Knowledge / Workflows
Variation and change impact review
Tracing a proposed change through the drawings, specification, programme and contract to identify what it touches and what it triggers.
When a change is proposed or instructed, three people look at three documents. The design manager checks which drawings and clauses it affects, the planner checks which activities it touches and whether any are critical, and the commercial manager checks which contract clause it falls under and what notice is due. It happens in a meeting, from memory, and the parts nobody looked at surface later as a second variation or a missed notification. Variation impact AI deserves the name only if it follows the change through every document it touches. Structured knowledge lets a team see what an instruction alters across the record and what it triggers under the contract, and keeps the commercial manager on the decisions about what to notify and what to quote.
What the workflow involves today
Read the instruction or the proposed change and describe in a sentence what it alters.
List the drawings and specification clauses that show the affected element, and check which revision is current.
Open the programme and find the activities that depend on those drawings, noting float and whether any sit on the critical path.
Pull the governing contract clause, the amendments to it and the notice periods that apply.
Check the change register for events already notified in the same area, so the new one is neither double-counted nor missed.
Decide what to notify, prepare the quotation with its time and cost build-up, and file the references.
Find out what was missed when the second variation arrives.
Where generic AI tools fail
A general-purpose tool can summarise an instruction. Asked what it affects, it will guess from the words in the instruction, because it has no way of knowing that the wall it names appears on four drawings, that two of those drawings are referenced by a specification clause with a fire rating, or that the plastering activity in the programme depends on the wall being built. It cannot follow the change from the instruction to the drawings it alters, to the activities that depend on them, to the clause that governs notice. A summary of the instruction is what the commercial manager already had.
The output looks like an impact review, which is the danger. It names some drawings, mentions the programme and quotes a clause from the standard form rather than the contract as amended. A commercial manager who trusts it notifies within the wrong period and quotes a scope that misses the affected activities, and a planner who trusts it misses the critical path. Each of them then redoes the review by hand to be sure, which is the work the tool was supposed to take away, with the added cost of first having to find out what it got wrong.
What changes with structured knowledge
When the instruction, the drawings, the specification clauses, the programme activities and the events already notified are connected, the impact of a change is a question the record can answer rather than a meeting the team has to hold. The wall on the instruction is the wall on the drawings and the wall in the programme, and the clause that governs notice is the one in this contract, with its amendments.
The commercial manager receives an impact list: the drawings and clauses the change affects with their current revisions, the programme activities it touches with their float and a flag where one sits on the critical path, the related events already notified in the same area, and the contract clause and period that apply. Every line carries the document it came from.
The commercial manager decides what to notify and what to quote, the planner decides how the programme should respond, and the design manager decides which drawings to revise. The quotation goes out with its references attached, so when it is assessed, or disputed a year later, the basis for every line can be shown.
We onboard a focused slice of your project data, configure the ingestion paths, extract a structured context graph, and build a workflow against the resulting structured knowledge layer.
Related to
This workflow reads the record of change orders, variations and compensation events, the construction contract as amended and the construction programme, and it draws on the drawings and specification for what the change actually alters. It sits beside contract obligation extraction, which finds the clauses and periods it relies on, and RFI drafting and precedent search, where a change often begins as a question.
Does it work with NEC compensation events and JCT variations?
Where does it read the programme from?
How do we see it on one of our own changes?