Alright Stop, Collaborate and Listen!

Collaboration is being pitched as an approach to integrate the diverse, and often divergent demands of a project team into a single vision. It’s a commendable goal, but most of software solutions that claim to help are centralized systems under the control and management of the developer or contractor. At the end of the day though, it is the design professional who is on the hook in terms of liability for the job – meaning it is in the design professional’s best interest to be in control of the project data.

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Change Management – the other side of the coin

We previously explored the outgoing documents of CCDC 24 – those that are initiated by the designer/design team such as Site Instructions, Change Notices, and Change Orders. Now let’s take a closer look at the incoming documents – those that you receive from the contractor, consultants, and/or your client.

Since incoming documents are coming from outside sources, they tend to be less structured. Sometimes they aren’t even documents in the traditional sense at all (phone calls, texts, and email messages). CCDC2 tends to limit all communications about the project to the contractor, while management and other contracts may have communication coming from each discipline separately. Regardless of the contract type or communication source, incoming documents usually come in one of two “flavours”:

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Exploring Change “Notices”

In construction contract administration the general purpose of a notice is to document the anticipated expansion or contraction of the scope of work of a project. Notices can be used to elicit a quote from the contractor, and should contain language that explicitly forbids or permits the contractor to proceed with any work described therein without subsequent written authorization in the form of an approved Order.

Notices go by a variety of names, including: Change Notice, Contemplated Change Order, Proposed Change, Change Directive, and Bulletin. Despite the diverse nomenclature, there are three commonly issued types of Notices:

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Report from the Field – CSC CCA Course

I just completed the week long, intensive Construction Contract Administration (CCA) course put on by Construction Specifications Canada (CSC) in Toronto. Largely due to the dynamic personality of instructor Ted Katsoris it was more fun than I expected! Ted was serious and informative as needed, but he kept things light by periodically injecting his somewhat acerbic and occasionally self-deprecating sense of humour into the lessons. 8 hours a day over 4 days is a long time to stay 100% focused on contract admin, but Ted kept it entertaining.

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Go West, Young Architect!

We’re pleased as punch to announce the expansion of our FIVE Hosted Cloud platform with the launch of a new cloud system on the west coast of North America!

We’ve already migrated our existing subscribers that are closer to the new system geographically, giving them an improved experience at no extra charge.

If you are interested in starting a FIVE Hosted Cloud trial and your offices are located on or near the west coast, make sure to let us know that you’d like to have FIVE hosted on our west coast cloud system!

 

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Featured image copyright by Wolfgang Staudt.  Some rights reserved.

Going, Going…GONE!

One thing FIVE has always done exceptionally well is make it quick and easy to distribute your construction documents. Whether it’s smart distribution lists, automatic PDF and image collation and merging, or report scheduling, distributing documentation is one task that you’ll spend a lot less time doing with FIVE than with any alternative. And guess what? It’s even faster and easier with the new Send To button, available now in FIVE by StatsLog.

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The Statslog Story