2026, June 5th – From Field Issue To Approved Scope

June 5th, 2026

Hosted by: Taha, Trainer at Contractor Foreman

Topic: Change Orders, RFIs, and Change Management — From Field Issue to Approved Scope in Contractor Foreman

Webinar Description

In this advanced training session, Taha tackles one of the most financially consequential habits in the construction industry: doing work for free. Whether it’s a $500 extra that seems too small to invoice, an unforeseen condition resolved quietly to keep the project moving, or a scope assumption made without written confirmation, the pattern is the same — and the costs compound quickly. This session walks through the full change management workflow in Contractor Foreman, from the moment a question arises in the field to an approved change order reflected in the project schedule and billing cycle.

Taha opens with a candid account of the mistakes he made as a project manager: resolving issues without telling the client, holding onto change orders until the end of the project, and making field assumptions instead of sending RFIs — all in an effort to keep things moving and avoid friction. He explains why each of these habits ultimately backfires, and why the best protection a contractor has against scope disputes, schedule delays, and unprofitable jobs is a paper trail that starts from the first question, not the last invoice.

The session begins with RFIs — Requests for Information — which Taha describes as one of the most underutilized tools in construction. An RFI isn’t just an administrative formality: it is the mechanism for getting the ball out of your court, forcing engineers and architects to answer questions in writing, and documenting the exact moment an assumption was made or a clarification was needed. When a change order eventually results from that RFI, the two documents link directly in Contractor Foreman, creating a complete, traceable record from question to resolution to cost impact.

From RFIs, the session moves through Change Order Requests — the internal cost-gathering step before a formal change order is submitted to the client — and into the Change Order itself. Taha shows how cost, markup, and schedule impact are captured within the change order, and how approving a change order automatically adds it to the project’s Schedule of Values for invoicing, eliminating the need to track it separately through the billing cycle. He is particularly emphatic about the schedule delay field: not logging a time impact, or marking it “no” without confirmation, is one of the most common ways contractors absorb costs they were never obligated to carry.

Cesar Macedo joins for the project schedule portion of the session, demonstrating the right and wrong ways to reflect change order impacts on a Gantt chart. He walks through why simply extending a task’s duration leaves no traceable record — and why adding a dedicated change order line item with proper finish-to-start dependencies is the correct approach, both for client communication and for running accurate delay analysis reports after the fact. Cesar also highlights the importance of enabling auto-scheduling so that cascading delays update the entire project timeline automatically rather than requiring manual adjustments.

Attendees were offered a complimentary one-on-one training session to go deeper on change order workflows, RFI management, or project scheduling.

This session is ideal for:

• Project managers who regularly absorb small change order costs rather than submitting them — and want a faster, less friction-heavy process for doing it properly
• Contractors who have had clients push back on change orders because they were submitted too late or without adequate documentation
• Teams who are using change orders but not connecting them to RFIs, the Schedule of Values, or the project schedule
• Anyone who has experienced a dispute over schedule delays and realized after the fact that the time impact was never formally documented