Practical, experience-based project management lessons for project engineers, developing project managers, and field professionals.
Friday Field Notes #10: Don’t Wait Until the End to Price the Change
|
FRIDAY FIELD NOTES #10 Don’t Wait Until the End to Price the Change Good morning team, This week’s topic: pricing changes while the information is still current. 1. From the Field Change pricing becomes much harder when the team waits until the work is complete to begin building the cost. By that point, timecards have been processed, equipment has moved, invoices may be mixed with other work, and the people who performed the task have already shifted their attention elsewhere. I’ve seen project teams spend more time reconstructing a change than they would have spent tracking it correctly from the beginning. Pricing does not always need to be final before the work starts. In many situations, the exact quantity or duration is still developing. But the project should establish a cost structure early enough to capture the resources being used and identify the assumptions that will affect the final price. 2. Leadership Perspective Good project leaders do not avoid an uncomfortable cost conversation because every detail is not yet known. They communicate what is known, identify what remains uncertain, and keep the discussion moving as better information becomes available. 3. Field Observation Change pricing is usually strongest when estimating, operations, and project controls contribute while the work is still active. The superintendent can explain the method and production, the PE can assemble quantities and records, and the PM can review contract entitlement, pricing requirements, and schedule effects. When those efforts happen together, the final request is easier to understand and defend. When pricing is treated as an administrative task at the end, important details are more likely to be missed. 4. Spreadsheet Tip This week’s formula: SUBTOTAL Use this formula when you want Excel to total only the visible rows in a filtered list. =SUBTOTAL(9,F2:F500) The number 9 tells Excel to calculate a sum. If you filter the list by change item, date, employee, equipment type, or cost category, the formula updates to show the total for the visible records. This is especially useful when reviewing detailed change cost logs without creating a separate worksheet for every change item. 5. Question for the Week What potential change on your project would be easier to price now than after the work is complete? 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...