Construction Documentation: Types and Tips to Improve It

Construction documents are drawn up by architects and engineers to provide a detailed look at the entire scope of the project. They include the final specifications, materials, and other details required for project managers and contractors to oversee construction and understand how the building should be constructed. The following article goes in-depth to explain all the different types of construction documents and ways to improve them.

What’s Construction Documentation?

The lifeline of a project depends on its construction documents. They help project managers plan, schedule, and track construction projects. They are also vital for contractors to understand the scope of a project, obtain building permits, and ensure quality standards and regulations are met.

Major Types of Construction Documentation

There are different types of construction documents, each serving a different purpose. You can think of them as puzzle pieces that project managers assemble to facilitate the complete construction management process of a project. Here are some of the most common (and important) construction documentation that every project manager should know of.

1. Contract Documents

If not already obvious, multiple construction contracts make up the completion of a project. They legally bind the parties involved until the terms are met, which can typically include cost estimates, schedules, drawings, specifications, etc. For example, a contract can exist between an owner and an architect to design a building. In the same vein, general contractors can sign up subcontractors or engineers.

They are treated with importance because these construction documents serve to protect the interests of all parties on a project.

2. Construction Drawings

Also called blueprints, construction drawings are a set of documents that define how a building will look and function after being completed. These blueprints contain exact dimensions for the on-site crew and cover different construction drawings for each phase such as structural drawings, electrical roadmaps, plumbing layouts, etc.

3. Specification Documents

While construction drawings offer a graphical representation of the project, construction specifications offer guidelines for materials and work that are required to build the drawings according to standards set by the design team. Both drawings and specifications complement each other and improve the accuracy of the final product.

4. Scope of Work

The scope of work document describes all the work needed before a construction project can be successfully delivered. It is often part of a larger construction documentation that is either part of the contract or used during the bidding process.

While companies can come up with their own templates, a typical scope of work contains information such as the project location, resources, estimated timelines, deliverables, costs, and payment terms. Contractors can also mention tasks in the document that are to be excluded, meaning they are out of the project’s scope. 

5. Project Schedule

The main purpose of a construction schedule is to ensure that all tasks are completed on time. It gives contractors and subcontractors a deadline for each construction phase (or activity) and coordinates on-site activities to avoid bottlenecks and misallocation of resources. 

Following an approved scheduling documentation is critical to successfully delivering a project. It helps the construction team get more done in less time. Owners will often want to lay out a project schedule before construction starts. 

6. RFI (Request for Information)

It often happens that general contractors and subcontractors require clarification about construction specifications. There might be mistakes in the documents or instructions that are unclear. It is also possible that on-site conditions are different from what the plans are based on. In such cases, a request for information (RFI) document can be submitted to the owner, design team, engineer, or project manager for more information.

7. BOQ (Bill of Quantities)

The bill of quantities is a construction document that contains a list of all materials and labor required to complete a construction project. It can also specify the quality of materials needed alongside the total expected costs. This construction document is typically used for large-scale projects, primarily to let contractors estimate construction costs to place accurate bids. 

8. Permits and Approvals

Another basic purpose that construction documentation serve is obtaining a building permit to green-light construction. Depending on the location and neigborhood, the owner and project manager may also want to obtain more approvals from the local governing bodies depending on the scale (and nature) of the project.

9. Submittals

Yet another important type of construction document, submittals are sent by subcontractors to approve materials, equipment, and other information related to the execution of work. For example, electricians can send a submittal to approve the type of light fixtures and power outlets they are installing.

10. Change Orders

It is normal for approved construction plans to go through changes during the execution phase. The project owner, for example, might want to add another room to a floor or make an existing room larger. In such cases, a construction change order is used to lay down how the initial plan needs to be adjusted, how many more materials are required, the labor and equipment needed, and timelines.

11. Daily Reports and Logs

Everything that happens on a construction site needs to be detailed and recorded daily to help keep track of the project. The document can also include details such as the resources used, and ordered, and if any additional materials or equipment were brought on-site.

The construction daily report can, furthermore, mention the weather conditions of the day, a list of visitors, and just about anything that took place on the site.

12. Safety Reports

It is important to never overlook the safety of the construction crew on a job site. Ensure that safety protocols are in place that define what actions to take in case of an incident. 

Creating a detailed safety plan to mitigate risk also helps to keep the project on track without suffering long delays and overhead expenses. It is the project manager’s responsibility to maintain periodical safety and incident documents for the crew.

Useful Tips for Better Construction Documentation Process

1. Define Your Own Goals for Better Project Documentation

This tip is a reminder that no company should pursue change for the sake of change. McKinsey researchers Matt Bereman, Brendan Fitzgerald, Jose Luis Blanco, Imke Mattik and Erik Sjödin make a similar point about innovative R&D in general.

“Great innovation concepts come from the intersection of three lenses: customers, technology/capability, and business model,” they write. “At the end of the day, they must serve a clear downstream customer need.”

So, as you begin to refine your project documentation processes, do so with your customers in mind. That helps you set clear goals, such as:

• We want to be able to handle RFIs quickly, not in a matter of days.
• We want to build a system that plugs into what our GCs do so they get instant visibility into how our work is coming along.
• We want our historical project data to be searchable so we can submit more accurate estimates in our bids.

It’s the customer that pays you, so anything you can do to help the customer helps your bottom line.

2. Make It Easy for Field Teams to Input Good Data

Quality in, quality out. That’s the basic rule for any system that processes data. The better the data that goes in, the better the analysis and insights will be. For trade contracting specialists, that means getting quality data from field teams.

Vincent DiFilippo, president of DiFilippo’s Service Co. in Paoli, Pennsylvania, talks about this in a piece for Contracting Business magazine. DiFilippo’s team changed software vendors in 2022, and the new software has helped clean up inputs from the company’s heating and air-conditioning techs.

“Technicians sometimes do not have the best penmanship and also forget to write down critical client info like equipment type, any accessories, client email address, important notes like ‘dog aggressive’ etc.,” DiFilippo says.

“[Now] the tech can enter all information, parts, work done, pictures of equipment, client signature, and send it to the office. Done. This program has also reduced the workload on the office staff, as they no longer have to hand process invoices and do filing.”

Again, this is all done in the context of client service. When techs don’t have to struggle with messy note-taking, they’re free to focus on real bottom-line concerns like client satisfaction, which is exactly what DiFilippo says.

The key is to make sure field teams have software that makes it quick and easy for them to send over good data. That’s a foundational process for better project documentation.

3. Centralize Your Project Documents

With all kinds of information flowing in from several people at once, you need one centralized location for that project documentation to go.

In the pen-and-paper days, it was easy to lose track of things like dailies or timesheets. Those documents often ended up in binders, which were then left all weekend on the passenger seat of a foreman’s truck.

Digitizing your project documentation helps solve that problem, but you still need that one central repository for it all to flow into. If you’re storing all of your contracts on one computer, for example, but you have RFIs and change orders in a separate Dropbox folder, then you have a decentralization problem.

When someone needs to chase down a document, they’re going to spend non-productive hours combing through folders and different hard drives. It saves everyone time when all of the documents are in the same, easily accessible location.

4. Put Your Document Management System in the Cloud

Having everything in a single cloud system means people can retrieve documents from wherever they are, and they can likewise submit documents from wherever they are.

Rick Tanner at Warco Construction in North Carolina tells us that switching from paper timesheets to eSUB has saved each project foreperson an hour every week because they don’t have to come into the office to hand-deliver the document. Instead, they just send it in from the work site.

Granted, there will be work sites without reliable internet coverage. We built eSUB to handle situations like that. If our users need to submit photos or dailies or field notes from the site, they can go ahead and record those things offline. Whenever they reconnect to the internet, that construction project documentation automatically syncs to the cloud.

There’s one last thing worth mentioning about cloud systems. As Michael Lepper at Impact Networking writes for Contractor Magazine, construction companies of a certain size can reach a point in which their cloud services and cloud workloads get so big that they become unwieldy. Lepper refers to this as cloud sprawl, and this can run up a company’s IT costs quickly. The fix? Lepper advises businesses to unify and organize their data.

5. Work Clean

Sous chefs and project managers. Few other professionals understand better what it means to work clean. Fortunately, your team probably has one of these people in the office. It will be useful to adopt some of the core principles of project management here to give your project documentation the order and structure necessary. This is what will allow you (or anyone else on your team) to easily find and retrieve information whenever they need it. Those principles include:

Version Control

When you pass spreadsheets or Word documents around, it’s easy for people to make changes then pass along their new version. From that point forward, you no longer have a single source of truth.

Version control simply means having a process for signaling which version of a document is the source of truth. In a cloud environment, there will usually just be one version of a document that everyone can access, edit and/or comment on.

“My number one top tip ever when it comes to dealing with key documents is to make sure that you use version control,” says Elizabeth Harrin, an expert on project management. “This is super easy but it still surprises me how many people don’t do it.”

Document Tracking

It’s important for any stakeholders to know where a given document has been stored, where it has been sent and when.

This is a standard feature in eSUB Cloud 2.0. When a client has requested information, you can see immediately in eSUB whether that request has been fulfilled or is still pending. You can also see the date of response or, if it’s late, how many days late the response is.

When there are delays, then, there is a trail of evidence available to assess what went wrong.

Shoring up Your Bottom Line

By moving from piecemeal project documentation to a robust, cloud-based system of documentation, you save your entire team time and energy.

If you have any questions about how eSUB can help get your team’s documents and workflows organized, contact us today to schedule a demo.