Whose Decision Is It, Actually

Ask a general contractor who decides whether the project gets BIM coordination, and the honest answer is usually the contractor. Coordination, resolving where one trade's work collides with another's before either shows up on site, is means and methods. It's how a GC chooses to execute its own scope. Most contracts never mention it, because most owners never specify it. There's nothing to approve.

And yet the decision routinely gets punted upward anyway. Not to production, not to engineering, upward, to the owner, on a question the owner was never actually asked to weigh in on.

Two reasons this happens, and only one of them is honest. Sometimes the constraint is real, a late-arriving scope, a capped budget, a contingency line that has to be touched to fund anything not already priced in. That's a legitimate reason to go ask. It's not a judgment on coordination, it's a judgment on where the dollars sit.

The other reason looks identical from the outside and means something very different. It shows up as a soft, uncertain answer, not sure if they'll want to proceed, we'll circle back once someone decides. No case being made for the cost of not coordinating, no urgency behind the ask, just a decision quietly handed to someone else, on a question that was never really theirs to answer in the first place. You don't ask permission to buy insurance against your own risk, you buy it, or you decide the exposure is small enough to skip. Punting the decision is itself the decision, it just doesn't look like one.

A contractor that has genuinely priced the risk doesn't need anyone's blessing to spend a little now to avoid a lot later. It funds the coordination itself, or makes the case loud enough that funding it becomes obvious. The organizations that route the decision elsewhere aren't usually protecting a budget, they're avoiding a conviction they haven't formed yet. That's the actual tell, not the delay, the shape of the excuse.

Closing question: if coordination is means and methods, and the decision to fund it keeps landing on someone else's desk, whose risk is actually being managed, and whose isn't.