Developing Construction Playbooks for Winning Project Teams
By: Miguel Roman, Product Manager & Advisor, Document Crunch
Winning football organizations distribute playbooks to their players ahead of the season. By studying and internalizing the playbook, athletes show up ready to practice, play, and win. Construction companies should rely on a similar strategy. Every project team needs a playbook to follow that outlines the contract terms and illustrates their part in a winning strategy. With Document Crunch, general contractors can generate and customize a playbook that translates contract decisions to jobsite execution, and sets up project teams for success.
What should a construction playbook include?
A construction playbook should include the general contractor’s opinion on what is important for project teams to know when working on a project. The playbook is the starting point for every project and should allow a project team to thoroughly understand what’s expected of them according to the contract.
Playbooks should highlight critical information including:
Clients, partners, and key representatives contact information
Key dates and milestones
Project location, price, and contract type
Additionally, playbooks should contain overviews of the following project domains and answer these questions:
Financial Management
What are the payment procedures and terms?
How will liquidated damages be treated?
Change Management
What is the approval process for change orders?
What are the allowable fees and markups for change orders?
What information is needed as backup for change order approval?
What is the expected time to respond and approve open change order requests?
Legal Procedures
What audit rights exist?
When do notice letters need to be sent?
How do notice letters need to be sent?
Are there confidentiality requirements on this project?
Scope of Work and Project Execution
What reports are needed for this project and at what frequency should they be produced?
What is the order of precedence of documents when there are conflicts of information?
What meetings are required and who needs to be included in them?
How do most general contractors build playbooks?
Unfortunately, most GCs don’t have a standard project playbook. They will typically have a person or small group of individuals that have worked in the industry for 20+ years that offer advice to teams at the beginning of the project. For those that do have a playbook, it may be a physical binder that serves as a manifesto of how that company uses its various systems to run a project. These manuals tend to be dated and unusable at scale. Other companies have a “contract abstract” or a spreadsheet of questions that are filled out when reading through a contract. Finally, companies with legal counsel, either in house or external, may have an attorney walk through the contract with the project team. This can be a costly endeavor when lawyers charge $600-800/hour, and it's not scalable for GCs that run several hundred projects a year.
Most of the methods above fail to recognize that a playbook is more than tasks to complete. A playbook is a framework that shows teams how to look at a project. Just like a football team’s playbook can’t predict the defense, the weather, or player injuries, a construction playbook can’t predict the course of a project, but it can give project teams the tools to adapt to any circumstances. A construction playbook should evolve over time and become sharper with every project through the learned wisdom of those who use it. Over time, GCs should have a customizable playbook that can be adapted for each contract type, client, region, or business unit.
How can GCs use AI to build construction playbooks?
Through software like Document Crunch, GCs can operationalize their contracts quickly and effectively. Document Crunch allows project managers to develop a project playbook in a few clicks that is customized to the contract and parties involved.
The Document Crunch playbook includes the following plays that set project teams up for success:
Financial Management - A summary of what project teams need to know regarding:
Progress payments
Final payment
Retainage
Contingencies
Allowances
Audits
Savings
Change Management - A summary of what project teams need to know regarding:
Change orders
Notices - when, where, and how to send them
Delays, Compensation, Remedies, Limitations
Material price escalation
Unforeseen conditions
Hazardous materials
Weather delays
Project Execution - A summary of what project teams need to know regarding:
Parties
Designated representatives
Duration for performance
Initial schedule requirements
Completion milestones
Confidentiality requirements
Order of precedence
Minority and woman participation
Prevailing wage requirements
And playbooks in Document Crunch are easily customizable to add or edit additional information.
How do playbooks fit into project kickoff and beyond?
Playbooks should be the main outline used to facilitate the construction kick-off process. Playbooks should be owned and developed by the project teams as they are in the preconstruction phase and contracts are getting finalized. It allows them to get prepared to start the project off on the right foot. Teams can kick off projects by reviewing playbooks in a software like Document Crunch (or in Procore through our integration), as a physical, printed document, or as a slide presentation developed from a playbook document. It’s not enough to generate a great playbook, it has to be shared and reviewed with project stakeholders, to make sure it’s useful and ubiquitous.
After kickoff, project teams need easy, mobile access to their playbook to reference key contract terms and check their progress. With Document Crunch, teams can access their playbooks directly in Procore through our integration. They can quickly reference a piece of information, get up to speed on a particular topic, or choose to dive deeper on a subject they have a question on. They can even ask our AI-driven Chat feature the questions they need quick answers to. With a powerful AI contract and document platform like Document Crunch, project teams can have unlimited access to Playbooks that support project success.
Paul "Bear" Bryant, a College Football Hall of Fame coach who won six national championships once said, "It's not the will to win that matters-everyone has that. It's the will to prepare to win that matters."
Developing a great playbook and memorizing that playbook, doesn’t guarantee a win. Internalizing the playbook and adapting to the game conditions is how great teams turn a playbook into a championship. We’d argue the same is true for construction teams. Internalizing the contract terms via our Playbook gives project teams the confidence to handle daily challenges on the job site.