PRICELESS: Patience and wisdom to communicate properly the first time. “The real cost of poor communication is what it does to the people involved.” This is true in every family, every workplace, every relationship, and every country on earth!
“The biggest communication problem is we do not listen to understand. We listen to reply.”
“The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t being said.” — Peter Drucker
“Good communication doesn’t mean never disagreeing; it means disagreeing without hurting the one you love.”
“The first duty of love is to listen.” — Paul Tillich
“The quality of your life is the quality of your communication.” — Tony Robbins
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“There is a number that should be on every owner’s desk. It is not a project budget. It is not a contingency line. It is the cost of managing information that should have been clear in the first place.
$860,000
“That is what the average construction project spends dealing with RFIs — requests for information — once you add up the review time, the response cycles, the administrative overhead, and the labor on both sides of each exchange. That figure comes from a Navigant Construction Forum study covering 1,362 projects and more than one million RFIs. It is not an outlier. It is the average.
“When Autodesk analyzed more than 1,300 projects, they found an average of 9.9 RFIs for every $1 million in construction value. Other research puts that closer to 15 to 20 per million. A $100 million project can generate over a thousand RFIs. Do the math.
“But the dollar figure is not actually the most interesting part of the problem.
****“The real cost is what it does to the people involved.”****
“The hidden tax that information overload places on the people managing projects: Project professionals are already operating at near-capacity before they ever open a software platform. The intrinsic complexity of the work — coordinating dozens of trades, managing shifting schedules, tracking cost against budget in real time — consumes most of their available mental bandwidth. Every extraneous task, every unnecessary notification, every system that creates work instead of reducing it pulls cognitive resources away from the decisions that actually matter.
“RFIs are a cognitive load machine.
“The typical RFI consumes about 8 hours of combined time across the parties involved — submitting, logging, reviewing, researching, drafting a response, distributing it, and closing the loop. The median response time is 9.7 days. That is nearly two full working weeks from question to answer, during which the work either waits or proceeds on an assumption that might be wrong.
“For the person managing a log of 800 RFIs — which is what Navigant found to be the average per project — this is not a workflow. It is a second job running inside the first one.”
-KP Reddy
@kpreddy
Civil Engineer, entrepreneur, and investor, AEC
(Architecture, Engineering and Construction) kpreddy.co
