Last Saturday morning I had coffee with a friend in one of those Seattle name brand coffee houses that have all the comfy chairs. Rick is in the insurance business and for 30 years he has compiled cost estimates for residential insurance claims. When you get two estimators together and coffee is involved, the communication gradually drifts to the common work interest....estimating! The discussion turned to accuracy in estimating and my friend commented how his estimates never match the totals provided by the contractor vying for the work and how the differences were more a function of the SCOPE thinking and SCOPE approach to doing the repair work. As Rick put it "the contractor's unit costs set up against my own book values are within reason it is the SCOPE of the repair work that most often requires a meeting of the minds." To this I replied, Amen! This thinking is exactly that which I have preached for years. Cost data is valuable in the construction estimating process, but the accuracy of the aggregate project cost is only as good as the SCOPE of WORK to which it is applied.

Construction Scope of work can be isolated into three types; AE Scope, Context Scope, and Process or Execution Scope. AE scope is defined by architects & engineers plans and specifications for a project. AE plans are very objective and speak to the specifics of quantity (size, dimensions, connection details) whereas AE specifications speak to the quality such as make, model, color, installation, and manufacturer. Context scope is defined by the context or environment in which the project will be built. Context scope is more contractor subjective and deals with site specific scope issues such as weather, on-going operations, time of the year, location of the lay-down area, site access & egress, location within a building, market conditions, time & noise constraints. All these context issues can impact the cost of a project (sometimes significantly) and need to be quantified and priced in the cost estimate. The execution scope is defined by the construction process chosen to construct the AE scope in the given context environment. A recent example of process scope was in the placement of concrete at a college facility for seismic shear wall upgrades. The placement was not as simple as a direct chute or motor buggy application but instead required a carefully placed pumper hose through select windows and upon carpet clad corridors to the arrive at the placement location. Process scope includes the support equipment, labor, scaffolding, shoring, cranes, mixers, forklifts and other equipment to support the execution of the construction. Thinking through a project as a contractor would and building the job before the job is built are key concepts to capturing ALL of a projects' scope and accurately estimating an aggregate total.