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Preconstruction

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The phase of a capital project between the decision to invest and the start of physical work, in which the design is developed, costs are estimated, permits are obtained and the contracting strategy is decided.

Preconstruction is where a project exists only as documents: feasibility studies, design packages, estimates, permit applications, tender submissions. The owner, the design organisation, the estimators, the permitting authorities and — once tendering begins — the contractors all work from these documents, and each discipline produces outputs that become inputs for the next.

What makes the phase disproportionately important is the cost-influence curve. By the time construction starts, the large decisions — process configuration, plot layout, structural system, material specifications — are already fixed, and with them most of the final cost. Changing a line on a drawing during preconstruction costs hours; changing the built result of that line costs weeks and money.

The characteristic failure of preconstruction is not bad decisions but stale information. Estimates built on superseded drawing revisions, permit packages citing withdrawn standards, tenders priced against different document sets — these errors are cheap to catch on paper and expensive to discover on site, and most of them come from documents falling out of sync rather than from anyone's judgement.

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