Pre-construction is a phase of the delivery process refers to activities that occur prior to construction work starting, including design coordination, budgeting and estimating, constructability assessment, scheduling, and procurement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
How much pre-construction activity there will be and how soon it will start depends a lot on the particular delivery process. In design-bid-build projects, there is minimal pre-construction activity by the contractor, because the GC is not brought on board until the design process is almost complete. On design-build and CM at-risk projects, on the other hand, there can be quite a lot of pre-construction activity for many months before groundbreaking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Good preconstruction work compounds in value throughout the rest of the project. A thorough constructability review during preconstruction catches issues while they’re still cheap to fix on paper. Careful early buyout locks in trade pricing before market conditions can shift unfavorably. Accurate early estimates give the owner a realistic budget to plan against, rather than a number that gets revised upward repeatedly as the design develops, which generally erodes trust in the team’s cost projections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The counterpoint worth acknowledging is that preconstruction takes real time and resources, and a project team under pressure to start construction quickly sometimes compresses this phase more than is genuinely advisable, trading a faster groundbreaking for risks that tend to resurface more expensively once construction is already underway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A reasonable benchmark worth keeping in mind: preconstruction activities on a complex CM-at-risk project might reasonably run anywhere from a few months to well over a year depending on project size and design complexity, and compressing that timeline significantly below what the project’s actual complexity would normally warrant tends to shift risk into construction rather than eliminating it the unresolved issues preconstruction would otherwise have caught don’t disappear, they simply surface later, usually at higher cost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Owner engagement during preconstruction varies considerably by project type and client sophistication, and calibrating that engagement level appropriately matters. An experienced institutional owner may want deep involvement in every preconstruction decision, while a first-time developer client may prefer the contractor to drive most preconstruction activity independently, surfacing only the decisions that genuinely require the owner’s direct input rather than every incremental step along the way. Getting that calibration wrong in either direction tends to frustrate the relationship, either through oversight and a lack of involvement or by being left out of the loop and without ownership.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Pre-construction is a phase of the delivery process refers to activities that occur prior to construction work starting, including design coordination, budgeting and estimating, constructability assessment, scheduling, and procurement. How much pre-construction activity there will be and how soon it will start depends a lot on the particular delivery process. In design-bid-build projects, there is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-p"],"yoast_head":"\n