The Truth About RFIs

RFIs Are Rework for Information: The Construction Industry’s Most Normalized Waste

There is something the construction industry has decided to accept as just how things are done, and it is worth sitting with how strange that acceptance is. A request for information an RFI is treated as a normal, expected, routine part of construction project management. Software systems are built to track them. Contracts specify turnaround times. Teams measure how many they have open and how fast they are being closed. And almost nobody stops to ask whether the entire practice represents a failure that the industry should be embarrassed about rather than systematically managing.

Let me say it directly. An RFI is not a request for information. It is rework for information. It is waste for information. It is a symptom of incomplete design, batched communication, disrespect pushed downstream, and a production system that has been organized to tolerate defects rather than eliminate them at the source.

What an RFI Actually Is

When a contractor submits an RFI, it means the information they needed to perform the work was not in the drawings or specifications. Full stop. The drawings were incomplete, the coordination was insufficient, or the quality control on the design package did not catch the gap before the package was issued. The RFI is the field team’s way of requesting what should have been provided before they ever received the documents.

That is a defect. Not a feature of construction project delivery a defect. And like all defects, it carries cost: the cost of identifying the gap, the cost of formulating the request, the cost of routing it through a documentation system, the cost of processing it on the design side, the cost of waiting for the response, the cost of the delay to the work that cannot proceed, and sometimes the cost of the coordination problems that arise when related work continues without the missing information. Every one of those costs is pure waste effort expended to correct a problem that should not have existed.

The Arrogance of the 15-Day Turnaround

Here is where the normalized disrespect becomes most visible. A contractor submits an RFI which is a request for information the design team was supposed to provide and did not and the response is: we have fifteen days to respond per the contract. The design team is not embarrassed that their work was incomplete. They are exercising a contractual right to make the field wait three weeks for information the field should never have had to ask for.

If you had an error on lift drawings you produced for a crew and told them you would have the correction back in three weeks because contractually that was your turnaround time the response would be immediate and obvious: that is not their fault, they are waiting on information you owe them, and three weeks is not acceptable when work is stopped. Yet that same logic, applied to architects and engineers responding to RFIs, is treated as professional practice.

The arrogance of waiting for the contract deadline when a crew is stopped or worse, making decisions without the information and doing work that may require rework is the ultimate downstream disrespect. You pushed a defective product to the field, and the field is paying for it with waiting, improvisation, and potential rework. The least the design team can do is treat the response as urgent.

The Better Alternative

The goal should not be to manage RFIs more efficiently. The goal should be to eliminate the need for most of them. That requires attacking the problem at two levels.

The first level is design quality. Better design coordination, more complete documents, more rigorous quality control before issue, and earlier involvement of the people who will build the project all reduce the gap between what the drawings show and what the field needs to know. When specialty contractors participate in design coordination before documents are issued identifying clashes, flagging constructibility problems, and asking the questions before the documents go out many of the RFIs that would have been submitted never need to be submitted.

The second level is communication systems. Even with excellent design quality, some questions will arise in the field. The question is how those questions are answered. The current RFI process is a batched, documented, routed, logged, tracked communication system that treats a question as something requiring multi-step administrative processing rather than something requiring a fast, reliable answer. The alternative is a communication system that provides that answer directly, quickly, and by the most appropriate means and documents it formally only when the official record genuinely requires it.

A fifteen-minute morning huddle between the contractor’s team and the design team answers questions before the crew is waiting. A WhatsApp channel between the field engineer and the design coordinator answers questions in real time instead of in a queue. A co-located design and construction team the big room model that IPD enables answers questions the moment they arise rather than routing them through a documentation system. Frank Gehry was known for running submittal and RFI review parties where teams gathered together and resolved questions in a shared session rather than passing them through individual channels over weeks. The result was dramatically faster turnaround and dramatically fewer open items.

Here are the specific waste categories that the RFI process produces:

• The defect itself information that should have been on the drawings was not
• The work required to identify, formulate, and submit the request all non-value-adding effort
• The communication channels and documentation systems required to route and track the request
• The waiting the delay to work that cannot proceed until the information arrives
• The revise-and-resubmit cycle when the first response does not fully resolve the question
• The coordination problems that arise when related work proceeds without the missing information

Every one of those is waste. The whole process is waste, generated by a defect that should have been prevented upstream.

What Better Looks Like

A small number of RFIs will always exist on complex projects information that could not reasonably have been captured in the documents given the standard of care in the industry, questions that arise from genuinely unforeseeable field conditions. That is acceptable. What is not acceptable is treating the current volume of RFIs as a normal baseline and optimizing the process for managing them rather than for eliminating them.

Better looks like design quality control that catches coordination gaps before the documents are issued. Better looks like specialty contractor involvement in design coordination so the questions that would have become RFIs are answered before the documents go out. Better looks like communication channels between design and construction teams that provide fast, reliable answers when questions do arise. Better looks like answering the RFI by updating the electronic contract documents rather than creating a parallel documentation trail. And better looks like a culture on both the design and construction sides that is embarrassed by high RFI volumes rather than resigned to them.

The measure of a Lean production system is not how efficiently it processes waste. It is how effectively it eliminates waste at the source. RFIs are waste. The source is incomplete design and slow, batched communication. Address the source.

At Elevate Construction, the production planning system exists to put the right information in the hands of the right people at the right time the pre-construction meeting, the installation work package, the look-ahead that confirms information readiness before the crew enters the zone. If your project needs superintendent coaching, project support, or leadership development, Elevate Construction can help your field teams stabilize, schedule, and flow.

We should let the RFI process disgust us just a little bit. That disgust is what motivates the improvement that gets rid of it.

On we go.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is wrong with treating RFIs as a normal part of construction project management?

Because RFIs are symptoms of defects incomplete drawings, insufficient coordination, or inadequate quality control not features of a well-managed project. Normalizing them means accepting the waste they generate rather than eliminating the conditions that produce them.

Why is a 15-day RFI turnaround time a form of disrespect?

Because the crew waiting for the information did not create the gap. The design team did, by issuing incomplete documents. Making the field wait weeks for information they need to work because the contract allows it treats the design team’s schedule as more important than the production time the field team is losing.

What is the better alternative to the traditional RFI process?

Fast, direct communication channels morning huddles between design and construction teams, instant messaging platforms, co-location, or structured review sessions that answer questions before work stops rather than after a documentation queue is processed.

Why should RFIs be answered by updating the contract documents rather than creating a parallel record?

Because a parallel documentation trail creates another layer of waste managing two information systems rather than one. The answer belongs in the source of truth that everyone references, which is the contract documents themselves.

What is the acceptable baseline for RFI volume on a well-coordinated project?

A small number of RFIs arising from genuinely unforeseeable field conditions is acceptable. The large volumes that are typical on most construction projects are not acceptable they indicate design coordination failures that should be embarrassing to all parties rather than normalized as standard practice.