and Crossline crews | 6 days × 6 workers × 10 hr × $28 premium | $10,080 | | Two extra Kestrel laborers for hoist-side staging ( → Construction Management
Savings split
The agreed division of unspent GMP contingency and buyout savings between owner and contractor. It is the single most valuable feature an owner gets from an open-book GMP, and owners routinely trade it away for a slightly lower fee, which is usually a bad deal. See [Chapter 4](../part-01-foundations → Appendix I — Glossary
A temporary elevated work platform. The management facts that matter: it must be erected and modified under the supervision of a competent person, it must be inspected before each shift and after anything that could affect its integrity, and **it must be tagged**. The classic failure is a scaffold m → Appendix I — Glossary
Schedule of values (SOV)
The breakdown of the contract sum into line items used to measure progress and generate payment applications. An honest SOV reflects the actual value of each portion of work, including a disclosed allocation of general conditions; see **front-loading** for the dishonest version. See [Chapter 32](../ → Appendix I — Glossary
Scope
**Add** 46 LF of full-height metal-stud partition to the deck (12 ft), one layer of gypsum board each face, painted - **Add** one 4'-0" × 7'-0" pair of hollow-metal doors, frame, and hardware - **Add** 11 LF of nourishment-station casework - **Delete** 22 LF of partition, not yet framed — direct cos → Construction Management
scope and complexity
see the caution below | | | **Capacity and backlog** | 15 | Current contracted work versus annual volume; **crew size available for *your* dates**; named supervision | Your job should not be more than roughly a third of their annual volume | | **References and past performance** | 15 | Their record → Appendix D — Forms and Templates Library
scope creep and the relationship
specifically, undefined scope, late client decisions, and allowance overruns. Cycle time barely matters to them; a custom builder who obsesses over cycle time and neglects the selections schedule will lose money on every job while running an efficient site. Twelve houses a year is not a line. It is → Construction Management
scope cut made under time pressure
the most expensive kind. After the GMP is signed, an underfunded construction contingency lands on the contractor first, then on the relationship, then on the owner anyway, via claims. → Construction Management
Scope gap
Work that no subcontract covers, sitting in the seam between two packages. Gaps are found in a scope sheet before award or discovered in the field at three times the price; they are the single largest avoidable loss in buyout. See [Chapter 16](../part-03-preconstruction/chapter-16-procurement-and-bu → Appendix I — Glossary
Scope of the change
Add **78 LF** of new full-height metal-stud partition to the deck (12 ft), acoustic batt insulation, two layers of 5/8" gypsum board one face, one layer the other face, painted - Demolish **24 LF** of existing partition framing and **620 SF** of hung board, then re-hang and refinish that 620 SF in i → Construction Management
Scope sheet
A written, trade-specific list of what a subcontract package includes and excludes, used to level bids and to write the subcontract. It is the most valuable document in buyout because it is where the seams get closed. See [Chapter 16](../part-03-preconstruction/chapter-16-procurement-and-buyout/inde → Appendix I — Glossary
Screen a look-ahead
take a list of scheduled activities, identify the binding constraint on each, and *remove* the unready ones from the weekly work plan. 3. **Build a constraint log entry** with a category, a named human owner, and a need-by date back-calculated from the activity start. 4. **Compute PPC** and explain → Chapter 27 — Instructor Notes
count against schedule, area against $/SF, tonnage against SF of building? 3. Are units labeled on every line? *(Yes, every line.)* 4. Have all addenda been incorporated, and has the drawing log been reconciled to the **issued-for-bid** revision of every sheet? 5. Do quantities from the enlarged pla → Appendix C — Estimating Reference: CSI Divisions, Unit Costs, Productivity, Waste Factors
Second, 260 LF was above hard ceilings
gypsum lids with no access panels, because access panels were never required for a scope nobody knew existed. And 14 of those locations were the lead-lined gypsum ceilings in the imaging suite, the radio-frequency shielded construction that came out of change order #14 when Meridian's vendor selecte → Construction Management
Second, the contract is usually unit price
a specific, deliberate allocation of risk that I introduced in [Chapter 4](../../part-01-foundations/chapter-04-construction-contracts/index.md) and am now going to make you live inside. → Construction Management
SectionFormat
CSI's standard internal structure for a specification section: Part 1 General, Part 2 Products, Part 3 Execution. Learn it once and you can read any section in any project manual without reorienting. See [Chapter 7](../part-01-foundations/chapter-07-reading-construction-documents/index.md). → Appendix I — Glossary
Self-perform
Work executed by the contractor's own craft workforce rather than subcontracted. It buys schedule control and cost visibility, and it puts productivity risk squarely on your own balance sheet. See [Chapter 13](../part-03-preconstruction/chapter-13-detailed-estimating/index.md). → Appendix I — Glossary
self-performs the majority of the dollar value
earthwork, structures, drainage, paving — and subcontracts only specialties. So the heavy civil manager's core skill is not procurement. It is **production**: getting a fleet of machines and a crew to move a measured quantity of material per hour, day after day, at a cost per unit below the price yo → Construction Management
Sell the as-built model as a deliverable
registered point cloud plus modeled overhead MEP in designated areas, added to Kestrel's CM at Risk proposals | **$66,000** to the owner; **$44,000** to deliver (outside modeling); **$18,000** internal setup for a scope template and a written accuracy-and-reliance statement | Kestrel alone | Owner p → Construction Management
Sent written notice to Wendell Frame
station, time, plan location, measured location, work stopped, request to inspect before disturbance, rights reserved. No dollar figure, no argument. 5. **Opened a cost code**, before anyone knew whether there would be a claim. → Construction Management
Separate a claim into three proofs
entitlement, causation, damages — and diagnose which gate it fails at from a described set of facts. 2. **Select a delay-analysis method** from the five in §33.4.1 given an inventory of records, and state which methods are *unavailable* and why. 3. **Run a windows analysis** across three monthly upd → Chapter 33 — Instructor Notes
September 18
on the contract date, after 565 calendar days, a 23-day steel delay, an acceleration, a change order that got built before it was priced, and a storefront rework in month fourteen. Certificate of occupancy is scheduled for **September 24**. Meridian's move-in crews are staged. The imaging service li → Construction Management
September 18, Year 2
**25 calendar days of project buffer**, in one place, reported monthly, with a name on it. → Construction Management
September 24, Year 2
six calendar days past the contract date, but **seven days ahead of the lease expiry.** → Construction Management
the assumptions, conventions, and boundaries that produced it. Chapter 12's 412,000 SF rested on a weighted average height, an opening-deduction convention, and a furring allowance, three assumptions sitting inside one number. → Construction Management
Set up the day-charge reconciliation now
your daily reports and rain gauge against the agency's statement, every Monday morning, in a spreadsheet with a running total. 8. **Put every permit window on the schedule as a named date constraint** and review them at every monthly update. 9. **Put a pre-numbered force-account ticket book in every → Construction Management
Seven can prevent substantial completion
2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 13, 15 — and item 6 conditionally. What they share: every one is a life-safety system, a required regulatory test or certificate, or a performance requirement the space cannot function without. **None is about appearance and none is a matter of judgment**, because in each case a third → Appendix J — Answers to Selected Exercises
seven or eight minutes
honestly less, since it is a number they have already read. The team is 25 points and deserves close to twenty. → Construction Management
SFCA (square feet of contact area)
The unit of formwork measurement: the area of form face touching concrete. **It is not concrete area and not slab area** — 380 cubic yards of grade beam can carry eight times the formwork of 380 cubic yards of slab, and pricing formwork off concrete volume is one of the most expensive beginner mista → Appendix I — Glossary
one pool of seven days, spent once, by whoever gets to it first (Chapter 14). Kestrel spent 6 and Caldwell spent 4 out of a pool of 7. Whichever one you look at second is the one that "caused" the overrun, which is exactly why this argument is unresolvable without a contract provision assigning floa → Construction Management
Shop drawing
A submittal prepared specifically for this project by a fabricator or subcontractor, showing how a component will actually be made and installed. Review confirms general conformance with design intent; **it does not relieve the contractor of responsibility for dimensions, quantities, or coordination → Appendix I — Glossary
Shore and reshore release
the concrete superintendent (one named person), on a written strength result from field-cured cylinders meeting the specified criterion. 2. **Brace release** for steel, precast, or masonry — the erection or bracing engineer, in writing, by area. 3. **Excavation support removal** — the shoring engine → Construction Management
Shore release
written strength result meeting the specified criterion, field-cured cylinders, one named signer. 2. **Brace release** (steel, precast, masonry) — written release from the erection or bracing engineer, per area. 3. **Excavation support removal** — written, in stages, by the shoring engineer. 4. **De → Construction Management
Shoring
Temporary support: of an excavation (soldier piles and lagging, sheeting, soil nails, braced or tied-back systems) or of a structure (posts and beams carrying load during construction or demolition). Usually a delegated design with a stamp, a review cycle, and therefore a lead time. See [Chapter 22] → Appendix I — Glossary
shorten the chain.
**Every trade protects itself, and the buffers stack.** Longer quoted durations, a second job kept warm, a deliberate late start, hidden float nobody declares. Each response is locally intelligent and globally catastrophic, and nobody in it is behaving badly. - **Trades will trade their hidden float → Construction Management
Shrinkage
The volume *decrease* from bank measure to compacted measure. Compacted volume = bank volume × (1 − shrinkage factor). Take your factors from the project's own geotechnical laboratory data rather than a published table. See [Chapter 8](../part-02-means-and-methods/chapter-08-sitework-and-structure/i → Appendix I — Glossary
after which a deviation without written approval belongs to the deviating party. → Construction Management
signature
a written statement of what redundancy is being removed and who accepts the risk. Most items still get accepted. A few do not. - **Position 3 — the question is malformed.** The failure at Alderwood was not the acceptance of VE-47; it was that VE-63 deleted the *verification* of VE-47 on the same log → Chapter 9 — Discussion Guide
silence
an injured worker under peer pressure not to cost the crew its pizza party, a foreman who finds a reason not to record something. OSHA's recordkeeping rule includes anti-retaliation provisions, and OSHA has issued guidance making clear that incentive programs which discourage reporting can themselve → Construction Management
Single-family
custom homes (one owner, one house, high touch, high change) and production housing (a builder builds the same four floor plans ninety times a year and lives or dies on cycle time). Kestrel does not do this. **Harbor Ridge**, the 34-lot subdivision run by Tessa Bright Homes with superintendent Colto → Construction Management
single-project cap
and different pursuits fail different ones, so you check both, every time. Backlog is remaining contract value not yet earned, expressed in months of revenue. And growth kills contractors because it consumes working capital faster than it generates profit, dilutes the supervision that catches proble → Construction Management
single-trade days
one crew, one crane, no stacking — precisely because a Saturday with three trades and reduced supervision is how the scaffold in week 34 got modified overnight by a trade that had not erected it. → Construction Management
six elevated floors
and suppose a high-SCM mix pushes the stripping release from day 4 to day 6, which pushes the cycle from **5 work days to 7**: → Construction Management
Six of the fifteen are due before NTP
before you are being paid, before contract time starts, before the owner has technically told you to begin. That is the uncomfortable structure of preconstruction planning: some of the highest-value work on the job happens in a window where you have no contract time and, on a hard-bid job, no fee fl → Construction Management
Six things to carry out of this chapter.
**Float erosion is the earliest reliable warning a project gives you.** A path with 34 days losing 8 a month is not comfortable. It is scheduled to become your problem in four months, and no report that filters on zero float will ever show it to you. - **Delay is not proportional to lateness.** Thre → Construction Management
Sixty-two days from the beam to the check
and that beam was set on a good day. Work performed on the *first* day of the pay period (August 26) also waits until November 4, which is **seventy days**. Work performed on the last day gets paid in about forty. Across a single pay period the range runs roughly **forty to seventy-five days**, and → Construction Management
size, scope, and a result
and every one of them is something the reader of this book can now produce truthfully about their own work. Two rules: never claim a number you cannot support if asked, and never take credit for a team outcome in the first person singular. Experienced interviewers test both, usually with the same qu → Construction Management
skill
building a submittal log by back-scheduling from required-on-site dates instead of transcribing the project manual — and it teaches a **disposition**, which is the threshold concept: that a record made on the day is worth roughly ten of the same record made in August. The skill is provable in one af → Chapter 25 — Instructor Notes
Slab on grade
A concrete floor cast directly on prepared subgrade and base course, with a vapor retarder where required. Reinforcement controls crack *width*, it does not prevent cracking, and joint layout and sawcut timing decide how the floor looks for the next forty years. See [Chapter 8](../part-02-means-and- → Appendix I — Glossary
SMACNA
Sheet Metal and Air Conditioning Contractors' National Association | Duct construction and installation standards, testing and balancing, architectural sheet metal | Your specifications will cite its duct construction standards by pressure class; knowing what that means saves an argument | | **NECA* → Bibliography and Further Reading
which, as [Chapter 16](../../part-03-preconstruction/chapter-16-procurement-and-buyout/index.md) puts it, is exactly where scope gaps always live, and exactly what the general contractor is paid to own. → Construction Management
Code-required inspection of specified work — high-strength bolting, welding, concrete, soils, sprayed fire-resistive materials — performed by an inspector engaged usually by the owner and reporting to the building official. **The special inspector is not your quality control**; special inspections c → Appendix I — Glossary
specifically to establish and approve the standard
often off to the side, sometimes free-standing, sometimes laboratory-tested | The **first real installation in the actual building**, inspected and formally accepted, which then becomes the standard for everything after it | | Becomes part of the building? | Sometimes (in-place mockups), often demol → Construction Management
Specifications
The written contract documents governing **quality, product, procedure, and verification** — how good, which one, how installed, how proven, what warranty. Drawings say how many and where; specifications say how good and which one. See [Chapter 7](../part-01-foundations/chapter-07-reading-constructi → Appendix I — Glossary
specified in-place strength
the strength the element must have achieved before it can support itself and its construction loads — and that criterion is stated in the contract documents. It is verified by **field-cured cylinders** (cured alongside the element, so they experience the same conditions) or by an approved alternativ → Construction Management
SPI (schedule performance index)
`EV ÷ PV`. Below 1.00 means less work has been earned than planned. **It is not a schedule metric**: it is measured in dollars and knows nothing about the critical path, so a job can show SPI of 1.00 while the one activity that matters is four weeks late. See [Chapter 30](../part-06-project-controls → Appendix I — Glossary
which many energy codes adopt as a compliance path, along with standards for ventilation and indoor air quality and, critically for healthcare work, **the ventilation standard for health care facilities**, developed jointly with the health care engineering community. That document governs pressure r → Bibliography and Further Reading
standard specifications
that governs materials, workmanship, measurement, and payment for every item of work the agency buys. Alongside it sits a set of **standard drawings** (also called standard plans): pre-approved details for guardrail, inlets, headwalls, joints, pavement markings, and dozens of other recurring element → Construction Management
Start an area-handoff log
area, date, released by, received by, exceptions with names and dates. Ten minutes per handoff. → Construction Management
start and end on time.
**"Cardinal Mechanical will look into it" is not an action item.** You cannot call a company. A company cannot forget, be reminded, be mildly embarrassed next Tuesday, or be held. Diffusion of responsibility does the rest. - **The OAC meeting exists for the decisions only the owner and the designer → Construction Management
Start with a Hook
a specific scene with a named person and real stakes, *before* any theory. The gate at 6:10 a.m. The trailer at the end of a bad week. A phone call from the steel fabricator. A number on a screen that does not match the number in your head. 400–800 words. Make the reader feel the moment and the mone → Continuity Tracker — *Construction Management*
starting earlier.
**Four categories, four remedies, four payers.** *Punch item* — complete but nonconforming; the sub or you pay; generally no effect on substantial completion. *Incomplete work* — you pay, and it **can prevent** substantial completion. *Warranty item* — conformed at turnover and failed later. *Damage → Construction Management
State the impact
known to date, and **say so explicitly if the full impact is not yet determinable**, with a commitment to supplement | Never overstate; never leave blank | | 4 | **Reserve your rights**, in one sentence, for cost and time including impacts to unchanged work | Keeps the claim alive | | 5 | **Request → Appendix D — Forms and Templates Library
Status distributed as a document, not read aloud
which is what created the fifty-minute log walk that pushed decisions to the end. 3. **A standing decision log** with decider, opened date, age in days, needed-by date, and cost of delay. This one item alone would have produced most of the claim's missing proof, automatically. 4. **A named person re → Construction Management
Statute of repose
An outer limit on construction-defect liability measured from completion rather than from discovery of the defect. It differs from a statute of limitations, it is longer, and both vary substantially by jurisdiction in length and in what starts the clock. It is the reason construction record retentio → Appendix I — Glossary
steel erection start slipped 23 calendar days
August 4 to August 27, Year 1 — on a chain that was squarely on the critical path. → Construction Management
steering a distribution
moving the whole band down and narrowing it, decision by decision, until the day you have to put a guaranteed number on it and the band collapses onto a single value that Kestrel owns. → Construction Management
Step 1 — Neat volume:
33,000 SF × (5 ÷ 12) ft = 13,750 CF - 13,750 ÷ 27 = **509.3 CY → the canonical 510 CY** → Construction Management
Step 2 — the footing and the aggregate position.
Total contract value: **$88,300,000** - Total estimated gross profit: `$88,300,000 − $83,248,000 = $5,052,000` (5.72% of contract) ✓ and it equals the column sum ✓ - Aggregate percent complete: `$49,618,800 ÷ $83,248,000 = 59.60%` - Total gross profit earned: `$52,355,000 − $49,618,800 = $2,736,200` → Construction Management
Step 3 — what each mechanism actually is.
The **18.4 CY** of lost time is the pump relocation: setup, teardown, travel, re-staging, second washout. It is pure access. - The **12.8 CY** of lost rate is the split crew. Jamal said it in one sentence at the gang box: ten people on one pour is a machine — two hoses, two vibrators, a screed gang, → Construction Management
Step 3 — Which of the five?
Can you change the plan so it cannot happen, and is that worth what it costs? → **Avoid** - Is there a party who controls it, or a market that prices it better than you? → **Transfer** - Can you buy information or change the method to shrink it? → **Mitigate** - Is it small, bounded, and cheaper to → Construction Management
Step 6 — Then plan the failure.
**A backup pump.** On a 540 CY placement, a second pump on standby costs a mobilization and a minimum — call it **$1,900**. Compare that to the cost of a cold joint below. - **A written pour plan** showing sequence, direction of placement, construction joint locations if you have to stop, screed and → Construction Management
Steps 1 through 5 are all on the schedule.
**A company that punishes the first honest fade report is manufacturing its own surprises.** Humiliate a $200,000 fade at 30 percent complete and you have not prevented it — you have moved it to 80 percent complete, at four times the size, when nothing can be done. → Construction Management
Stonebridge
Ambulatory Care Center
**$28,400,000**, 62,000 gross square feet, three stories: imaging on level 1, infusion and procedure rooms on level 2, physical therapy and medical office on level 3. Design-bid-build, lump sum, **480 calendar days**, liquidated damages **$3,500 per calendar day**. → Construction Management
Stop the cover
call the drywall superintendent and follow with an email holding gypsum board on that run. (2) **Bound the extent** — send inspectors to check the same condition on every other level, 100%, today, because you cannot disposition a nonconformance whose size you do not know. (Photographing with a tape → Construction Management
straightedge
a physical ruler laid under the row being read, moved down one row at a time. On screen, it is the same discipline: highlight the active row. → Construction Management
Strong
it is actual cost. Requires that your cost codes separate field overhead cleanly, and requires care with costs that are not time-driven | | **3. Total field overhead ÷ original contract duration** | An average daily rate across the whole job | **Moderate.** Simple and common, but field overhead is n → Construction Management
Struck-by
One of OSHA's Focus Four categories: being hit by vehicles, falling or swinging loads, flying debris, or collapsing material. Drop zones, exclusion zones, and traffic control plans are the controls that actually work; high-visibility vests are the last line, not the first. See [Chapter 24](../part-0 → Appendix I — Glossary
structural CMU (concrete masonry unit) walls
the Willow Street first floor. Include at minimum: unit and mortar material verification, layout and bracing, reinforcing placement and lap, grout space cleanouts, grouting operations and lift heights, mortar and grout sampling, prism or unit strength verification, tolerance verification, cleaning m → Construction Management
Structural steel erected
frame, open-web joists, and joist girders | **78** | TON | **GIVEN**. *Metal deck and miscellaneous metals are NOT in this tonnage.* | | Metal roof deck, 1½" type B, 20 ga (gymnasium) | 4,000 | SF | **GIVEN** | | Miscellaneous metals — lintels, embeds, bollards, ladders, hatches, 2 stairs | — | LB / → Appendix K — The Willow Street Community Center Project Package
structural steel frame
985 tons erected — with composite metal deck. Its concrete is not on a form cycle, so a slower strength gain costs it almost nothing in schedule. **The same carbon decision has a completely different price on a steel frame than on a cast-in-place frame.** That sentence is worth remembering, because → Construction Management
A firm under contract to the general contractor to perform a portion of the work. You do not manage the work of a subcontractor; you manage the contract, the schedule, and the coordination — which is a different job requiring different tools. See [Chapter 19](../part-04-field-operations/chapter-19-s → Appendix I — Glossary
Submittal
Information the contractor provides for the design team's review to demonstrate that what will be furnished conforms to the documents: shop drawings, product data, samples, mockups, calculations, and certifications. Review is for **general conformance with design intent**, and it transfers far less → Appendix I — Glossary
submittal due date
the day the subcontractor must hand you the package. And then one more subtraction gives you the **award date**: the day the subcontract or purchase order must be executed, because nobody prepares shop drawings for a job they have not been awarded. → Construction Management
substantial completion
the point at which the owner can actually use the building for its intended purpose — on September 18, Year 2. We made those promises on a day when we did not know: → Construction Management
Substantial completion (SC)
The point at which the work is sufficiently complete that **the owner can occupy or use it for its intended purpose.** It is a functional test, not a zero-defect test, and it is a *determination* somebody makes against criteria — not a date on a bar chart. It triggers the start of warranties and the → Appendix I — Glossary
subsurface contingency from the lowest bidder
priced by the party with the least information about the ground — and paid for it in the contract sum whether or not a single unexpected shovel of rock ever appears. → Appendix J — Answers to Selected Exercises
Subtract the approval cycle
the design professional's contractual review period, **plus a realistic allowance for one resubmittal**, plus your own review and transmittal time. 6. **Subtract the subcontractor's preparation time.** → Construction Management
Supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs)
fly ash, ground granulated blast-furnace slag, silica fume, natural pozzolans, and newer alternatives — replace a portion of the portland cement in a mix. Since cement is the dominant carbon contributor in concrete, replacing cement is the dominant reduction lever. → Construction Management
so the clause you are relying on may have been rewritten in a document you have not opened. *For: everyone on a private building project. Do not quote it from memory; open it.* → Construction Management
Surety
The party that issues bonds, guaranteeing the contractor's performance or payment to the owner. **A surety is not an insurer**: insurance is a pooled transfer of risk that expects losses, while a surety is a three-party credit instrument that expects zero losses and has a right of indemnity against → Appendix I — Glossary
SV +$264,000, SPI 1.020, CPI 0.980
and ask the class to interpret it. They will say slightly ahead on production, two percent inefficient on cost, contingency covering it. That is what Curtis said, and Harriet Nkemelu thanked him for it. → Chapter 30 — Instructor Notes
Swell
The volume *increase* from bank measure to loose measure when soil is excavated. Loose volume = bank volume × (1 + swell factor). Common earth swells roughly 20–30% and blasted rock far more, but take the project's factors from its own laboratory data. See [Chapter 8](../part-02-means-and-methods/ch → Appendix I — Glossary
Stormwater Pollution Prevention Plan — with inspections and rainfall logs | EPA and delegated state agencies; often stricter locally | | **Dust, noise, work hours** | Local ordinances on fugitive dust, permitted hours, decibel limits, truck routes | The municipality; enforcement is often complaint-d → Construction Management
SWPPP (stormwater pollution prevention plan)
The plan and permit obligation governing erosion and sediment control and stormwater discharge from a construction site. It carries inspection, recordkeeping, and maintenance duties with real penalties, and it is administered by states under delegated authority, so requirements vary. See [Chapter 17 → Appendix I — Glossary
symptom
the visible, measurable, free-of-charge early warning that Kestrel's number was missing something. Two of the nine loss lines ($375,000 of bid errors and $318,000 of masonry scope gap, $693,000 together) were literally *in* the bid on the day it was opened, and could have been found in an afternoon → Construction Management
system
and a system will keep producing that rate until somebody changes it. Note that the *investigation* is never premature. Only the forecast can be. → Construction Management
system fix
a standing **safety impact review** as a required step in every acceleration decision, with the eight named questions from §24.11, priced controls, and the safety director's signature **before the directive issues**. Then ask how they would know, six months later, whether any of it worked. They will → Chapter 24 — Instructor Notes
T
TAB (testing, adjusting, and balancing)
Measuring and setting air and water flows in mechanical systems so each space gets what the design called for. It is a prerequisite to functional performance testing, it takes longer than anybody schedules, and it cannot start until the systems are actually complete. See [Chapter 40](../part-08-clos → Appendix I — Glossary
table based on the line's
voltage
and where the voltage is **unknown**, the common default for equipment operation is substantially larger, on the order of **20 feet** up to a high threshold. Get the actual table from the current standard, and **get the actual voltage from the utility in writing.** - Controls, in hierarchy order: ** → Appendix F — Safety Reference: OSHA Focus Four, Checklists, Competent-Person Duties
Takt time
The fixed rhythm at which a train of trades moves through equal-sized zones: available time divided by total takts, where total takts = zones + trades − 1. Always round the takt **down**, never up; the leftover becomes buffer. See [Chapter 27](../part-05-communication-and-documentation/chapter-27-le → Appendix I — Glossary
Target value design
Setting a target cost during design and then designing *to it*, rather than designing and then pricing. It works when owner, designer, and builder are in the room early, and it fails when the "target" is an owner's budget wearing a new name. See [Chapter 11](../part-03-preconstruction/chapter-11-pre → Appendix I — Glossary
TCPI (to-complete performance index)
The cost efficiency the *remaining* work must achieve to hit a stated target: `(BAC − EV) ÷ (BAC − AC)` to hit budget, or `(BAC − EV) ÷ (EAC − AC)` to hit a forecast. Its value is that it converts a forecast into a testable claim — you can ask whether the job has ever performed at that level. See [C → Appendix I — Glossary
Telematics
the GPS and engine-data systems now standard on most new equipment — give you utilization hours, idle percentage, fuel burn, location, fault codes, and service-interval alerts. Used well, telematics answers the questions this chapter has been asking all along: *what is my actual utilization?* (which → Construction Management
Temporary certificate of occupancy (TCO)
Conditional permission to occupy, usually with an attached condition list and an expiration date. **Many jurisdictions do not issue them at all.** Never build a schedule on a TCO you have not confirmed is obtainable. See [Chapter 40](../part-08-closeout-and-career/chapter-40-project-closeout/index.m → Appendix I — Glossary
Temporary enclosure
reinforced poly on scaffold or wood framing, insulated tarps, temporary doors, hoarding at openings — buys you the ability to do interior work in winter. **Temporary heat** comes in two flavors, and the difference matters: **direct-fired** heaters burn fuel and put the combustion products, including → Construction Management
Temporary facilities and utilities
offices, power, water, sanitary, heat, lighting, and the meters and permits behind them. - **Temporary protection** — floor and stair protection, dust partitions at the active clinic on the north line, an accessible path of travel maintained around the site at all times. - **Progressive and final cl → Construction Management
Temporary facilities removal
trailers, storage containers, temporary fencing, temporary toilets, temporary power and lighting, construction elevator or hoist | Every day the trailer stays is rent, and the rental clock is not on your schedule. Northgate held temp facilities 30 CD past plan: **$27,000**. Set the removal dates in → Construction Management
Temporary utilities
temp power, temp water, sanitary, telecom. Straightforward, but note that a temporary power service still requires a service application, a meter, an electrical permit, and usually the utility's own installation crew. On Northgate the temp power application went in 60 days before NTP so the trailer → Construction Management
Ten minutes on day nine
a one-paragraph letter, sent the afternoon of the OAC meeting where he raised it verbally — was worth up to $153,000 of unrecovered cost plus 16 calendar days of float, and the 6 days of liquidated damages that consumed float eventually produced eleven months later. Call it $168,000 for two hours of → Construction Management
The owner's right to terminate for the contractor's default. Catastrophic: you may owe the cost to complete above the remaining contract balance, and your surety becomes involved. Notice-and-cure periods are your protection, so know how many days you have. See [Chapter 4](../part-01-foundations/chap → Appendix I — Glossary
Termination for convenience
The owner's right to terminate without cause. You typically recover work performed plus demobilization and some closeout costs, and typically do **not** recover lost profit on the unbuilt work. See [Chapter 4](../part-01-foundations/chapter-04-construction-contracts/index.md). → Appendix I — Glossary
Test it early and test it twice
that instruction is in `../common-struggles.md` and it is there because a single exposure does not hold. - **The intervention:** make them build a small estimate to a *target margin* rather than by applying a markup. The moment they have to solve backward, the distinction becomes real. Then show the → Chapter 12 — Instructor Notes
That is the behavior you are installing
not a rule they can recite, but a question they ask automatically when they are about to make a schedule decision. And it has a natural companion in Chapter 29 and 31: when they price an acceleration, make them price the **controls** too, because the cheapest line on a cost sheet is usually cheap be → Chapter 24 — Instructor Notes
and a worker has far more control over whether an injury is *recorded* than over whether it *occurs*. So the program creates a direct financial incentive to: → Construction Management
the afternoon before
access route confirmed by walking it, pump position confirmed with reach checked against the actual setup point, formwork inspected, rebar inspected and released, embeds verified, washout available, crew and pump confirmed, weather checked. Constraints get removed the day before or the pour moves. T → Construction Management
the air barrier changes material here
fluid-applied below, self-adhered above · lap direction not shown | | **1/A-403** | Punched window head, jamb, sill in fiber cement | Sill pan with end dams and back dam · head flashing · sealant joint with backer rod | | **2/A-403** | Roof-to-parapet at the two-storey block | **The roof membrane is → Appendix K — The Willow Street Community Center Project Package
the audit question
framing runs 24 work days instead of 18. What does the schedule report, and what would it report if somebody had deleted the A → B **FF + 2** link during an update? → Appendix B — CPM Scheduling Workbook
do not corrupt the library with a one-time event | | 09-2100 | Metal stud framing | LF | $17.20 | $16.10 | −6.4% | Pull planning by zone. Carry the improvement only on jobs that will actually run Last Planner | | 09-2900 | Gypsum board hang and finish | SF | $2.34 | $2.58 | +10.3% | Level-5 finish i → Construction Management
The basis for determining cost
unit prices, T&M with defined markup, or a mutually acceptable lump sum to be agreed | The whole point. Without this the CCD is just an order | | The markup percentages that will apply | Removes one future argument | | **Who is authorized to sign daily tickets on the owner's behalf** | Removes the o → Appendix D — Forms and Templates Library
The budget was never tested
and the owner finds out on bid day, when every remaining remedy is expensive. → Construction Management
The buffer gets consumed silently
a crew given 80 days for 72 days of work takes 80 days, because nobody reports being early when being early looks like having sandbagged. **You cannot see it** — a schedule with hidden padding in forty places has no honest critical path, so you have destroyed the diagnostic value of the schedule to → Construction Management
The burdened-rate checklist
base wage · paid time off · health and welfare · retirement · FICA · FUTA/SUTA · workers' compensation by class code × experience mod · general liability on payroll · small tools and consumables · overhead allocation. Multiplier typically **1.5–1.8**, higher for low-wage classifications, higher agai → Construction Management
The business
Construction is one of the largest sectors of the U.S. economy — well over a trillion dollars of construction put in place annually — and one of the most fragmented, with hundreds of thousands of firms, most of them small. Get current numbers from the **U.S. Census construction spending series** and → Construction Management
The choice of formula is worth $223,203 to Kestrel
the difference between the top and bottom rows. Which is exactly why the person whose bonus depends on the answer should not be the person who picks the formula, and why Nadia asks Wei for the EAC and not me. → Construction Management
The clause is an unenforceable penalty
generally, LDs must be a reasonable pre-estimate of anticipated damages at the time of contracting, not a punishment. Rates wildly disproportionate to any plausible harm get attacked on this ground. Enforceability rules vary by jurisdiction | | **Causation** | That you finished late, measured agains → Construction Management
The commissioning agent works for you, directly
hired by the contractor, they are grading their employer's homework. **The testing laboratory works for you, directly** — independent testing is how you find out whether the concrete met strength and the welds passed, and in most U.S. jurisdictions the building code's special inspection provisions a → Appendix E — The Owner's Companion: For Owners, Developers, Facility Managers, and Homeowners
The company
**Backlog is measured in months**, not dollars. Most mid-size contractors want nine to eighteen months. Below that, the organization gets hungry, and hungry contractors buy work. - **Bonding capacity is the real ceiling on growth** — and it has *two* limits: an aggregate program and a single-project → Construction Management
The constraint is the silent
one
it changes every float number in the schedule and produces no flag, no red bar, and no exception report. That is why the constraint count is the first check, not the last. → Construction Management
The contingency is visible
in a hard bid the contractor's risk money is buried and nobody but the estimator knows how much it is; here it is $1,320,000 on its own line with a monthly report on what has been drawn and why. **Escalation is a named line, not a gamble.** **The fee is disclosed** at 4.0%, so nobody argues later ab → Construction Management
12 minutes, at a table on the deck, with the three or four foremen whose work interferes today | Not a meeting. A touch. Resolve today's interferences before the afternoon. | | **11:00–1:00** | Deliveries, inspections, and the paperwork window | AHJ inspections, delivery receiving, and the writing t → Construction Management
whoever caused the hazardous condition. > - **The exposing employer** — whoever has employees exposed to it. > - **The correcting employer** — whoever was engaged to correct or maintain that condition. > - **The controlling employer** — whoever has general supervisory authority over the worksite, in → Construction Management
The crew
different people, fewer people, different mix | Sign-in sheet, time cards, classification split | Same ten names, same classifications, same foreman | | 2 | **Concrete supply** — trucks late, spaced wrong, short loads | Batch tickets: arrival, discharge start, discharge complete | Consistent truck s → Construction Management
The critical
path does not change
C was already critical, so the slip passes straight through. Full credit requires noting that a slip to an activity *already* on the critical path extends the project one-for-one and shifts nothing. → Midterm Examination
the definition of the scope is the entire ballgame
and that definition is not the drawings. It is the drawings *plus* the qualifications page. → Construction Management
The delivery method
the *structure of relationships*. Who has a contract with whom? How many contracts does the owner sign? Who holds the design agreement? When does the builder show up? 2. **The contract type** — the *pricing mechanism*. Lump sum? Cost of the work plus a fee? A guaranteed maximum price (**GMP**)? Unit → Construction Management
The design itself
building form, size, structural system, floor-to-floor height, glazing ratio, and the mechanical system selected. **Architect and engineer decisions.** You influence them only in preconstruction, and only if you are invited. 3. **Materials, at the point of purchase** — concrete mix design, steel sou → Construction Management
The design professional of record, in writing
and the engineer of record where structure or life safety is involved. Often the owner as well | An approved repair procedure or detail, plus re-inspection and often re-testing | Contractor's cost; sometimes an owner credit for reduced value | | **3. Use as is** (concession / waiver) | Leave the wor → Appendix D — Forms and Templates Library
The eight constraint categories
recite these: design information · submittals and approvals · material on site · labor · equipment · prerequisite work · permits and inspections · space and access. → Construction Management
the envelope was fine
Cypress Grove passed its whole-building air test on the first attempt — and the largest cause was not construction at all. The first case is a scope gap. The second is a category error about what a model is. → Chapter 36 — Discussion Guide
The estimate class and its honest band
"Class 4, roughly −15% to +25%." 2. **The effective date the price is built to**, and the escalation rate and midpoint assumed. 3. **The burden multiplier**, so that everyone in the next meeting is doing the same arithmetic. → Construction Management
The execution plan decides whether any of it pays
and most failures happened there, before anybody modeled anything. 4. **Agree the coordinate origin in week one.** A project without one will waste weeks. 5. **Raw clash counts are noise.** 1,840 became 61 by tolerance rules, a self-clash filter, grouping, and judgment — and the rules belong in the → Construction Management
the extended-GC number is the one people forget
they fixate on the $5,500 because it is written down and ignore the $5,150 bleeding out whether or not the owner ever assesses a dime. Both clocks run. → Construction Management
the finding nobody wanted to write down
a crew running behind after the steel acceleration, under an unwritten expectation to make it up. → Construction Management
The fire alarm final acceptance test
witnessed by the fire marshal, 21 days' notice, and it cannot be scheduled before functional performance testing has proven the interfaces (smoke damper closure, elevator recall, HVAC shutdown). 2. **The elevator certificates** — an independent state authority with a 4–6 week queue that is completel → Construction Management
The first and third are staffing decisions
somebody, in an office, decided where the best superintendent and the best pipefitters go next, and that decision determined how the last 5% of a $47,500,000 project would go. It shows up in the closeout schedule as a delay and it will be called a closeout problem. It is not. It is a leadership and → Construction Management
The fix is a one-page revision log per community
date, what changed, which lots are affected, who was told. Twenty minutes per revision. It is the cheapest insurance in residential construction. → Construction Management
The Focus Four
falls, struck-by, caught-in/between, electrocution — with real mechanisms, not just names. - **The hierarchy of controls** — elimination, substitution, engineering controls, administrative controls, PPE — and the uncomfortable observation that PPE is the weakest control and the one the industry reac → Teaching Safety
The forecast is $4,285,000
that is your cost, because it is a fixed-price subcontract, and the buyout saving has fallen from $86,000 to $25,000 because you directed $61,000 of work. → Construction Management
The forecast is where
earned value earns its keep
and it is also where earned value is most often abused, because there are four standard formulas and they give four different answers. → Construction Management
The four sentences to carry off this chapter:
**The price of a change is set by what you can document, not by what it cost you.** - **A change order that adds time without addressing extended general conditions has given away $5,150 per day.** - **Unapproved changes are a cash-flow problem before they are a profit problem.** - **Give back the p → Construction Management
The interior sequence has two hold points
in-wall and above-ceiling — and a gate cannot be partially complete. One day of defect routinely costs three to five days of floor. - **Firestopping is the most commonly failed inspection item** because no single trade owns it. Assign one firestop contractor for all penetrations at buyout. - **Test → Construction Management
The marginal daily cost
the one you need when somebody asks what a delay costs. Separate the fixed items (design, mobilization and demobilization, installation of both stages, header, permit, monitoring wells) from the time-related ones: → Construction Management
the missed amount ÷ percent complete
$10,500 at 42 percent hides $25,000 | Cut-off memo by the 20th; superintendent's quantity report as the source | | Transferring budget to bury a variance | Deletes two true facts your estimators and your executive need | Ask: did the *work* move, or did only the *overrun* move? | | Drawing contingen → Construction Management
The money
**The fee is not the profit.** Northgate: a $1,804,800 CM fee becomes $957,300 of projected net profit after $997,500 of allocated home-office overhead and a $150,000 savings share — about **2.0 percent** of the $47,500,000 contract. - **2 to 4 percent net margin is typical for a general contractor. → Construction Management
margins are frequently better than general contracting and compensation follows | | **Owner's side / program management** | The money before it becomes a contract. Programming, budgets, financing, and what an owner is actually optimizing | Means and methods, and the daily production reality — which → Construction Management
The ninth cost $137,000
because it was the day the crew's capacity fell under the line's requirement, and from that point forward annual output is no longer 11 ÷ 92 × 365. It is 365 ÷ 9. → Construction Management
The outcome
what "done" looks like, concretely. 2. **The constraint** — the date, the money, or the limit they must work inside. 3. **The authority** — what they may commit without asking. Say the number out loud. "You can commit up to $5,000 and any resequencing that doesn't move a milestone." 4. **The deadlin → Construction Management
The outcome you want
stated as a behavior and a date, not as a feeling. 4. **What you do if it goes badly.** → Construction Management
The overtime arithmetic that people get wrong
An overtime hour costs the burdened rate plus the *loaded half-time premium on base wage* — about 1.38×, not 1.5× the burdened rate. - Sustained 10×6 for four weeks buys marginal production at roughly **1.8× straight time overall** and about **2.5×** by week four. - **Compressing** a week (three 12- → Construction Management
The parts a manager must get right:
**Bedding and backfill are structural, not cleanup.** A flexible pipe gets most of its strength from the compacted material around it. Skimp on haunching under the pipe springline and you get deflection failures that show up on the video inspection at the end of the job, when the pipe is 14 feet dee → Construction Management
The people and the honest problems
The craft workforce is aging, the training pipeline is thin, and **a labor shortage is a schedule problem before it is a cost problem** — it shows up as a sub who bid four crews and can field two. - Construction accounts for **roughly one in five U.S. workplace fatalities.** Schedule pressure travel → Construction Management
**Ray Alvarez** — Kestrel senior project manager. - **Margo Deacon** — Kestrel general superintendent. - **Dani Okonkwo** — field engineer, six months out of school. - **Hank Duffy** — project manager, Ironbridge Steel, the erector. - **Grace Lindqvist** — Kestrel VDC manager, who built the 4D erect → Construction Management
The people:
**Jamal Foster** — self-perform concrete superintendent. Twenty-six years placing concrete. - **Ray Alvarez** — senior project manager, narrating. - **Dani Okonkwo** — field engineer, four months out of school, about to do their first productivity investigation. - **Margo Deacon** — general superint → Construction Management
The period varies enormously
five days, seven, ten, fourteen, "prior to the next regularly scheduled meeting," and plenty of contracts say nothing at all. Find yours and write it on the wall of the trailer. How a tribunal weighs minutes against other evidence varies by jurisdiction and forum; that is a question for your attorne → Construction Management
the permanent structure's own lateral capacity
it stays near zero while columns and beams go up, jumps when the first braced bay or shear wall is completed and connected, and climbs in steps as diaphragms are poured and connections are made, reaching 100 percent at the right-hand end. The second curve, starting high and falling, is **the tempora → Construction Management
the person who walked the building
superintendent, assistant superintendent, or field engineer. Not an administrator transcribing a whiteboard. Ten to fifteen minutes, in the field, same day, ideally before leaving the site. → Appendix D — Forms and Templates Library
the person who was there
the superintendent, the assistant superintendent, or the field engineer who walked the building. Not by an administrator in the trailer transcribing a whiteboard. Not by the project manager from the office. → Construction Management
The plan is nothing
there is nothing left to manage, and saying so out loud is what a student who has crossed the threshold can do that a student who has memorized the definition cannot. → Chapter 28 — Discussion Guide
The prevailing-wage checklist
current wage determination in the file with a verification date · classification assigned by what the hands are doing · split hours for split classifications, recorded contemporaneously · fringe paid for all hours worked · overtime premium computed on the basic rate per the applicable act · apprenti → Construction Management
The project is built twice
once on paper through estimating, scheduling, coordination, and submittals, and once in the field. **The first build determines the second.** The cheapest place to fix anything is in a model, an estimate, or a schedule. 4. **Safety is not a line item.** A job that hurts people has already failed, wh → Continuity Tracker — *Construction Management*
The question you could have asked instead
one that the other person could answer and you could not. 4. **What it cost**, in dollars if you can construct them and in relationship if you cannot. 5. **The systemic cause**, if there was one, and who owns the fix. → Construction Management
the recovery money goes on C, not on B
the loud problem is not the controlling one, and this is exactly the situation where a project spends $80,000 accelerating the thing everybody is talking about and gains zero days. Second, **look backward** at the same time: pull the last three updates and find out when C's float went negative, beca → Construction Management
The rest of the fall inventory:
**Floor and roof openings.** Every hole big enough to drop through gets a cover **secured against displacement**, **marked** ("HOLE" or "COVER"), and **rated for at least twice the load** that could be imposed. Loose plywood over an opening is not a cover; it is a trap with a lid. - **Leading edges. → Appendix F — Safety Reference: OSHA Focus Four, Checklists, Competent-Person Duties
the retainage clause
specifically whether the step-down releases the previously withheld excess or only reduces future withholding, which on Northgate is $1,009,850 of timing — and **the payment flow-down**, including whether the subcontract is pay-when-paid or pay-if-paid. → Chapter 32 — Discussion Guide
the revenue effect is annual, not one-time
3.09 houses × $63,500 = $196,000 a year, every year, until somebody takes the constraint back out of the line. → Chapter 37 — Discussion Guide
the same data date as the Chapter 28 cost report
that alignment is the point and the first thing to check. Six parts: the update, with retained logic or progress override stated and justified; variance in calendar days and dollars at **$2,800/CD**; a float trend table on three paths, one a procurement chain; a ten-section narrative whose section 6 → Chapter 29 — Instructor Notes
the same four days shown
three times
the float belongs to the *path*, not to the activities on it. If you have ever added up a float column, this is the error you were making. And read the difference: F has free float, so Ironbridge can deliver four days late and nobody notices. C and D have zero free float, so if Kestrel takes four ex → Appendix A — Construction Math Reference
The scaffold first, and it is not a ranking
it is handled now, before anything else, because a person is standing on it. Safety is the floor, not a corner. → Construction Management
The scope and price articles
what am I obligated to deliver, and for what. 2. **The changes article** — how does the price move, who can direct a change, and what happens if I proceed without a written directive. 3. **The notice provisions** — every deadline, for every kind of claim. These are jurisdictional, they are short, an → Construction Management
The setup:
**A phase and its end milestone.** One phase — not the whole job. Six to twelve weeks is the useful range. Northgate's was: *enclosure and dry-in*, ending at the canonical milestone **building dried-in, March 28, Year 2.** - **The people who will do the work.** Foremen and superintendents, not proje → Construction Management
The site-specific safety plan
the hazards of *this* site, JHAs for the first activities, competent persons named. (2) **The emergency action plan**, with muster points marked on the ground, an assembly headcount procedure, the site address posted at every gate, and the hospital route. (3) **First aid, AED, and an emergency conta → Construction Management
The spread is $892,812
from $40,672,000 to $41,564,812 — on the same four input numbers, on the same day, for the same job. Nobody is lying. Every one of those is a correctly applied standard formula. → Construction Management
The status column has only four values
Bidding, Scope review, Awarded, Committed. The moment you let people type "in progress," you have lost the ability to see the job at a glance, and a buyout log you cannot read in ten seconds is a buyout log nobody reads. → Construction Management
The statute of repose
a separate, generally longer outer limit on construction-defect claims measured from completion rather than from discovery. This one surprises people, and it is the reason record retention on buildings runs in years rather than months. - **Regulatory requirements** — OSHA record retention, certified → Construction Management
The sub does not price it
they do not read it, or they read it and know they cannot win the job if they price it, so the number that arrives carries no risk load. **The risk occurs** — a delay, a condition, an impact they could never have controlled. **The sub cannot absorb it** — a $180,000 subcontractor cannot fund a $400, → Construction Management
casting, initial curing, transport, and capping; whether the cylinders were lab-cured or field-cured (field-cured routinely break lower and are not the acceptance test); the technician's certification. 2. **The batch ticket and placement record** — mix identification, batch-to-discharge time, whethe → Construction Management
The things to carry out of this chapter:
**Cost control is not accounting.** Accounting looks backward and must be right; cost control looks forward and must be timely. Same data, same people, different obligations. - **The cost code must correspond to a unit of work somebody can count**, and the same structure must appear in the estimate, → Construction Management
The three arithmetic facts to carry in your head
Northgate's fee is $1,804,800 and its projected net profit is $957,300 — **the fee is not the profit**; home-office overhead takes over half of it. - 23 calendar days × $10,650 per day = **$244,950**, roughly a quarter of that profit, from one submittal that sat eleven days on a desk. - Replacing $2 → Construction Management
The three unpriced items are the ones that matter.
**The cold joint.** If the pour stalls past initial set you get an unplanned cold joint in a structural topping. Now Caldwell Structural has to evaluate it and either accept it or design a repair. That is an RFI, several days, and possibly a saw-cut-and-dowel detail. It is not on the list because yo → Construction Management
The traffic control plan (TCP)
sometimes called a temporary traffic control or maintenance-of-traffic plan — is a contract document showing how traffic will be handled through each phase of construction: signing, channelizing devices, tapers, buffer spaces, lane shifts, detours, flagging operations, and pedestrian and bicycle acc → Construction Management
The two reports that run the log:
**The aging report** — what is out, for how long, ranked by days out, decided on the "gates" column. - **The ball-in-court report** — 214 rows collapsed to five numbers: subcontractors (NR + RR), GC review, design team (OUT), released and pending action (AAN), closed. **This is the single most usefu → Appendix D — Forms and Templates Library
paid the measured quantity, which *fell* from 616 LF to 320 LF and cost Kestrel $121,952 of revenue. 2. **The quantity variation clause** — recovered stranded fixed cost on a 48.1% underrun of a major item ($22,500 allowed). 3. **The differing site conditions clause** — paid the increased *cost per → Construction Management
the whole number
twenty-three divisions, forty-one subcontract packages, a staff, an equipment fleet, two winters of temporary heat, a bond, and a fee — into a figure somebody signs and then lives inside for nineteen months. → Chapter 13 — Instructor Notes
Then write the basis-of-quantities page
one page, six sections, following §12.10.3. List every assumption you made: average wall heights, opening-deduction conventions, whether the topping is in the concrete or the steel package, what soil type you assumed for trench sloping, and which quantities are *derived* rather than measured. Aim fo → Construction Management
Thermal bridging
Heat taking a shortcut through a conductive element that penetrates the insulation: a steel stud, a shelf angle, a mullion, a balcony slab, a clip. Steel conducts on the order of hundreds of times better than the insulation beside it, so a stud is not a small defect in the assembly — it is a highway → Appendix I — Glossary
They are frequently wrong
in horizontal position, in depth, in size, in material, and occasionally in existence. A one-call locate service marks what the utility owners' records and locating equipment can find, which is not the same as what is there. Abandoned facilities are notoriously undocumented. → Construction Management
This chapter owns the engineering half
findings one and two, the shared structure, the tag, the modification-control rule. **Chapter 24 owns finding three**, the argument in the conference room, and the acceleration behind it. Say that out loud at the start of this section and again at the end, and do not resolve finding three here. Set → Chapter 22 — Discussion Guide
this week
and what is the correct step for the *other* trade that looks bad in this data? > > Worked answer > > **Step 1 — compute the required crew for each trade.** > > Required crew = remaining labor hours ÷ (weeks available × 40 hours per week). > > | Trade | Remaining MH | Wee → Construction Management
Thresholds: 375–500 pursue
green light, assign the team. **300–374 pursue with conditions** — bid only if named conditions are satisfied in writing *before* the estimating hours are spent. **Below 300 decline** — write the no-bid letter. → Construction Management
time
a nine-day extension, so liquidated damages do not run. Nobody gets the **money**: weather is typically excusable but non-compensable, so the contractor absorbs nine days of its own extended general conditions. On Northgate that is 9 × $5,150 = $46,350. → Construction Management
Time entitlement: 14 calendar days
the 8 compensable days plus the 6 concurrent days. Concurrent delay is *excusable*, so it extends the contract time even though it carries no money. The owner cannot assess liquidated damages for those 6 days because it caused delay in the same period. → Construction Management
Time granted for all 11 days; money for 7
those traceable to the mislocated gas main, inside the exception. The other 4 traced to Northlight's duct bank, which appeared on **no** plan, so "mislocated" did not apply | | **Totals** | **$253,000** | **$182,850** | | → Construction Management
time impact
a separate notice on its own clock — 9 days claimed against 4 granted tells you it was weak. 4. **"What do you have from the first four days?"** Nothing. That is the $65,400 gap between $186,400 incurred and $121,000 substantiated. No legal argument recovers cost you cannot prove you incurred. 5. ** → Construction Management
Time impact analysis (TIA)
Inserting a fragnet representing a change or delay into the *accepted current schedule update* — not the baseline — and measuring the movement of the completion date. Run contemporaneously it is evidence; run eight weeks later against a reconstructed schedule it is an opinion. See [Chapter 31](../pa → Appendix I — Glossary
time only, or time and money
the sentence that decided $42,350 here? Is there a threshold of days before compensation begins? **When a utility is materially mislocated, does the DSC clause reach it, or is subsurface utility information carved out of it entirely?** Who pays for support in place, and for its design? How short is → Construction Management
Time, place, and attendees
fixes the event: named people, a location, a clock time. 2. **What we understood you to direct** — records the instruction in *their* words and invites correction rather than asserting agreement. 3. **What we advised** — establishes that you gave notice on the spot that this was a change with no est → Construction Management
Time-and-material (T&M) ticket
The daily record of labor, equipment, and material expended on directed work whose price is not yet agreed, **signed the same day** by the owner's representative or inspector. A ticket signed a week later is an argument; a ticket signed that afternoon is evidence. See [Chapter 31](../part-06-project → Appendix I — Glossary
Timing
the billing cycle closed just before a big cost hit; it fixes itself next month. 2. **Poor billing discipline** — a schedule of values that does not track how cost incurs, or a project manager under-billing to avoid an argument; self-inflicted and correctable this month. 3. **Unbilled change work** → Construction Management
say $130/hr because "that's what the rental house charges" — and you have hidden a profit center inside your job costs. Every job looks worse than it is. Your project managers will rent from outside to escape the rate, your yard will sit full, and your utilization will collapse, which makes the true → Construction Management
Toolbox talk
A short pre-shift safety discussion on one specific topic tied to the work about to happen. What makes one land is specificity and a story; what makes one noise is reading a laminated card about a hazard nobody on the crew will encounter today. See [Chapter 24](../part-04-field-operations/chapter-24 → Appendix I — Glossary
topic and function
the subpart that owns it and what it requires — rather than by section number, and where you are unsure, write down where you would go to look it up. That habit is the exercise. → Construction Management
Total float (TF) = LS − ES = LF − EF
how much the activity can slip without delaying the > project. Compute both ways; they must match, and the disagreement is a free error check. > > **Free float (FF) = (smallest ES among successors) − EF** — how much it can slip without delaying > the early start of any successor. > > **Interfering f → Appendix A — Construction Math Reference
in many states a party preserving lien rights must notify the owner early, and those notices are a free list of everybody who could lien you; reconcile your waiver package against them. **Require a payment bond** where you are worried, so unpaid parties have a claim against the bond; on U.S. public → Appendix E — The Owner's Companion: For Owners, Developers, Facility Managers, and Homeowners
Trade stacking
Too many trades working in the same space at the same time, each interfering with the others. It is the usual hidden cost of acceleration: you buy days with overtime and second crews, and pay for them in productivity loss, rework, and incident rate. See [Chapter 19](../part-04-field-operations/chapt → Appendix I — Glossary
transformation
turning inputs into outputs — and had no concept of **flow** (how work moves between transformations) or **value** (what the customer actually receives). His technical report and later doctoral work developing what became known as the transformation-flow-value view are widely cited and readily finda → Construction Management
Transmittal
The cover record accompanying a document, stating what was sent, to whom, when, and why. It is boring, it is thirty seconds, and it is the record that decides who had a submittal for how many days when somebody later argues about a review period. See [Chapter 25](../part-05-communication-and-documen → Appendix I — Glossary
transmittal dates and the review-cycle log
who had the document, and for how many days. Contemporaneous records beat reconstructed ones by a factor of about ten. That principle gets its full treatment in [Chapter 25](../../part-05-communication-and-documentation/chapter-25-submittals-rfis-document-control/index.md). → Construction Management
Trellis Engineering
the same firm that later did Northgate | | General contractor | Vantry Construction | | Vantry project manager | Teodora "Teddy" Vukovic | | Vantry project engineer, 20% allocation | Arjun Belliappa | | Modeling consultant, engaged in month 5 | Northbound Digital | → Construction Management
TRIR (total recordable incident rate)
Recordable cases per 100 full-time-equivalent workers per year, computed as (recordables × 200,000) ÷ hours worked. It is a lagging indicator and, on small worker-hour bases, statistically noisy — one recordable can move it dramatically. See [Chapter 24](../part-04-field-operations/chapter-24-safety → Appendix I — Glossary
Trough: month 5, negative $829,728
17.7 percent of contract value, which is an alarming number and is what 45-day terms plus 10 percent retention plus an eight-month schedule produce. → Construction Management
True
that is the point of unit pricing. At Cottonwood Creek, extra drilled-shaft footage is simply measured and paid at $412.00/LF. But most such specifications carry a variation threshold, commonly around 25%, beyond which either party may seek an adjusted unit price, because the contractor's fixed cost → Construction Management
Turnover package
Everything the owner receives at the end: O&M manuals, warranties, record drawings, approved submittals, test and balance reports, commissioning records, spare parts, attic stock, keys, and training documentation. Assembled continuously it is a filing task; assembled at the end it is the reason fina → Appendix I — Glossary
twelve consecutive months
for a full year, a profitable job on ordinary terms is a net user of company cash. The premiums, by the way, are paid in March of Year 1, not December. → Construction Management
twelve hours, eight moves, and 28.2%
three numbers Dani produced from a crane log that already existed and that nobody had ever added up. → Construction Management
twenty-one percent of the contract
and a selections clause with no dates, no lock points and no consequences. Selections ran late, the cabinet decision landed 63 days past due and cascaded through nine downstream trades, the job finished 77 calendar days over, and the Fairbairns paid $913,250 against a $790,000 loan. → Chapter 37 — Discussion Guide
two different solutions to the same supply problem
getting trained craft workers onto a site that needs them for fourteen weeks and then does not. → Construction Management
two mobile cranes
a 275-ton crawler on the west and a 165-ton hydraulic truck crane on the east, both working from prepared pads outside the building footprint. Grace has spent six weeks building a 4D erection model against Hank Duffy's preliminary piece list, and she has a third option nobody asked for: **one 275-to → Construction Management
Two rules. Hire the commissioning agent directly
not through the contractor, and ideally not through the architect; they are verifying other people's work and should not report to the people being verified. **And hire them during design.** One who first appears at substantial completion can produce a report. They cannot produce a commissioned buil → Appendix E — The Owner's Companion: For Owners, Developers, Facility Managers, and Homeowners
Type
owner-directed / design change / differing site condition / error or omission / impact | Type predicts both the argument and the payer | | Originating document and date (bulletin, ASI, RFI, CCD, field condition) | Traceability | | **Notice given: date and reference** | See below | | Date priced · da → Appendix D — Forms and Templates Library
Type I, decisively
you compare a document to a measurement | **Type II is hard.** You must prove the condition was both unknown *and* unusual, which is a judgment call | → Construction Management
U
unable to enforce its own contract or place a lien
it can do the work, be owed the money, and have no legal way to collect. Some states allow disgorgement of amounts already paid. Add fines, stop-work orders, and disqualification from public bidding. **Varies by state; verify before you cross a state line, and again before a subcontractor mobilizes. → Construction Management
Unbalanced bid
A unit-price bid in which money is moved between line items away from actual cost, usually to exploit quantities the bidder believes are wrong. **Materially unbalanced** bids — those creating reasonable doubt that the agency will pay the lowest ultimate cost — may be rejected by most public agencies → Appendix I — Glossary
unbalanced bidding
legitimate as cash-flow management within your real early costs, and a wager against the public when it becomes a bet on the engineer's quantities being wrong. → Construction Management
uncertainty retiring
design contingency going to zero and escalation dropping as the work is bought. Only the first part is something you can promise. | → Construction Management
under investigation
inspection of all remaining transitions to be completed within two working days. Sampling on other levels to be 100%, not random, until the extent is bounded. > > **Detection:** Kestrel QC (D. Okonkwo), routine transition inspection per ITP hold point "air barrier transitions — before cover," [date] → Construction Management
unfunded balance
cumulative incurred minus cumulative funded — at each day in the table above, plus day 112. → Construction Management
UniFormat
CSI's classification of a building by **system and building element** — substructure, shell, interiors, services, equipment, sitework — rather than by trade. It is the right structure for conceptual and parametric estimating, where MasterFormat is the right structure for detailed estimating and spec → Appendix I — Glossary
Cost per unit of installed work: `unit cost = (labor ÷ production rate) + material + equipment`, or more compactly, quantity × productivity × rate. Every published unit cost is somebody else's crew in somebody else's market; adjust it or replace it with your own. See [Chapter 12](../part-03-preconst → Appendix I — Glossary
Unit price
A contract structure paying a fixed price per measured unit of work, with the owner carrying quantity risk. Somebody has to **measure**, the contract has a **variation clause** allowing renegotiation when quantities swing beyond a stated percentage, and truck tickets, weight tickets, and survey reco → Appendix I — Glossary
Unit rate
Used two ways, and the difference matters. In estimating it usually means the same thing as **unit cost** — dollars per installed unit. In labor productivity it often means the inverse relationship, man-hours per unit. Say which you mean, especially in a forecast. See [Chapter 28](../part-06-project → Appendix I — Glossary
unit repetition
the same 46 unit layouts repeated across five floors — which means the scheduling ideas in §37.3 apply to the interior buildout even though the contract is commercial. That is the whole of multifamily's special case, and pretending otherwise wastes your time. → Construction Management
unit-price heavy-civil contract
and you will find that these two memos are opposites. Residential removes contract machinery because repetition replaces it. Heavy civil *adds* contract machinery, because when you are paid by the measured cubic yard, measurement itself becomes the contract. → Construction Management
units complete
the one method with almost no built-in bias — wherever the work can be counted. And whichever you pick, pick it before the work starts and write it down. → Construction Management
Unloading method
crane, hoist, forklift, hand, self-unloading | This is the field that reveals the conflict | | **Destination** — laydown area, floor and zone, or direct-to-install | The single most valuable field on the form | | Who receives and inspects it | Not "the GC." A name | | Special requirements | Permit l → Appendix D — Forms and Templates Library
the accepted update in effect when the event occurred — and got 23 days. Crashing produced 17 days for **$168,000**. Kestrel took Option D over the $2,100-cheaper Option C for six more days of margin against the lease. It worked: substantial completion September 24, seven days early. Eighteen months → Chapter 29 — Discussion Guide
Update 01, data date March 31, Year 1
the accepted update in effect when the event occurred. Not the baseline. Not the schedule as it stood on April 22. → Construction Management
upside is capped by the contract
you signed a lump sum, so the very best outcome available to you is that you keep the three percent you bid, plus whatever you buy the work for below your estimate. Your **downside is capped by nothing.** Cost overruns, acceleration, a subcontractor default, a differing site condition the contract s → Construction Management
utility responsibility matrix
service, applicant, who pays the utility's cost estimate, who signs it, who schedules the shutdown, required-on-site date — and I make somebody sign it. It takes an hour. It has saved me that forty-one days about five times over. → Construction Management
Utilization
The fraction of available time a piece of equipment is actually working. It is the number that decides own-versus-rent, and the honest version counts idle days on your job, not the machine's theoretical availability. See [Chapter 21](../part-04-field-operations/chapter-21-equipment-management/index. → Appendix I — Glossary
V
VAC (variance at completion)
`BAC − EAC`. The forecast overrun or underrun on the whole scope. See [Chapter 30](../part-06-project-controls/chapter-30-earned-value-management/index.md). → Appendix I — Glossary
value
and calls everything else **waste**. Ohno's original list had seven categories; an eighth (unused human talent) was added later by others and has become standard in practice. Translated into a construction site, with real Northgate examples: → Construction Management
Value engineering (VE)
Systematically finding lower-cost ways to deliver the same *function*. Genuine VE substitutes a means, not a function; what usually passes for it — deleting scope, reducing quality, deferring work to the owner's operating budget — is cost cutting with a nicer name, and it should be labeled honestly → Appendix I — Glossary
Variation clause
In a unit-price contract, the provision allowing either party to request renegotiation of a unit price when the actual quantity of a major item varies from the estimate by more than a stated percentage — 15% and 25% are both common. Thresholds vary by agency; check yours. See [Chapter 4](../part-01- → Appendix I — Glossary
variation threshold
commonly around 25% — beyond which either party may seek an adjusted unit price, because the contractor's fixed costs no longer spread across the assumed quantity. Unit price is not "no risk." It is *quantity* risk on the owner, *productivity and price* risk on the contractor. → Construction Management
vary by jurisdiction
your local amendments are what actually govern. *For:* anyone laying out a gate, a laydown yard, or a fire lane. → Construction Management
*variable air volume* — boxes are the most common. Each box serves a zone, has a damper that modulates airflow, and usually a reheat coil so the box can warm the air back up on a cold morning. Northgate has **184 VAV terminal units**. Each one needs a location, a hanger, a duct connection upstream a → Construction Management
VDC (virtual design and construction)
The broader practice of using models and digital processes to plan and execute construction: coordination, sequencing, layout, prefabrication, and reality capture. Used loosely as a synonym for BIM; the useful distinction is that BIM names the model and VDC names what you do with it. See [Chapter 35 → Appendix I — Glossary
vehicle intruding into the work space
a motorist entering the area where crews are working — rather than an incident caused by construction equipment. The practical implications are unglamorous and they save lives: positive protection (barrier, not cones) wherever the exposure and duration justify it; high-visibility apparel on every pe → Construction Management
the one you are most confident about from memory. Note the date. You will be surprised. 6. **Check your subcontract's notice period against your prime contract's** on the job you are on right now. If they are the same number, you have built a trap. 7. **Log the expiration date of every outstanding q → Construction Management
one package at a time, comparing three bidders inside a single trade. That is the estimating discipline from [Chapter 13](../chapter-13-detailed-estimating/index.md) and it is necessary. But a scope gap is invisible in a vertical comparison, because all three site-utility bidders exclude the fire li → Construction Management
Very fast
pieces fly and set | **Very fast** — panels tilt in days | | Weather sensitivity | High (hot/cold weather protection) | Low at the site; the plant is enclosed | Moderate — needs dry casting conditions | | Crane requirement | Moderate | **High** — piece weights drive crane size | **High** — panel wei → Construction Management
virtual design and construction
the discipline of building the project in a coordinated 3-D model before building it in the field, and then using that model for clash detection, sequencing, and field layout. **BIM** is **building information modeling**, the model itself. **CPM**, which you will see in a moment, is the **critical p → Construction Management
W
Wage theft
shaving time cards, off-the-clock work before or after the shift, "straight time for overtime," per diem used as a substitute for wages, part of a check in cash. Illegal, discoverable in an audit, and it destroys the thing that makes a crew productive: **a crew that thinks you are shorting them is n → Chapter 20 — Discussion Guide
waiver matrix
payees down the side, periods across the top, two cells per intersection. **Every hole in that matrix is either a company that did not get paid or a company that did not respond, and both are things you need to know before you release the next check.** A matrix with holes in it is an early-warning s → Construction Management
Waiver of subrogation
An agreement that an insurer, having paid a loss, gives up its right to sue another project party to recover it. It keeps a fire loss from turning the project team into adversaries, and it must appear both in the contract and in the policies to work. See [Chapter 5](../part-01-foundations/chapter-05 → Appendix I — Glossary
Waivers and releases
including the release language buried inside a change order form or a pay application. That is §33.3.3, and it destroys more entitlement than any courtroom ever has. → Construction Management
walk it out loud
narrate the sequence as if you were describing the job to somebody. You are listening for a break in the story. *"Excavate, footings, walls, backfill, slab, steel, deck, fireproofing, curtain wall on the north, then… interior partitions on Level 4?"* Stop. Why does Level 4 follow the north curtain w → Appendix B — CPM Scheduling Workbook
Walk your temporary facilities
toilets, water, lighting, break area — and time the round trip from the farthest work face. Then price the walk. 8. **Write your weather triggers as if-then statements** and give them to your concrete, masonry, and roofing foremen before you need them. 9. **Start a complaint log** with date, name, c → Construction Management
wall surface area
two faces. It does not multiply by the number of board layers, because the wall type carries the layer information as *data*, and the area parameter is *geometry*. On rated corridor and shaft walls that is a whole additional layer of board, 2,400 LF of it. To get this right you have to query by wall → Construction Management
wall-to-foundation
the above-grade WRB and the below-grade waterproofing are different materials installed by different trades, and the classic failure is water entry at the base with no through-wall flashing or weeps. **Wall-to-roof (parapet)** — the wall air barrier stops at the top of the sheathing and the roof mem → Construction Management
Warranty
A promise that work or a product will perform for a stated period. Three different pieces of paper commonly overlap on one roof: the contractor's workmanship warranty, the installer's warranty, and the manufacturer's material or system warranty — with different durations, different exclusions, and d → Appendix I — Glossary
Waste factor
The allowance added to a takeoff for material lost to cutting, breakage, over-order, and spillage. Two rules keep you out of trouble: apply it once (not in the takeoff *and* in the unit cost), and use a factor that matches the material — drywall and rebar do not waste alike. See [Chapter 12](../part → Appendix I — Glossary
Water, air, vapor, thermal
ranked by consequence per unit of failure. And failures live **at transitions**, not in the field of the wall: wall to foundation, wall to roof, wall to window, and — as this chapter's hook demonstrated at a cost of $236,710 — curtain wall to slab edge. A control layer is only as good as its worst i → Construction Management
so the failure was real and was recoverable at almost no cost. Students who land on *"right decision, incomplete instrument"* have the chapter. → Chapter 29 — Discussion Guide
week 34
a plank that had been lifted overnight by another trade and not re-secured, and a mason tender who caught himself on the top rail — happened during exactly that condition. The investigation found three failures, and the third one was *a crew running behind after the steel acceleration, with an unwri → Construction Management
weekly certified payrolls
a payroll report for each week, with a signed **statement of compliance** by an officer of the company. The certification is not a formality. Under the Copeland "Anti-Kickback" Act, the signer certifies among other things that no rebate or kickback of wages has been taken, and a false certification → Construction Management
weeks 34 through
36
including the scaffold event Bea Salgado investigated, whose third finding was *"a crew running behind after the steel acceleration, with an unwritten 'make it up' pressure."* When you price acceleration, price it honestly: premium time, a second crew, **and** the elevated risk of putting more peopl → Appendix B — CPM Scheduling Workbook
weeks 34 through 36
including the scaffold event that Bea Salgado investigated. When you price acceleration, price it honestly: premium time, a second crew, *and* the elevated risk of putting more people in less space under more pressure. Then decide. Sometimes the answer is still yes. It should never be an easy yes. → Construction Management
Weeks 61–65 are the peak of the job
210 craft workers in week 61, the highest headcount Northgate ever carried. Every pressure indicator went up and every reporting indicator went down, exactly as in weeks 31–34. → Construction Management
weighted scoring model
a fixed list of criteria, a fixed set of weights agreed in advance when nobody is looking at a specific job, a 1-to-5 score on each, and a threshold. The model does not make the decision. It makes the decision *visible*, forces every criterion to be said out loud, and leaves a record you can go back → Construction Management
Westbrook Ambulatory Surgery Center
$28,400,000, three stories, 61,000 square feet, CM at Risk, a composite like everything else in this book. Day nine after notice to proceed. I am the senior project manager. Margo Deacon has the field. And the assistant project manager is Dani Okonkwo. → Construction Management
What a joint check does not do:
It does not create a contract between Kestrel and Northfield. Northfield is still Aperture's supplier. - It does not make Kestrel liable for Aperture's other debts — including the $231,000 on the other project. - It does not, by itself, buy a lien waiver. **You must require the waiver as a condition → Construction Management
What actually protects you:
**Preventive maintenance on a schedule**, tracked by hour meter, not by memory. Fluid and filter intervals, greasing, undercarriage inspection, hydraulic hose inspection. - **The daily operator inspection**, done and documented before start-up. On many machines this is required, and on all machines → Construction Management
what changed since yesterday
is the whole reason the card exists. Yesterday's plan was safe for yesterday's conditions. Overnight, a different trade moved a plank, a floor opening got uncovered, a lift went down, or the weather turned. → Appendix D — Forms and Templates Library
What digital takeoff does not change — any of it:
**The assumptions.** Software does not know that the partition schedule shows walls to deck in the imaging suite and to six inches above ceiling everywhere else. You know that, or nobody does. - **Whether the item is on the sheet.** Dani's nine missing footings would have been missed just as cleanly → Construction Management
What is covered and what is not
because half of all warranty calls are maintenance items, filter changes, and operator error, and sorting that out on the phone politely, once, is much better than sorting it out after you have driven across town. 5. **The log.** Every call, logged, with a date, a disposition, and a closure. That lo → Construction Management
What is the source
owner-directed, design error or omission, differing site condition, or regulatory? The source determines entitlement and the temperature of the conversation. Contractor-caused rework exits here: no entitlement, log it as your cost anyway. 3. **Send written notice. Two clocks — cost and time. Today.* → Construction Management
What you are doing about it
including that you are proceeding to protect the schedule, if you are. 6. **A request**, if you have one: a direction, a decision, information, or access. → Construction Management
What you do this week:
**Monday:** walk the pour with Jamal Foster before 7 a.m. Not a meeting — a walk. Watch a form set. - **Monday afternoon:** pull the quantity log against the ready-mix tickets and confirm 719 CY. - **Tuesday:** review three weeks of time cards for coding accuracy. Hours charged to the wrong code are → Construction Management
When the period starts
substantial completion of the whole project, final completion, or (in a badly drafted subcontract) the subcontractor's own completion. Get that wrong in a flow-down and a roofer who finishes eleven months before substantial completion warrants nothing by the time the owner moves in. Duration, and wh → Appendix G — Contract Clause Decoder: The 25 Clauses That Decide Who Pays
Where
by area, level, and grid. 3. **How long** — with clock times and a **computed labor-hour total**. 4. **Why** — the specific cause, with its reference number and its date. 5. **What you did about it** — the mitigation, **and why no other released work was available.** → Appendix D — Forms and Templates Library
where things physically are in three dimensions
a matter the contract documents never resolved, and which the coordination process exists to resolve. → Construction Management
Where to go if you missed:
**Questions 1, 2, 8, 11** → §39.1 and §39.9.2 (failure modes, and the A/B/C/D gate) - **Questions 3, 6, 13, 15, 19** → §39.2 and §39.3 (reality capture and drones, and their honest limits) - **Questions 4, 5, 9, 14, 16, 17, 24** → §39.4 (prefabrication, and [Case Study 1](case-study-01.md)) - **Ques → Construction Management
whether it cost you $250,000 or $340,000.
Earned value never contains actual cost. If you find actual cost leaking into your EV, your CPI will be exactly 1.000 forever and your report is worthless. - Earned value is a measure of **production**, priced in dollars so that it can be compared to something. The dollars are a unit of measure, not → Construction Management
Whether the standard is the standard is the point.
in the model, with lead time, before the trades stacked behind it have committed. On Northgate, one bay found before MEP was hung cost about **$2,100** to fix; the same condition found after duct was hung would have cost about **$18,400** plus three days of sequence. → Construction Management
who / where / how long / why / what you did
so the person filling it out at 3:30 in the building has the five questions in front of them. 4. **Pull last week's five daily reports and read the "problems" box.** Count how many contain a crew, an area, a headcount, clock times, computed labor hours, a reference number, and a mitigation sentence. → Construction Management
who can stop work
by name and by role, and that it includes every worker on site | | 3 | **Competent- and qualified-person designations by activity, by name** | Not "the sub will provide one." A name, a company, a qualification basis, and a backup | | 4 | **Emergency action plan** | Muster points (primary *and* secon → Construction Management
who else is working near us, above us, below
is the multi-employer question, and it is the one a crew cannot answer from inside its own company. That is what the general contractor is for. → Appendix D — Forms and Templates Library
who is new
because every new person restarts a learning curve, and assigning a named buddy for the first week is the cheapest intervention on this list. → Appendix D — Forms and Templates Library
who owns the cost of clash
resolution
the default should be that each trade bears the cost of moving its own work when the routing priority convention assigns it the lower priority, with contractor-directed deviations handled as changes; (3) **delegated design responsibility** for sprinkler layout, hangers, and seismic bracing, includin → Construction Management
who owns the scaffold
one trade, several trades, or you as a general-conditions item. Then write two things: the **daily inspection procedure** (use the checklist in §22.4.5, cut to what applies) with a named competent person and a named backup, and the **modification-control rule** in the exact words you would put in th → Construction Management
who you will ask to tell you whether it is working
because you cannot see this in yourself and self-assessment on leadership is famously worthless. Put a date on the check-in. This page is the one you will actually reread. → Construction Management
why it works that way
the incentive, the risk, the physics, or the contract behind it. - **Worked numbers** wherever relevant: name the formula → plug in the canonical figures → state the result with units → say what it means for the job in one plain sentence. Put estimates, schedules of values, cost reports, CPM tables, → Chapter Agent Brief
**F-1** is category (b) and unambiguous. It is the only gendered pronoun attached to Wei Chen in the entire book; every other passage repeats "Wei" rather than use a pronoun. - **F-2**: the canon fixes 6.2 acres, the figure is isolated prose, no arithmetic depends on it, and the *same chapter's own → Consistency Audit — *Construction Management: Building the Built World*
why the measurement is hard
what does "output" mean for a product that is different every time, built outdoors, by a temporary coalition, with quality and complexity changing across decades? Do not resolve the argument; describe it accurately enough that a reader could hold both positions. → Construction Management
Wide-flange
beams with a maximum span of 35 ft.
3/4-inch tongue-and-groove sheathing, glued and nailed, plus 3/4-inch underlayment at wet areas. **Total floor system depth 16 inches.** - Framed area **11,200 SF** (10,000 SF of floor plus stair, elevator, and rim framing). - Note: no beam is shown at the operable-partition line between Multipurpos → Appendix K — The Willow Street Community Center Project Package
Willow Street
two lanes, parallel parking both sides, sidewalk both sides. **Danforth Elementary School directly opposite**, Principal **Arnetta Loyola**; crossing guard, bus loop, parent drop-off. **Arrival peaks 7:45 a.m., dismissal 3:15 p.m.** | | **North** | **Hollis Park** — wooded city parkland, no vehicula → Appendix K — The Willow Street Community Center Project Package
Willow Street Community Center
estimate, bid, CPM schedule, logistics plan, buyout log, submittal and RFI logs, daily reports, cost reports, pay applications, change orders, a delay analysis, a punch list, and a closeout binder. When you finish you will not have read a book about construction management. You will hold a project n → Construction Management
Willow Street project charter
three parts, one to three pages: the student's own role and decision authority; the §1.3 stakeholder table rebuilt for Willow Street with a fourth column (*what I need from them, and by when*); and a written definition of success across five categories — cost, time, quality, safety, relationship — e → Chapter 1 — Instructor Notes
Windows
most defensible; follows a moving critical path | | The update in effect when each event occurred | **Time impact analysis** — often required by contract for extension requests | | A defensible as-built with real logic | **Collapsed as-built** — but expect the logic to be contested | | Only a baseli → Construction Management
Windows analysis
A delay-analysis method dividing the project into periods and, for each, using the schedule update in effect at the time to identify what was critical, what slipped, and who owned it. It is generally the most defensible method because it follows the project as it actually happened, including a criti → Appendix I — Glossary
WIP schedule (work in progress)
The company-level report showing, for every job, contract value, cost to date, estimated cost to complete, percent complete, revenue earned, billings, and over- or under-billing. It is the document your surety, your bank, and your CFO actually read, and the row that matters is fade. See [Chapter 34] → Appendix I — Glossary
withdrawal, not correction
you do not get to raise your number and keep the job. Requirements and remedies vary substantially by jurisdiction. → Construction Management
Witness point
A point in an inspection and test plan where you must **notify** a designated party a stated number of hours in advance; if they do not attend, **work proceeds** and you make the record. Your notification record is your protection. Compare **hold point**. See [Chapter 23](../part-04-field-operations → Appendix I — Glossary
work
labor performed on your site, installed by someone else's people, under your schedule and your safety program. Use a **purchase order** when you are buying **goods** — material delivered to your gate, with no installation labor and no site presence. → Construction Management
Work breakdown structure (WBS)
The hierarchical decomposition of the project into manageable pieces — by area, system, phase, or trade — that organizes the schedule, the budget, and the reporting. Get it right once and the schedule, cost codes, and pay application all speak the same language. See [Chapter 14](../part-03-preconstr → Appendix I — Glossary
Work day (WD)
A day the crew actually works, excluding weekends and holidays. Crew productivity and durations run in work days; contract time and liquidated damages run in calendar days. Converting between them requires the project calendar, and mixing them up is the most common arithmetic error in scheduling. Se → Appendix I — Glossary
the WIP — is a single table with one row per contract in progress and roughly a dozen columns. Competent contractors prepare it monthly; everyone else prepares it at least quarterly. It is the bridge between the project world you live in and the financial statements the company reports. It is the fi → Construction Management
Workers' compensation
The no-fault insurance system paying medical costs and lost wages for work-related injury. Its premium is driven by classification codes and by your **EMR**, which is why a safety record is simultaneously a moral matter and a line item on every bid you submit. See [Chapter 5](../part-01-foundations/ → Appendix I — Glossary
Working capital
Current assets minus current liabilities: the money available to fund operations before payment arrives. It is the binding constraint on a growing contractor and the reason growth kills more construction companies than recession does. See [Chapter 34](../part-06-project-controls/chapter-34-construct → Appendix I — Glossary
working days
210 at Cottonwood Creek. 2. The specification defines what makes a day **chargeable**: typically a day on which the contractor could have worked some stated portion (often a majority) of a normal day on the **controlling item** of work. 3. The resident engineer makes that determination **daily** and → Construction Management
green / yellow / orange / red — and email them to your team so no future conversation is an argument about whether a shortfall counts. → Construction Management
Written for the other side of the table
owners, developers, facility managers, and homeowners. How to decide what you are buying, how to hire a contractor, what the contract you are signing actually does, what a fair change order looks like, what to watch for during construction, and how not to get taken. It stands alone; you can start he → Appendices
Y
Year two came in at 55 kBtu/SF·yr and $212,000
sixteen points recovered. The arithmetic predicted about thirteen and a half (the 41% of the gap that was actually fixable); the extra two and a half points came from staff retraining and optimized start-stop tuning that Amara threw in. → Construction Management
YES
two worked risk-map rows the student is told to copy the format of. Four numbers move together. | | **C-1b** | `instructor-guide/chapter-notes/ch-04.md` | 78 | Repeats "$612,000 ÷ 425 CD = **$1,440/CD** … = **$2,640/CD**" as the answer key | Same as above | No dependent arithmetic — but it must move → Consistency Audit — *Construction Management: Building the Built World*
Yes, it belongs on the agenda
not because of the cash position, which is roughly neutral, but because a **full percentage point of margin disappeared in a single period at 65 percent complete**, and that is exactly the point in a job's life when the remaining cost is committed enough to be knowable and unfinished enough to still → Construction Management
You
the carrier requires an approved prequalification program | | Cost basis | Rate on each bonded subcontract | Rate on total enrolled subcontract value | | When it responds | After you declare default and the surety investigates — weeks to months | You act immediately and file a claim | | What it cove → Construction Management
You are behind
distinguish with the CPM update and a physical measure of quantities in place. **You are on schedule but under-billing** — stored material not billed, a line the architect disputed, an application submitted short; distinguish with the continuation sheet against a field measure. **The curve was wrong → Appendix J — Answers to Selected Exercises
you can occupy and use it for its intended purpose
generally including a certificate of occupancy and any required regulatory approvals | Liquidated damages **stop**. Risk of loss, utilities, security, and maintenance generally **shift to you**. Retention is typically **reduced**. The **warranty period starts**. The punch list is issued | | **Certif → Appendix E — The Owner's Companion: For Owners, Developers, Facility Managers, and Homeowners
you can see it coming from inside the schedule
four days of float in a chain with a hard downstream constraint — if you know how to read the numbers. Every calculation in this chapter is a tool for seeing that four weeks early. → Construction Management
You have just given away the impact claim
the disruption to the trades working around that change, the resequencing, the productivity loss, the schedule impact you had not yet quantified. That is Theme 1 in its purest form: a risk transferred by a sentence, at a moment when nobody was paying attention to risk. And it is exactly the kind of → Construction Management
roughly one time in five you will discover that the person doing the work knows something you do not, and the question saves you from a confident, public error. Second, **a conclusion a person reaches themselves is not resisted.** Third, the question routes around the thing you cannot afford, which → Construction Management
on a $22 million job, and it would have looked like a sharper number, not an error. → Construction Management
Your deliverable: a contract-type risk map
four columns, ten rows: **the clause**; **plain English** (one sentence, for somebody who does not read contracts); **dollar exposure** (a defensible estimate with the arithmetic shown); **negotiate or accept** (and if negotiate, what you offer in exchange). → Construction Management
your organization
your utilization, your purchasing power, your shop discipline, your balance sheet, and your bonding capacity. Two identical contractors bidding the identical job can honestly reach opposite answers. Anyone who gives you a universal rule ("always rent under six months") is selling something. → Construction Management
your own job cost history
the last twenty closeout reports are the best risk database on earth and almost nobody reads them; if drywall subs defaulted on two of your last thirty jobs, your base rate is about 7%, not "unlikely." **A structured document review** with a pen, hunting conflicts, missing details, deferred design, → Construction Management
your own procedure
which is why the single most valuable hour of reading available to you is not a book at all. It is the general conditions of the contract you are working under, read slowly, with a pen, looking specifically for the submittal certification, the review-limitation language, the notice periods, and the → Construction Management
your own review and transmittal time
which on the anchor bolts was 11 days of sitting on a desk. Add them up on Northgate and you get the 23-calendar-day slip in steel erection start, August 4 to August 27. Now connect it to this chapter: a *permit* back-schedules exactly the same way. Required-in-hand date, minus review duration, minu → Construction Management
Your state's plan
is it a state-plan state, does it cover private construction, and what does it require that federal OSHA does not? Cal/OSHA's written injury and illness prevention program and heat illness rules are the famous example, but they are not the only one. - **Your site-specific safety plan**, scored again → Construction Management
Your tasks.
**(a)** Did the dried-in milestone move, and by how many calendar days? What is the exposure in dollars? - **(b)** Was W2 on the critical path? Is the critical path in the same place now? - **(c)** How much float was consumed on **two** other paths? - **(d)** Does this require notice, a recovery pla → Construction Management
Your tasks:
**(a)** Compute the actual unit rate to date and compare it to the budgeted unit rate. - **(b)** Forecast the cost to complete using the unit-rate method. - **(c)** Compute the forecast at completion and the variance. - **(d)** Decide whether the trend is believable yet, and say why. - **(e)** Name → Construction Management
Z
zero
free float
meaning if either one slips at all, it pushes a successor's early start and eats the float of the activity behind it. G is the only activity holding genuine free float (2 days), and it holds it only because it is last in line before the merge. That distinction is Problem 4. → Appendix B — CPM Scheduling Workbook
zero recordable injuries
a quarterly bonus, a gift card, a jacket, a barbecue, a sign at the gate counting days since the last incident. The intention is genuinely good. The mechanism is a disaster. → Construction Management