Projects are built before trades even arrive on site. The drawings, specs, and project documents that tell us what we are going to build and how it is meant to be built are the path we’re meant to follow when we step on site. But what happens when that pathway is incomplete?
Too often these plans are being used as a halfway marker for the project, with the field team having to build out the other half. It falls under a quasi-delegated design category where the AOR provides a half-baked drawing and a subcontractors shop drawings become final design. At what point did that become acceptable? Why are trades being relied upon to design the last 50% of the systems necessary to bring the project to life? Engineers should be designing systems to be optimized for performance and at a bare minimum be functional. However, increasingly the ball is placed in the subcontractor’s court to finish designing the building even though the drawings are meant to represent a complete project design.
All people have different standards of acceptable quality in their work. It’s not reasonable to expect perfection of anyone, and not everything we build is going to be free of errors. However, when hundreds of errors ranging from simple omissions to catastrophic system failures can be found on a set of plans, that is a serious problem.
A project is only as good as the information it’s built on and the field team’s ability to interpret it. The more errors and omissions there are, the more issues that will arise on site. We absolutely can and do solve these problems as they come, but sometimes those solutions come at a great cost. One simple miss can turn into one significant change order later.
Where the Gap Actually Shows Up
This is not an abstract complaint. The gap shows up in specific, repeatable ways. A pipe routed through a structural beam with no coordination check. A panel schedule that doesn’t match the actual loads of the equipment being installed. A detail call out that doesn’t exist. Conflicting dimensions between the architectural and structural sets that nobody caught because nobody was asked to. Each one of these, on its own, looks like a small thing. An RFI, a quick sketch, a five-minute conversation. However, they don’t show up one at a time. They show up by the dozen, sometimes by the hundred, and the field team becomes the de facto coordination layer for a design that was never fully coordinated to begin with.
This is where the issue lies. Coordination is design work. Sequencing decisions that affect structural integrity are design work. Filling in a system so it actually functions as intended is design work. None of that is supposed to live with the trades. It’s supposed to arrive already resolved, because the people stamping those drawings are the ones licensed and paid to resolve it.
Why It Keeps Happening
Some of this comes down to schedule pressure on the design teams. Some of it comes down to fee structures that don’t leave room for a thorough internal review before a set goes out for bid or construction. The majority of it though is just an industry-wide acceptance of treating field coordination as a built-in safety net. The assumption is that the trades will catch whatever gets overlooked during pre-construction. Whatever the cause, the effect is the same: the burden of finishing the design moves downstream to people who weren’t paid to design it and aren’t protected if it’s wrong.
It’s worth noting that a handful of errors on a complex set is normal and expected. No design is going to be perfect, and a reasonable RFI count is just part of how construction works. What is not normal is when the error count climbs into the hundreds, and when those errors stop being clarifications and start being structural omissions, missing details, or systems that were never fully designed. At that point it’s not a documentation gap, but a transfer of responsibility, whether anyone intended it that way or not.
What It Costs
The cost of that transfer is rarely direct and evident. It shows up later, in a change order that traces back to a missed coordination point nobody flagged in design. It shows up in schedule delays while the field waits on a design clarification that should have already existed. It shows up in broken trust and damaged reputations as well. When a contractor opens a set of plans expecting to build from it and instead finds a puzzle they’re expected to solve it erodes the working relationship between the project stakeholders.
None of this is said to suggest the field team can’t solve these problems. Good Superintendents and Project Managers catch things that should have been caught months earlier, and they make it work because that’s the job. However, “the ability to solve a problem” and “the responsibility to solve it” are two different things, and the industry has gotten too comfortable treating them as the same.
Where This Has to Change
This isn’t a call for perfect drawings; It’s a call for complete ones. Designs that are actually finished before being handed off, with the coordination done where coordination belongs. If a system is shown on paper, it should function as drawn. If it doesn’t, that’s not a field problem to be absorbed, but a design problem that needs to be identified as such.
Take pride in your work no matter what you do. Stop passing the responsibility that belongs to you onto someone else. The drawings are supposed to be the guide we follow. It’s time we stop accepting this slide into complacency and take ownership of our project contributions. It’s time to step up.
Tyler Burnette 
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