Chapter 19 Exercises — Subcontractor Management

Work these with the chapter open. Several build on each other, and the deliverables in Parts C and M go straight into your Willow Street project notebook.

Difficulty legend: ⭐ basic recall and comprehension · ⭐⭐ applied analysis · ⭐⭐⭐ judgment, ethics, and multi-step work · ⭐⭐⭐⭐ research and extension.

Selected answers appear in Appendix J. Where a calculation has a single numeric answer, it is given here in a <details> block so you can check yourself before you look.

Part A — Conceptual Understanding ⭐

A1. In one sentence each, define coordinator, integrator, and risk aggregator as they describe the general contractor's role. Then name one specific Northgate fact from the chapter that illustrates each.

A2. State the chapter's threshold concept in your own words without using the words "authority" or "manage." Then explain what a manager who has not crossed this threshold typically does when a trade is short-handed, and why it does not work.

A3. List the four sources of leverage in order of usefulness. For each, state (a) what it costs you and (b) how fast it works.

A4. Why is manpower a leading indicator and percent complete a lagging one? What management window does the difference between them open, and roughly how wide is it?

A5. Name the six rungs of the escalation ladder in order. Explain, in one sentence, what is lost if you skip rung 3 and go directly to rung 5.

A6. What is the difference between supplementation and backcharge? Name the six prerequisites that must be satisfied before either one will survive a dispute.

A7. Define trade stacking and name the five channels through which it costs production. Which of the five do you think is most often underestimated, and why?

A8. What is a clean handoff? Name the five steps of a handoff inspection and state which party benefits most from the record — and why that party is not either of the two subcontractors involved.

A9. In OSHA's multi-employer worksite framework, name the four employer roles. Which one is the general contractor ordinarily, and what standard applies to it? What does that standard generally require in practice?

A10. Explain the sentence "quality is set by what the general contractor accepts the first time," and state what a long punch list is evidence of.

A11. The chapter says the pre-mobilization meeting is "the highest-return hour in the whole relationship." Give the economic reason — not the sentimental one — that an expectation set at kickoff is cheaper than the same expectation set in month eleven.

A12. List the nine warning signs of subcontractor financial distress given in §19.5.6. For each, name the person or document in a well-run project organization who would see it first.

Part B — Applied Analysis ⭐⭐

B1. Your project has 34 subcontracts totaling $32,800,000 against a $40,000,000 direct cost of work. The top four subcontracts are $6,400,000, $4,800,000, $4,600,000, and $3,400,000. Your operations vice president says the job is "well diversified — thirty-four subs." Write the three-sentence rebuttal, using the numbers.

B2. A subcontractor's prequalification package is excellent: strong balance sheet, ample bonding capacity, clean safety record, twenty years in business. Name the four things that package does not tell you, and for each, state one specific way you could find it out before award.

B3. Rewrite each of these reference questions so it produces a specific answer rather than a judgment: (a) "Were they good to work with?" (b) "Did they staff the job adequately?" (c) "Any quality problems?" (d) "Would you use them again?" For each, state what you are actually learning.

B4. Your electrical subcontractor's four-week rolling manpower average is 82 percent of the committed curve, and they are on the critical path. Two other trades downstream of them are at 74 percent and 91 percent. Using the chapter's thresholds, state what action each trade warrants this week, and explain which of the three shortfalls you should not write a letter about.

B5. A subcontractor tells you in the coordination meeting, "We'll try to get level two done by the fifteenth." Write the three questions you ask, in order, and explain what each one is actually doing. Then describe what you do if the honest answer turns out to be "the twenty-fourth."

B6. Your drywall subcontractor claims a disruption cost caused by trade stacking during a three-week acceleration. They cite a published industry table showing a 25 percent productivity loss for severe congestion. You are skeptical. Write the four questions you ask them, and state what evidence would actually persuade you.

B7. A subcontractor is delayed two weeks because another subcontractor blocked their access. They send you a claim. Identify the three contract provisions that will determine who pays, and state what your daily reports must contain for you to have any chance of pushing the cost to the responsible trade.

B8. You are the project manager on a job where a small subcontractor with an excellent crew keeps submitting incomplete pay-application backup and getting paid late as a result. Their foreman is now openly frustrated and their owner has started calling you directly. Diagnose the actual problem and describe the four-hour fix. Then state what this episode should change about your prequalification process for firms of that size.

B9. Read the following exchange from a coordination meeting and identify four separate management failures.

Superintendent: "Mechanical, where are we on level two?" Mechanical foreman: "We're working on it." Superintendent: "Okay. Electrical?" Electrical foreman: "Same as last week." Superintendent: "Alright. Drywall, you're following them, so — plan accordingly. Anything else? No? Good, see everybody Wednesday."

Rewrite the exchange as it should have gone, using the chapter's commitment discipline.

B10. Your general superintendent walks into a zone where five crews are working in an area planned for two. She wants to know whether to intervene. What are the three things you would measure or observe before advising her, and what would make "leave it alone" the right answer?

Part C — Calculations and Deliverables ⭐⭐–⭐⭐⭐

C1 — Read the curve. A trade has 7,200 labor hours of scope remaining and a required completion 9 weeks out. Assume a 40-hour week.

(a) What crew size is required? (b) They are currently running 14 workers. How many weeks will they actually need? (c) By how many weeks will they miss? (d) The sequence carries 10 working days of float and your daily exposure to slipping substantial completion is $10,650 per calendar day. What is the dollar exposure if nothing changes?

C2 — Price a backcharge, three ways. You supplement a deficient subcontractor with 8 workers for 4 weeks at a supplemental billing rate of $88.00 per labor hour. Your subcontract permits 10 percent overhead on supplementation.

(a) Compute the backcharge. (b) You gave verbal notice only, and started the supplemental crew the next morning. What is the realistic recovery, and why? (c) Now assume you gave a written 72-hour cure notice per the subcontract, documented the failure to cure with dated photographs, and have daily time-and-material tickets signed by your superintendent but not by the subcontractor. What is the realistic range, and what single missing item is costing you the difference? (d) What does the subcontractor gain, strategically, from your defective backcharge — beyond the money?

C3 — The true cost of holding money. Your company systematically pays subcontractors 25 days later than it could. Average outstanding payable subject to that delay is $3,100,000. Your cost of capital is 8 percent.

(a) What does the float earn in a year's worth of a single 25-day hold? (b) If four subcontractors each add 1.5 percent to a combined $11,000,000 of future work with your company, what does that cost? (c) Write the two-sentence recommendation to your chief financial officer.

C4 — Build a measured mile. Your ceiling-grid subcontractor installed 6,400 SF of grid in a clear area with 5 installers over 5 days. In a stacked area they installed 5,100 SF with 7 installers over 5 days. Assume 8-hour days.

(a) Compute both unit rates in SF/MH. (b) Compute the productivity loss as a percentage. (c) There are 61,000 SF of grid remaining in stacked conditions. At $64.00 per burdened labor hour, what is the impact? (d) Name three ways an opposing scheduling consultant would attack your measured mile, and how you would answer each.

C5 — Diagnose the table. Below is a six-week manpower record for four trades on a hospital renovation. Committed averages are shown in the header. All four trades work a 40-hour week.

(a) Compute the four-week rolling average (weeks 14–17) for each trade and express it as a percentage of the committed average. (b) Apply the chapter's thresholds. What status is each trade? (c) Demolition is complete in its assigned areas and framing follows it. Does demolition's drop-off warrant a letter? Explain what you would check before deciding. (d) Framing was scheduled to start week 12 and started week 14. Whose problem is that, and what one document would tell you?

C6 — Write the rung-3 notice. A framing subcontractor committed at kickoff to an average of 22 carpenters in months 6 through 8 and has averaged 15. Their remaining scope is 9,400 labor hours against a required completion 10 weeks out. All areas have been released on schedule, no RFIs are open past their response dates, and all applications have been paid within terms.

Write the letter. Under 300 words. It must contain no adjectives about their performance, affirmatively state your own performance with references, quantify the shortfall and the resulting projected completion, demand a written recovery plan with a specific deadline, offer something concrete, and state explicitly what the letter is not.

C7 — Build a kickoff agenda and expectation memo. Using §19.4.1, produce a complete pre-mobilization agenda for a $1,400,000 roofing subcontract on a job with an occupied adjacent building, plus the two-page expectation memo that comes out of it. Include the manpower curve format, the named change-order authority, the notice sheet, and at least three site rules specific to working above an occupied structure.

C8 — Escalation procedure. Draft a written six-rung escalation procedure for your company. For each rung specify: the trigger, who acts, the form, the recipient, the timing, and the document that gets filed. Then write the paragraph explaining to a new project engineer why skipping a rung voids the remedy at the end of the ladder.

Part D — Judgment and Ethics ⭐⭐⭐

D1. You are in a $60,000 dispute with a subcontractor over a change order. Their current application includes $340,000 for completed, undisputed work. Your project executive suggests holding the whole application "until they get reasonable." Write the response. Address the ethics, the contract, and the practical consequences, and state exactly what you would withhold and how you would document it.

D2. Your owner has directed a 3-week schedule recovery. Two of the three weeks were lost to your own late release of areas; one was lost to a subcontractor's manpower shortfall. You direct all affected subcontractors to work Saturdays. Two submit change orders for premium time. How do you respond to each, and what must the causation analysis establish before you answer? What is the name for getting this wrong, and what does it typically cost?

D3. A subcontractor performs $28,000 of extra work on your assistant superintendent's verbal direction. There is no written directive, no agreed price, and no time-and-material tickets. The work was necessary and is now buried in a wall. What do you owe, what can you prove, and what do you change on Monday? Reference the CO #14 numbers from the chapter in your answer.

D4. Your prequalification standard requires three completed projects of similar size in the last five years. A nine-person firm with an outstanding reputation on smaller work wants to bid a $220,000 package. Your risk manager says the standard is the standard. Make the argument both ways, then decide, and state exactly what you would substitute for the size test — and what you would tell your risk manager you are doing to control the added risk.

D5. A subcontractor's foreman is excellent but their office is chronically unresponsive — submittals late, change pricing slow, insurance certificates lapsing. They are the low bidder on your next job by $140,000. Do you award it? What conditions would you attach, and what would you have to be willing to actually enforce for those conditions to mean anything?

D6. Your superintendent tells you a subcontractor's crew is being pushed hard to recover schedule and he has seen two shortcuts this week that made him uncomfortable — nothing citable, but "the kind of thing that happens before something happens." The subcontractor is behind because of their own shortfall and you sent them a recovery demand ten days ago. What do you do, in what order, and what does the multi-employer worksite doctrine have to do with your answer?

Part M — Mixed and Interleaved Practice ⭐⭐–⭐⭐⭐

M1 — With Chapter 16. You are unbundling a $560,000 doors, frames, and hardware package into two smaller packages to open one of them to a small firm. Write both scope sheets, paying specific attention to the seam between them. Name the four scope gaps most likely to appear at that seam, state which package you would put each in and why, and state what this unbundling costs you in administration.

M2 — With Chapter 14 and Chapter 10. A trade on the critical path is projected 3.7 weeks late. Explain how you would confirm from the CPM schedule — not from intuition — whether that slip actually reaches substantial completion, which float value you would look at, and how the "MEP drives the interior schedule" principle changes which trades you monitor most closely and how often.

M3 — With Chapter 5. A subcontractor is showing four of the default warning signs, and two of their suppliers have sent preliminary notices. Describe the complete sequence of protective steps: the waiver matrix, joint checks, notice to the surety, and the cure notice. State which steps are contractual, which are statutory, which vary by jurisdiction, and which are simply prudent.

M4 — With Chapter 26. Write five consecutive daily report entries covering a four-day trade logjam like the one in Zone 3C. They must be usable eighteen months later by someone who was not present, must establish causation, and must not editorialize. Then write the one-paragraph coordination meeting minute entry covering the same events.

M5 — With Chapter 24 and Chapter 29. You are about to send a recovery-plan demand to three trades simultaneously. Write the safety provisions you will include in the demand, and describe the three leading indicators you will monitor over the following month to detect whether schedule pressure is producing hazard. Reference the week-34 scaffold near-miss findings in your answer.

M6 — With Chapter 32 and Chapter 34. Your company holds $2,400,000 in subcontractor retention across a portfolio. Explain how retention appears in the company's working capital, why passing through the reduction at the 50-percent threshold costs the company nothing, and what a chronic reputation for slow retention release does to the bids the company receives.

M7 — With Chapter 18 and Chapter 27. Take your Willow Street site logistics plan and list every element of it that removes a reason for a crew to stand still. Then map each one to a constraint category you would track on a six-week look-ahead. Which three constraints on your job are most likely to be the ones that actually stop work, and what is your plan for each?

Part E — Research and Extension ⭐⭐⭐⭐

E1. Obtain a real subcontract form — AIA, ConsensusDocs, or a general contractor's custom form. Locate and transcribe: the manpower and progress obligation, the cure and supplementation clause (including the exact notice period and delivery requirement), the termination-for-cause clause, the coordination obligation, and any no-damage-for-delay or claims-against-other-subcontractors provision. Write a one-page memo on which clauses are more demanding than the published-form default and what that tells you about the drafter's experience.

E2. Research your own jurisdiction's rules on: retention limits and release timing for public and private work, prompt-payment obligations for a general contractor paying subcontractors, and whether pay-if-paid clauses are enforceable. Cite the authority you relied on and the date you checked it. Then write the two sentences you would put in your company's subcontract-administration procedure. Do not copy any number from this book — every one of these varies by state and changes over time.

E3. Find your jurisdiction's or a nearby major agency's small, minority-owned, women-owned, and veteran-owned business participation program for public construction. Identify how a firm gets certified, what counts toward the goal, what the good-faith-effort standard requires when a goal is not met, and what documentation a general contractor must submit. Then interview or research one small subcontractor's experience of that process and write a one-page assessment of where the real friction is — and what a general contractor could do about it.