Underlying Causes of Changes on Projects

Start improving your change management skills by creating some categories of the underlying causes of changes your company experiences.

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Changes are a fact during construction projects, though many can be mitigated through rigorous management of the design and planning processes.

Change Management: Categories of the Underlying Causes of Change.

Some of those categories might include:

  • Project requirement changes: Remember that this project is simply there to serve as a step in the project owner's value stream. A lot changes in their business from the start of the design process through the construction process.  

  • Gaps, lack of clarity, or conflicts that occur during design, contracting, and installation phases. 

  • Value engineering, which is great for all parties

  • Unknown conditions that are unknown during design or bidding typical for underground or remodels

  • Execution variables, including schedule changes, compressed work, stacking of trades, or other factors that impact productivity

  • Back charges to or from others typically related to conflicts during installation

What are the categories of underlying causes for your company?

Which ones come up the most?

Could any of them have been identified earlier?

 


Deeply understanding the underlying reasons for changes allows you to identify them early in the preconstruction process and adds the most value to the project owner.  


Underlying Causes of Changes on Projects
Change orders are a fact of life in construction. Improve profitability, cash flow and customer satisfaction by effectively managing changes. Build a foundation for success with 12 steps to improve pricing and 11 negotiating strategies for the whole project team....

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Underlying Causes of Changes on Projects
Change orders are a fact of life in construction. Improve profitability, cash flow and customer satisfaction by effectively managing changes. Build a foundation for success with 12 steps to improve pricing and 11 negotiating strategies for the whole project team....

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A 10% improvement in change order pricing for a $50M per year contractor will add $500K to their bottom line. This is not about simply marking up the change more, but rather, including the many costs that are typically missed or undervalued.
Two Planning Dimensions
Some of the impacts you see on a project are not as clear as a design change, conflict, or obviously changed condition. Some impacts, such as poor project sequencing or congested work areas are hard to notice if you don’t have good tracking systems.
Two Key Results for Project Planning
There are two critical key results that should be focused on as part of every project planning process.