A bulletin is a formal instrument the architect or owner issues during construction to communicate a change in the contract documents, typically a design revision, clarification, or correction before that change gets priced and formalized into a change order. Consider it an announcement vs. an amended contract.
With most projects, a bulletin will be issued as a numbered document (Bulletin 014, for example) with a description and a set of revised drawings or spec sections attached. The contractor’s job is to review it, figure out cost and schedule impact, and respond, usually with a proposal request response or a formal change order request tied back to that specific bulletin number.
The distinction between a bulletin and a change order trips up a lot of newer project engineers. A bulletin describes what’s changing in the design. A change order is the contractual mechanism that adjusts price and time to accommodate it. You can have five bulletins rolled into a single change order, or one bulletin that gets split across two change orders if part of the scope was already covered under an existing contingency.
Tracking matters more than people expect here, mostly because bulletins pile up fast on any project with active design development; thirty or forty isn’t unusual on a mid-size building over an 18-month schedule, and losing track of which drawings a given bulletin superseded is a common source of RFIs later. A design flaw is not the cause of a current issue in coordination. Instead, it originated due to a gap in document control.
There are two bulletin numbering systems used by architects. One is a sequential system spanning the entire project, while the other resets the numbering system based on each phase or each discipline. It is important to note this system because it impacts the construction of your log system.
Analyzing a bulletin requires a thorough description beyond just a brief narrative. Experienced project engineers pull the attached revised sheets side by side against the prior version, confirm which spec sections are affected even if the bulletin only mentions drawings, and flag anything that touches work already partially installed. Skipping that last check is how a bulletin ends up triggering a tear-out nobody anticipated, simply because the crew was three days ahead of where the design team assumed they’d be.
A quick gut check worth applying to any bulletin before signing off on it: does the described change actually match what the attached drawings show, and does the drawing revision number align with what the bulletin narrative claims changed? These discrepancies happen more frequently than they should almost always emanate when the written description is provided after or before a drafting update.
