Fast Brief
Most change orders don’t stall because of pricing.
They stall because no one has clear visibility on where they stand.
A change gets identified, someone mentions it in a meeting, maybe an RFI is tied to it, and then it slowly disappears into emails, meeting notes, and scattered conversations.
A few weeks later, someone asks about it, and now it’s a scramble to piece together what happened.
By that point, it’s already slowing the project down.
What’s Actually Happening
On most projects, change orders aren’t tracked in a way that makes them easy to manage.
They exist in too many places:
Emails
RFIs
Meeting minutes
Someone’s notes
There’s no single place that answers:
What’s been identified
What’s been priced
What’s been submitted
What’s been approved
Without that visibility, nothing moves quickly.
Subcontractors wait on direction. Owners wait on pricing. Project teams spend time tracking things down instead of actually moving the job forward.
It’s not a pricing problem.
It’s a tracking problem.
How to Fix It
The fix is simple, but it needs to be consistent.
Every change order should live in one place from day one.
As soon as something is identified, it gets logged and tracked all the way through approval.
At a minimum, you need to see:
What the change is
Who owns it
Where it stands
What the next step is
That last part matters most.
If a change order doesn’t have a clear next step, it will sit.
And if it sits, it slows everything else down.
A Simple Tool That Fixes This
Here’s the exact tracker we use on real projects to keep everything visible and moving:
Use it to:
Track every change order from day one
Keep status, next step, and approvals visible
Link RFIs and supporting documentation in one place
Closing
That’s it for this week. Keep your change orders visible and moving.
Next issue, we’ll break down why RFIs tend to slow projects down and how to stay ahead of them.
— Punch List Weekly