Practical, experience-based project management lessons for project engineers, developing project managers, and field professionals.
Friday Field Notes #07: Change Orders Start Before the COR
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FRIDAY FIELD NOTES #07 Change Orders Start Before the COR Good morning team, This week’s topic: change orders. 1. From the Field By the time a change order request is formally written, much of the important work has already happened. Someone identified that the requested work may be outside the original scope, the team discussed how to proceed, labor or equipment may have been committed, and the project started collecting information to support the cost. I’ve seen change requests become difficult to recover because the team treated the COR as the beginning of the process. In reality, the process begins as soon as someone recognizes that the work may be different from what was originally planned or priced. The earlier the project team identifies the potential change, the easier it is to track the labor, equipment, materials, schedule effects, and supporting communication while the information is still fresh. 2. Leadership Perspective Good project leaders make it safe for the team to raise scope questions early. A PE should not feel like every potential change has to be fully proven before mentioning it. Early notice gives the PM time to review the contract, ask questions, and decide how the work should be handled. 3. Field Observation Scope changes are not always announced as formal changes. They often begin with a drawing clarification, an access restriction, additional handling, a different disposal requirement, or a request that sounds minor during a field conversation. The important skill is learning to pause and compare the request against the contract, estimate, drawings, and existing assumptions. Not every difference becomes a change order, but every meaningful difference should be recognized and evaluated before the cost is buried in normal project activity. 4. Spreadsheet Tip This week’s formula: SUMIFS Use this formula to total change-related costs for a specific change item. =SUMIFS($F:$F,$B:$B,A2,$C:$C,”Change”) In this example: Column F contains the cost. Column B contains the change item number. Cell A2 contains the change item you want to total. Column C identifies whether the cost is change-related. Excel will total the costs in Column F that match both conditions. This can be useful when labor, equipment, trucking, materials, or subcontractor costs are being tracked across several potential change items. 5. Question for the Week What work on your current project should be reviewed now before it becomes difficult to separate from the original scope? Have a great weekend, Dan |
Friday Field Notes
Practical, experience-based project management lessons for project engineers, developing project managers, and field professionals.
Good morning team, This week’s topic: look-ahead schedules. 1. From the Field A look-ahead should represent what the project team actually believes is going to happen over the next few weeks. That sounds obvious, but I’ve seen look-aheads continue showing activities that everyone onsite already knows are not going to start on the dates listed. At that point, the document stops being a planning tool and becomes an exercise in updating dates. A useful look-ahead should reflect current field...
Good morning team, This week’s topic: project schedules. 1. From the Field A project schedule is obviously a planning tool, but I’ve found that its real value comes from how well it helps people understand what is supposed to happen next. A schedule can be technically correct and still be difficult to use. If the field team cannot tell what areas should be available, when subcontractors are needed, or what activities are driving the next few weeks of work, the schedule is not doing much to...
If you’re new here, Friday Field Notes is a short weekly newsletter built around practical project management lessons from the field. I originally started writing these notes for Project Engineers I was helping develop. The goal was simple: give them something useful they could read in a few minutes and apply to a real project. A lot of project management is learned through formal training, procedures, software, and project controls. But some of the most important lessons come from...