Short, practical pieces on where preconstruction risk actually hides, and how to catch it while it is still cheap to change.
Your ability to influence a project falls at exactly the rate the cost of changing it rises. The gap between those two lines is where the money is, and it closes at the GMP.
Read the pieceA guaranteed maximum price feels like certainty. Underneath the headline number sits a layer of allowances, provisional sums and optimistic quantities, and that layer is where your risk actually lives.
Read the pieceA schedule is a sales document as much as a plan. When the finish date looks better than it should, the risk has not gone away. It has just been moved somewhere you cannot see it.
Read the pieceFloat looks like slack in the schedule, room to absorb a bad week. Treated that way it disappears fast, and the finish date goes with it. Float is a shared resource, and who spends it matters.
Read the pieceThe most expensive scope on a project is often the scope nobody priced: the work that lives in the gap between two packages, owned by neither and paid for by you.
Read the pieceA drawing can be complete, coordinated and clash-free and still describe something that cannot be built the way the schedule assumes. The difference is who is doing the reading.
Read the pieceEveryone on a project has a stake in the outcome, and every stake bends the read. The value of a review is not the analysis alone. It is that the person doing it has nothing riding on the answer.
Read the pieceChange is not the enemy on a construction project. Uncontrolled change is. The difference is set in preconstruction, long before the first variation is ever written.
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