The Plan Changed. The Contract Didn’t Hear About It.

Projects rarely go wrong at the moment of a bad decision. More often, a sound decision is made in a meeting room and never reaches the paperwork. A building that was going to be renovated will now be demolished and rebuilt. The owner agrees, the minutes say so, and the project lead updates the plan. Meanwhile, on site, a contractor is working to a scope that describes the renovation, priced from a survey written for the renovation, under a purchase order approved for the renovation. Nobody told the contract.

Recent context

Hazardous-materials work is where this gap tends to show first, because the rules care about what is going to happen to the building. In British Columbia, the Occupational Health and Safety Regulation requires a qualified person to inspect a building and identify hazardous materials before demolition or renovation begins, and local governments commonly expect those materials to be removed before a demolition permit is issued, as the City of Courtenay's building guidance sets out. An abatement scope written to let engineers back into a building to plan a renovation is a different scope from one written to clear a building for demolition. Both may start with the same drywall. They do not end in the same place.

How the old plan survives the new decision

A change of direction rarely announces itself in the documents. It tends to hide in three places.

• The open change order. A contractor prices the additional work the owner asked for last month. The proposal is accurate to the plan that existed when it was written. Signed after the plan has changed, it commits the owner to the wrong end state.
• The informal go-ahead. A short email asking a waiting crew to keep working while the paperwork catches up is a reasonable thing to send. It can also be read as written authorization of whatever scope was on the table at the time.
• The preliminary report. Prices are often built from the first version of a survey or assessment. The final report arrives weeks later with different counts, additional materials and new recommendations, and the contract does not update itself.

Each of these is ordinary. Together, they mean a decision everyone agrees on can be quietly contradicted by documents nobody reread.

What it costs

The direct cost is paying for work the new plan does not need, then paying again for the work it does. If a contractor is paid to protect what will be kept and leave the structure ready for an engineering review, and the building is then scheduled for demolition, the owner has bought care it will throw away and still needs a complete pre-demolition clearance. The indirect costs arrive later and are usually larger: a dispute over whether a scope was ever accepted, a clearance that covers the wrong materials, a funding application that still describes a project the owner has set aside, and a file that, read years later, cannot explain why the money was spent the way it was.

The decision-to-scope sweep

The remedy is not a better contract template. It is a short, deliberate step taken every time direction changes: a sweep of every open commitment against the new decision, done within days rather than at the next milestone.

1. List every live commitment. Contracts, purchase orders, pending change orders, consultant terms of reference, permit applications and funding applications. If it describes the project, it is on the list.
2. Mark each one against the new decision: still valid, needs a written revision, or needs to stop.
3. Tell each counterparty in writing the same week. A one-paragraph notice that direction has changed, and that work continues under the existing terms only until a revised scope is agreed, protects both sides.
4. Re-price against the latest information. If the final report has landed, the revision is priced from it, not from the draft.
5. Approve under the right authority. A revision that changes cost is approved by whoever holds the spending authority for that amount, not by whoever happens to be managing the contractor that week.
6. File the decision and the revisions together, so the record shows the reason, the date and the paper that followed.

The record is part of the decision

Deciding is only half of a change. The other half is the trail showing that every party heard about it and adjusted. Owners who run the sweep pay once for the right scope, avoid arguments over what was or was not accepted, and leave a file that a stranger can read in five years and understand. Owners who skip it usually find the gap later, in a dispute or an audit, when it is far more expensive to close.