By Steve Rizer
The amount of rework within the construction industry that goes unreported is staggering. If a 2011 estimate from the Construction Industry Institute is to be believed, only 50-75 percent of the actual amount of rework performed gets reported. But why is rework being under-reported? During a webinar called “The Impact of Rework on Construction Projects and Some Practical Remedies,” – a recording of which recently was added to the ConstructionPro Network (ConstructionProNet.com) Download Library free of charge for members -- Navigant Construction Forum Executive Director James Zack offered an interesting theory about why this happens.
“I think a contractor’s project manager would probably be putting his own career seriously at risk if he actually told the boss, ‘Yeah, I know we had $500,000 worth of rework here, but it really was $1.25 million,’" Zack told the webinar audience during the program’s question-and-answer period. “That’s just not going to go over well with senior executives, so I suspect that the reason that rework is under-reported is a job-protection sort of thing on the part of the field project managers.”
In defining what “rework” is, Zack and Nigel Hughes, associate director with Navigant Consulting Inc.’s Construction Practice, presented the following slide:
Zack and Hughes then listed the following causes of rework:
Also during the webinar, Zack and Hughes discussed the schedule impact of rework, the potential for building information modeling and virtual design and construction to reduce rework, the cost of rework, “design freeze,” and other topics.
For immediate access to the complete webinar (full audio and visual) -- as well as nearly three dozen other construction-related webinars that are available for download -- sign up to become a member of WPL Publishing’s ConstructionPro Network, a complete training, education, and development resource for the construction industry, at http://constructionpronet.com/info/Charter2012.aspx.
