Field Simulations and Role-Plays

Facilitation guide

Construction management is a social discipline pretending to be a technical one. A student can compute a time impact analysis perfectly and still be unable to sit across a table from an owner's representative and negotiate what it is worth. These five simulations exercise the half of the job that reading cannot reach.

Each one is designed for a 75–90 minute session, needs no props beyond printed role briefs, and works with classes from eight to forty.

General facilitation notes

Assign roles privately. Every participant gets a brief containing information the others do not have — their own incentives, constraints, and a number they must not disclose. Asymmetric information is what makes these feel real; a negotiation where everyone knows everything is a math problem.

Give people a side, not a script. Tell them what they want and what they are accountable for. Do not tell them what to say. The learning is in constructing the argument.

Do not let it run long. Set a hard clock and enforce it. Real meetings end whether or not the issue is resolved, and a class that runs out of time without a decision has learned something accurate.

Debrief for at least a third of the session. The simulation generates the material; the debrief is where the learning happens. Structure it: what did each side want, what did each side actually do, where did it turn, and what would you do differently. Then — always — what would the documents have said about this six months later?

Rotate the roles across the term. A student who has only ever played the contractor learns half the discipline. The single most valuable seat in this course is the owner's representative, because almost nobody wants it and everybody benefits from having sat in it.

Simulation 1 — Bid Day

Best after Chapter 13. 90 minutes.

Setup

The class is one contractor's estimating department. A hard bid for the Ridgeline Regional Library and Learning Center ($31.4M, Rivermont County Library District) is due at 2:00 p.m. The clock in the room starts at 11:40.

Roles: chief estimator, two or three estimators each owning divisions, a scheduler, the project executive with authority to move the number, and — this is the part that makes it work — two or three students playing subcontractors who phone in quotes at times you control.

Running it

Give the estimating team a partially complete estimate with known gaps. Then feed quotes in on a timeline you hold:

  • 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 offering to shave $60,000 if told the current low number. This is a bid-shopping invitation. Watch what the team does. Do not flag it.
  • 1:35 — the sole remaining electrical bidder raises their number by $95,000.
  • 1:50 — the project executive must decide whether to move the number.

What it teaches

A low number is a question, not an answer. Scope leveling under time pressure. That the bid-shopping line gets crossed by accident, in a hurry, by people who would never do it deliberately. And that the final number is set by judgment, not arithmetic.

Debrief questions

  1. What did you do with the mechanical quote, and how much time did you actually spend on it?
  2. Did anyone consider the drywall call to be a problem? When?
  3. Who moved the number, on what basis, and what would you tell the owner if asked?
  4. If you win this job, what is the first thing that goes wrong?

Simulation 2 — The Coordination Meeting

Best after Chapter 19 or Chapter 10. 75 minutes.

Setup

The Northgate level-two ceiling. There is 30 inches of available cavity and 39 inches of systems. Somebody has to give something up and it costs money either way.

Roles: the general contractor's project manager and superintendent, the VDC manager, and one participant each for mechanical, electrical, plumbing, fire protection, and framing. Add the architect if you have the numbers.

Each trade brief contains their own installed cost, their schedule position, and one thing they cannot move for a legitimate technical reason (the sanitary line is gravity; the sprinkler main's hydraulic calculation depends on its routing).

Running it

Four options exist: raise the structure, lower the ceiling, resize the duct, or reroute. Each has a different price and a different loser. The GC must reach a decision and — critically — must decide who pays, which is where it stops being technical.

What it teaches

The routing-priority convention as a negotiating framework, not just an engineering one. That "who gives way" and "who pays" are separate questions. That the person with the least flexible system has the most negotiating power and the least ability to help.

Debrief questions

  1. Did the priority convention decide it, or did the loudest voice?
  2. Who ended up paying, and was that the party best able to absorb it?
  3. What would this have cost if it had been found after the ceiling was closed?
  4. What in the BIM execution plan would have made this meeting unnecessary?

Simulation 3 — The Change Order Negotiation

Best after Chapter 31. 75 minutes.

Setup

CO #14. The imaging vendor changed the MRI unit after the GMP was set. A verbal go-ahead was given on a Thursday; the concrete crew built it Monday; there were no time-and-material tickets for the first four days.

Pair students: one contractor project manager, one owner's representative. Run every pair simultaneously, then compare outcomes.

Contractor brief: actual cost incurred $186,400. Records substantiate $121,000. You need the money and you know your documentation is thin.

Owner's representative brief: you authorized "about $60,000." You have a board and a budget. You believe the contractor and you cannot pay an unsubstantiated number, because you have to defend it to people who were not there. You also know that fighting this damages a relationship you need for eighteen more months.

Running it

Give them thirty minutes. Then collect every pair's settlement number on the board.

The spread will be wide, and that spread is the lesson. The book's canonical outcome is $142,750 after eight weeks — but pairs will land anywhere from $121,000 to near $186,400 depending on how each side argued.

What it teaches

That the price of a change is set by what you can document, not what it cost. That the owner's representative is constrained by people who are not in the room. That both parties behaved reasonably and it still cost $43,650.

Debrief questions

  1. Which pairs settled highest, and what did those contractors do differently?
  2. Owner's reps: what would have made you comfortable paying more?
  3. What single document, created on the Thursday, changes this entire negotiation?
  4. What does the contractor do differently on the next verbal directive?

Simulation 4 — The Incident Investigation

Best after Chapter 24. 90 minutes. This is the most important simulation in the course.

Setup

Six days after the week-34 scaffold near-miss. The investigation close-out meeting. Milo Serrano was not injured. Three findings are on the whiteboard:

  1. No competent-person inspection tag for that shift.
  2. A scaffold modified by a trade that did not erect it, with no re-inspection.
  3. A crew running behind after the steel acceleration, under an unwritten pressure to make it up.

Roles: the safety director (who wants finding three in the report), the project manager and the VP of operations (who made the acceleration decision), the general superintendent, the masonry subcontractor's foreman, and the scaffold subcontractor.

Running it

The entire simulation is the argument over finding three. Findings one and two will be resolved in ten minutes. Let them be.

Watch for the class's usual move: making finding three vaguer — "schedule pressure" as a general observation rather than a specific decision. Let them draft it that way. Then ask:

"If you write it that way, what changes next time?"

Nothing does. A finding that names no decision produces no corrective action.

Finish by having them write the corrective actions, insisting on the distinction between a hazard fix (a tag regime, a modification-control procedure) and a system fix (a standing safety impact review on every acceleration decision).

Debrief questions

  1. Who resisted finding three, and were their reasons unreasonable?
  2. What does it cost an organization to write down that its own management is a root cause?
  3. How will you know in six months whether the corrective actions worked?
  4. Where else in this course have you recommended an acceleration?

Facilitator note. This session invites students to criticize a management decision. If you are running it inside a company (see the onboarding syllabus), be sure you actually want that before you start. If you do not, do not run it — a simulation where the safe answer is known in advance teaches the opposite of what it intends. See safety-teaching-guide.md.

Simulation 5 — The Claim

Best after Chapter 33. 90 minutes, or two sessions if you want it done properly.

Setup

Eleven months after substantial completion of Rivermont Elementary School #12. Curtis Boone is certain — and largely correct — that the district's late decisions cost him money.

Divide the class in three: the contractor's team (project manager, scheduler, attorney), the owner's team (owner's representative, attorney, a scheduling consultant), and a panel of two or three students acting as a dispute review board.

Give the contractor's team the actual record: monthly schedule updates that stopped in month four, daily reports reading "worked on site" for eighty-one consecutive days, and notice letters sent after the fact in a batch.

Running it

The contractor presents entitlement, causation, and damages. The owner responds. The panel questions both and rules.

The contractor's team will discover, usually about fifteen minutes in, that four of the five delay analysis methods are unavailable to them because the contemporaneous updates do not exist. That discovery is the entire simulation.

What it teaches

That entitlement, causation, and damages are three separate proofs. That being right is not the same as being able to prove it. And — the line that lands hardest — "I believe you. I can't prove you."

Debrief questions

  1. Contractor's team: at what moment did you realize you were in trouble?
  2. Owner's team: was there a number you would have paid without a fight? Why did they not get it?
  3. Panel: what would have changed your ruling?
  4. Name the four documentation practices, each costing almost nothing, that would have changed this outcome entirely.

A short one for a spare twenty minutes

"Write the RFI." Give the class a real ambiguity — the corridor rating conflict from Chapter 7 works well. Ten minutes to write it individually. Then read three aloud and critique them against the six-element anatomy in Appendix D.

It is small, it takes no preparation, and it is the single most transferable skill in the book.