Owners, Contractors, and AEs often overlook the need for creating a plan for construction cost estimating.

Proper construction cost estimating is critical to all stakeholders of the built environment.  Having a plan appropriate to your organizations needs is critical to improving productivity, assuring an accurate project scope of work, mitigating errors and omissions, assuring appropriate levels of detail, and information sharing and reuse.

Elements to be considered in a construction cost estimate plan include:

1. Project scope, site conditions (physical, labor/productivity), schedule, historical information, specifications
2. Level(s) of detail, LOD (e.g. sq.ft., systems/assemblies, unit price (materials, equipment, labor, localization, update frequency, units of measure)
3. Data architecture (e.g. Masterformat)
4. Reference cost data usage (e.g. RSMeans)
5. Owner review, approval, timing requirements (e.g. Internal Government Estimates, IGEs)
6. Contractor review and approval process
7. Work breakdown schedule, WBS
8. Risks
9. Technology (e.g. cost estimating software, electronic price books / unit price books)
10. Training and/or levels of expertise

Using the above, appropriate stages in creating a construction estimate plan include:

1. Defined purpose
2. Milestones
3. Creation of a construction estimate draft plan
4. Approval of the construction estimate plan, inclusive of processes and work flow
5. Ongoing review and improvement

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