Practice Management Member Conversations

The owner and contractor have worked together on many previous projects? All relationships have bumps in the road. If one of those bumps happens with your project, who's the odd man out? You can do abbreviated specs on the drawings and reference published standards as part of that for small projects of limited complexity, but the Division 1 sections that define responsibilities and quality standards should always be part of the contract documents. On the topic of "spec books result in high bids" I would just say that uncertainty results in high bids. I wouldn't forego writing specs, but I would look at the overall package and process and learn from it. We are constantly struggling with too much boilerplate, with lots of information that isn't relative to the project, in specs from our MEPFP consultants for small projects and projects of limited scope. Spec references to scope that isn't in the project creates uncertainty at bid time. ------------------------------------------- Mary Holland AIA CICADA Architecture/Planning, Inc. Philadelphia PA -------------------------------------------

If your client proposes to do without the specs, they have mostly probably misjudged the causes of the high bids. The key word here is uncertainty. High bid can be a consequence of many variables in the process- macro-economic condition of the day, quality of contractors in the bidding, market sentiment, whether there is competitive bidding, quality of documentation,...

Quite often high bid also comes about because the contractors is uncertain what quality benchmark the client and consultants are looking for. Boilerplate spec is one typical cause. When spec detailed something that is not applicable to the project, the natural reaction is to price in some buffer in case that particular item actually exists somewhere and have been overlooked.

Rampant discrepancies between specs and drawings is another. When one is uncertain, the no-brainer is to price for the higher to protect yourself against being asked to provide for the better of the two quality standards. High staff turnover and even division of labor- the practice of separating design and construction documentation staff is also an indirect consequence of the disconnect between drawings  as well as specification. Project information inevitably get lost in the process when one party, (design staff) hands over to the next (construction documentation staff)

Having said that I can see where the client is coming from. Often time they fix a particular project as a quality benchmark and just want it replicated with another project of similar nature. The danger here is no two projects are entirely identical. Unless it is a multiple phase, large scale single use development where a large portion of the work can be based on a single spec for consistency across the entire project. Even here, there is a need for particular spec to overlay over the spec book of the entire project to address aspects of the work that is peculiar to a particular phase or particular site condition in the phase.

Bearing in mind once you are into the construction phase, anything not in the contract document is fair game for the contractor to price in a fat margin and no one can blame them for doing so given the lack of pressure from competitive bidding. By then the inevitable course of action to keep within a fixed budget is either to bite the bullet going back to square one (result in higher bid), reduced scope or reduced quality standard. The latter two scenario are probably the norms that have misled the clients at the management level into thinking they can get away with doing a project without a spec book.

I would lay down all the potential scenarios/ consequences very explicitly at the client's feet (the potential pitfalls, cost escalations and  loss of design control over quality standards) - first in a friendly meeting and then follow up with a written explanation why this is not advisable and not in their best interest.

-------------------------------------------
Geok Ser Lee Intl. Assoc. AIA, LEED AP
GSLA
Irvine CA
-------------------------------------------