Chapter 25 — Exercises

These exercises are meant to be done, not read. Several of them produce artifacts you can keep — a back-scheduled log, a written RFI, a document-control procedure. Selected answers appear in Appendix J; calculation items carry their numeric answers here in a <details> block so you can check yourself without checking your reasoning.

Difficulty legend: ⭐ basic · ⭐⭐ applied · ⭐⭐⭐ judgment and synthesis · ⭐⭐⭐⭐ extension and research

Part A — Conceptual Understanding ⭐

A1. In one sentence each, define: submittal, RFI, transmittal, deferred submittal, delegated design, record drawing.

A2. A submittal is described in this chapter as "the contractor's demonstration that what it intends to furnish conforms to the contract documents." Explain why the direction of that obligation matters, and name three specific things a design professional's review does not relieve the contractor of.

A3. Put these four stamps in order from most to least permissive, and state for each whether the fabricator may proceed: Revise and resubmit · Approved as noted · Rejected · No exceptions taken.

A4. What is the difference between an aging report and a ball-in-court report? Which one tells you who to call today, and why?

A5. Name the six elements of a well-written RFI. Which one is most often omitted, and what does omitting it cost?

A6. Explain, to someone who has never worked on a job site, why "there is exactly one current set" is a rule rather than a preference. Use a dollar figure.

A7. Distinguish an ASI, a bulletin, and a construction change directive. For each, say what you do when one lands on your desk.

A8. Why is a batch ticket from a ready-mix plant better substantiation than a project manager's memo written eight weeks later, even when both describe the same truth?

A9. What is a scope gap, and why does a resubmittal allowance in a submittal chain fail to protect against one?

A10. State the chapter's threshold concept in your own words, in one sentence, without using the word "documentation."

Part B — Applied Analysis ⭐⭐

B1. The sort order. You inherit a 180-row submittal log sorted by specification section. Describe, in six steps or fewer, exactly what you would do to it in your first afternoon — and state what output you would produce at the end of that afternoon that your project manager could act on.

B2. Whose fault is the delay? A submittal is transmitted to the architect on the 3rd. The specified review period is 14 calendar days. It comes back on the 25th, stamped Approved as noted. The item gated a fabrication release that had 19 days of float. What, precisely, has happened here — and what, if anything, do you do about it?

B3. The batch. Your team transmits 62 submittals to Halvorsen + Pike in the second week of June, having transmitted 9 in the previous five weeks combined. In August, three of those items are still out for review and the mechanical package is at risk. Write the two-paragraph argument the architect will make, and then write your honest reply.

B4. Reading the stamp. A curtain-wall submittal returns stamped Approved as noted, with 41 comments. Comment 17 reads: "Confirm anchor embedment per structural." Comment 31 reads: "Revise mullion cap profile to match approved sample." Comment 38 reads: "Coordinate head condition with precast." For each of the three, say whether the fabricator may proceed with production of the affected components, and what you must do first.

B5. The RFI that is not an RFI. Your electrical subcontractor sends you a draft RFI reading: "Please advise routing for feeders from MDP to Panel 2-LA." Explain why this should not go to the engineer, what you send back to the subcontractor instead, and the one circumstance in which a version of this question would be a legitimate RFI.

B6. The response that changed the contract. The architect's response to your RFI about a corridor rating reads, in full: "Provide a second layer of 5/8-inch Type X gypsum board each side at all Level 2 corridor partitions to achieve the 2-hour rating shown on G-004." Your bid was based on the single-layer assembly described on A-011. Walk through, in order, exactly what you do in the next 48 hours.

B7. The distribution failure. A project runs "reply all" as its distribution strategy. Six months in, a subcontractor claims it never received Bulletin 12. The audit trail shows the email was delivered to a list of 34 people including three at that subcontractor. Describe what actually went wrong, and design the distribution rule that would have prevented it.

B8. Two logs. On Northgate, a correct back-schedule existed in a procurement file and an incorrect submittal register was used daily. Explain in your own words why having the correct analysis did not help — and name two other places in construction management where the same "right document, wrong location" failure occurs.

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

C1. Back-schedule a long lead. The gymnasium maple flooring system for the Willow Street Community Center must be on site October 14, Year 2. Durations, all in calendar days, from the supplier in writing:

Compute: (a) the release/approval gate date; (b) the submittal due date to the GC with the resubmittal allowance; (c) the submittal due date without it; (d) the date the subcontract must be executed. Then state which of (b) or (c) you would put on the log, and why.

C2. The aging and ball-in-court reports. Here is a fragment of a submittal log as of June 30, Year 1.

(a) Build the aging report, sorted by days outstanding descending, showing days out and over/under the review period. (b) Build the ball-in-court summary. (c) Name the one item you call about today and justify it in one sentence.

C3. Write the RFI. During layout of the Willow Street commercial kitchen, your plumbing subcontractor finds that the grease interceptor shown on the plumbing plan has an invert elevation 14 inches below the bottom of the adjacent footing, and the structural drawings show no provision for it. The kitchen slab pour is scheduled in 12 calendar days. Two approaches exist: relocate the interceptor outside the building footprint (roughly $11,000, and it requires a civil revision and possibly a permit revision), or underpin/deepen the adjacent footing (roughly $6,500, requiring structural direction and a 5-day schedule impact).

Write the RFI in full, with all six elements. Then state your required response date and justify it against the pour date.

C4. Level the submission curve. Here is a count of submittals by their computed due week for a project's first sixteen weeks:

The design team has told you, credibly, that it can review about 12 submittals per week without the review period slipping. (a) Which weeks are the problem? (b) Total how many items must move, and where would you move them — earlier or later? (c) What information do you need about each candidate item before you can move it? (d) What do you tell the architect, and when?

C5. Price the documentation gap. A directed change on your project costs $94,000 to perform. You can substantiate $61,000 with contemporaneous records. Assume the same recovery behavior as CO #14 — the owner pays roughly one-third of the undocumented gap as a relationship premium.

(a) What do you expect to settle at? (b) What is your unrecovered cost? (c) If the missing documentation was four days of T&M tickets at roughly ten minutes a day, what was each minute of that documentation worth? (d) Now assume this went to arbitration instead. Recompute (a) and (b).

C6. Build the document-control procedure. Write the two-page document-control procedure for the Willow Street Community Center, as though a new field engineer starts Monday. It must cover: numbering conventions for submittals, RFIs, and transmittals; the current-set rule and how superseded sheets are handled at the field office and at the work face; the transmittal process; the distribution matrix (as a grid); the as-built markup routine and how it is enforced; the archive structure; and the retention period — which you will state after checking your jurisdiction's requirements and your contract, not from memory.

C7. Rewrite the field note. Here is a daily-report entry from a real project, cleaned of identifying details:

"Another wasted day on the north side. MEP still hasn't gotten their act together above the corridor ceiling and now drywall is stuck again. This is the third time. If the engineer had coordinated this in the first place we wouldn't be here. Guys were basically standing around all afternoon. At this rate the whole finish schedule is toast and somebody upstairs needs to know."

Rewrite it so that (a) every recoverable fact is preserved and quantified, (b) mitigation is documented, (c) notice is documented, and (d) there is not one sentence a lawyer could read aloud to embarrass its author. Invent the specific facts you need — crew size, hours, RFI numbers, dates — but keep them internally consistent.

Part D — Judgment and Ethics ⭐⭐⭐

D1. The stamp you asked for. You ask the architect, at the preconstruction meeting, to use "approved as noted" rather than "revise and resubmit" on the gating submittals wherever comments do not go to design intent. Where is the line between a legitimate process request and pressuring a design professional to lower a review standard? Write the sentence you would actually say, and then write the sentence that would cross the line.

D2. Proceeding on your own proposal. RFI 203 in the chapter says "Kestrel proposes to proceed on this basis unless directed otherwise." Identify three situations where that sentence is appropriate and three where including it would be a serious mistake. What is the underlying principle that separates them?

D3. The record you do not want to make. Your superintendent tells you, on a Tuesday, that a subcontractor's crew has been working without a required fall-protection anchorage design because the sealed submittal has not come back. Work stops immediately — that part is not in question. The question is what you write. Draft the record. Then explain what you would not write and why, and address honestly the tension between candor in a safety record and the fact that the record may be read by a plaintiff's lawyer.

D4. Silence as strategy. A subcontractor's RFI response, from the architect, plainly adds scope to that subcontractor's work — but the subcontractor has not noticed, and its subcontract is lump sum. You noticed. What do you do, and what is the argument for each answer? Consider the subcontract, the prime contract, the relationship, and what happens if you say nothing and the subcontractor discovers it in month fourteen.

D5. The 400-RFI project. You take over a project with 380 RFIs at 60 percent complete and an architect who has visibly stopped reading them carefully. The documents genuinely are thin. Your predecessor's approach was to send everything. Write the first three actions you take, and defend the one that costs you something in the short term.

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

M1. Chapter 7 + Chapter 25. Take three discrepancies from the discrepancy log you built in Chapter 7. For each, decide whether it is (i) resolvable by the order-of-precedence clause, (ii) an RFI, or (iii) a scope gap to be assigned in buyout. Then write the one that is an RFI, in full, and explain why the other two are not.

M2. Chapter 14 + Chapter 16 + Chapter 25. Take five activities from the CPM schedule you built in Chapter 14 that install a fabricated item. Back-schedule each to a submittal due date and an award-by date. Then answer: how much total float exists between your earliest award-by date and today's date on your project? If the answer is negative, say what you would do this week.

M3. Chapter 23 + Chapter 25. The approved submittal for a fire-rated door assembly specifies a particular hardware set and a particular listed frame. The doors that arrive on site have a different frame manufacturer's label. Trace the failure back through the submittal-to-installation chain and identify every control point where it could have been caught — from specification through submittal review, delivery inspection, preinstallation conference, installation, and inspection.

M4. Chapter 19 + Chapter 25. Your subcontract requires each subcontractor to submit within a stated number of days of award and to maintain its own as-built markups. Two subcontractors are chronically late on both. Write the escalation sequence you would follow — and identify at what point, and by what contractual mechanism, non-compliance affects their money.

M5. Chapter 31 + Chapter 33 + Chapter 25. CO #14 recovered $142,750 of $186,400 and 4 of 9 claimed calendar days. Using the three-part framework of entitlement, causation, and damages, state which of the three failed for the cost claim and which failed for the time claim — and explain why they failed differently.

M6. Chapter 24 + Chapter 25. The scaffold near-miss investigation found that the third contributing cause was schedule pressure following the steel acceleration, which itself followed a submittal that sat eleven days on a desk. Draw the causal chain as a diagram. Then write the two sentences about it that you would actually put in a lessons-learned report, and defend them against the objection that you are inviting liability.

Part E — Research and Extension ⭐⭐⭐⭐

E1. Read a real submittal article. Find a real construction specification section — many public agencies publish their standard specifications online — and read Part 1, "Submittals," in full. List every submittal it requires, classify each by type using the table in §25.2, and note anything it requires that you would not have predicted. Then find the Division 01 section that governs submittal procedures generally and compare: which requirements live in Division 01 and which live in the technical section, and why does that division of labor exist?

E2. Find your jurisdiction's deferred-submittal rules. Building codes and local amendments govern which components may be submitted after permit issuance, who must review them, and in what sequence. Locate the rule for the jurisdiction where you live or work. Determine: which components are commonly deferred there, who reviews them, what the stated or typical review duration is, and what happens if a deferred component is installed before approval. Write a one-page memo you could hand to a project team. Cite the actual source you found; do not generalize from this book.

E3. Compare three platforms by capability, not by demo. Pick three document-control platforms in common use. Without watching a single sales demonstration, determine for each: how it handles superseded drawings at the work face; whether its transmittal audit trail records download or only delivery; whether it can generate a ball-in-court report without customization; and how it links an RFI to a schedule activity. Write a one-page comparison aimed at a project manager, and end with the honest sentence about what none of them can do.