Владелец проекта должен провести формальную передачу ответственности в первые 30 дней после подписания контракта

My 30-Day Handoff Rule for Construction Success Remy Edmunds Within a week of signing the guaranteed maximum price, I was in a meeting watching a team discover, one item at a time, that project systems we had built over a year of design had not moved with us into construction. The risk register surfaced first. As the owner, we had maintained it, through design, with the estimator. Nobody had carried it past the guaranteed maximum price.. It was not lost. It had stopped, because no one on the construction side had been told to own it. The request-for-information process was in the same condition—now with real volume and no one staffed to run it. The submittal log, too. None of this was failure in the usual sense. No one dropped the ball. It just had never been formally handed over. We treated guaranteed maximum price execution as a finish line when it is really a handoff.When not managed, handoffs can cause critical elements to get lost. Construction is not the first industry to learn this. Hospitals studied the problem and found it expensive. A patient transfer between shifts or units is where information falls out. To address the problem, a 2014 study of nine hospitals created a structured handoff program. It cut preventable adverse events by 30% and medical errors by 23%—doing so without making the handoffs take longer. Different work, same weak point: the handoff. A capital project has the same exposure. Design produces a working set of controls: a risk register, decision log, coordination rhythm and a way that information moves and gets approved. Those controls live in documents and also in the heads of the people who built them. With guaranteed maximum price, the people change and the pace changes. Controls that were obvious to the design team are invisible to the construction team that inherits them. Information governance built during design, the data models and accountability workflows that keep decisions traceable, tend to fracture when work is handed across. Capital project research has found that communication carries one of the largest effects on performance, working through the competence of the team. The handoff is where that communication is most likely to break. With the design team winding down and the construction team ramping up, the owner is the only party present to see how both operate. The constructor will stand up its own controls, but those do not automatically preserve the owner’s design history, or the open risk position the owner carries into construction. The constructor tracking its own contingency is not the same as the owner knowing what it is carrying. If the owner does not run the transition, no one does. Looking for quick answers on construction and engineering topics? Try Ask ENR, our new smart AI search tool. Ask ENR → The Simple Reframe The reframe is simple and I call this oversight reset my 30-day handoff rule. The moment the contract is signed is the moment to re-establish it for construction. In practice that requires a short and unglamorous list. Decide who owns the risk register now and how it is reviewed or decide on the record to retire it. Staff the request for information and submittal function before the volume peaks—not after. Confirm who drives, who audits the coordination meeting and who attends, and add it to the calendar before the first clash. Then, carry the open design assumptions forward as named items with owners, so they do not return later as change orders. Also, restate decision rights for the construction phase, because the authority that was clear among a small design group is not clear once the room fills with new parties. These steps are easy to skip because each one feels like something that will sort itself out, and because the guaranteed maximum price signing carries the comfortable feeling of an ending. The cost of skipping these handoffs shows up one month later as a slow request-for- information log—a risk no one was watching, a decision that took three weeks when no one knew who owned it. I have started treating the first weeks after guaranteed maximum price the way the schedule treats mobilization: as real work with an owner and a deliverable, not as a gap between phases. The deliverable is continuity and is my work as owner. The window closes faster than it feels like it will. The handoff is cheap if you manage it and expensive if you assume it. Assigned guaranteed maximum price feels like the end of the hardest part. For the owner, it is where the project either keeps its grip or quietly loses it.