Why Change Orders Happen in Low Voltage Projects (And How to Prevent Them)

Change orders aren't random misfortune. They're predictable outcomes of specific scoping failures. Understanding why they happen is the first step to preventing them.

Every facilities manager has felt the frustration: the low voltage contractor's original bid came in at $45,000, but by project completion, you've signed change orders totaling $58,000. The 29% overrun wasn't in your budget, and now you're explaining variances to finance.

Change orders are often treated as inevitable—just part of construction. But they're not random. They follow predictable patterns, and most are preventable with proper planning, thorough site assessment, and working with contractors who have institutional knowledge of your requirements.

The Anatomy of a Change Order

Change orders happen when actual conditions differ from what was assumed during bidding. The contractor priced the job based on certain assumptions; those assumptions proved wrong; now additional work is required.

The key insight: change orders are information failures. Either the contractor didn't have accurate information when bidding, or the scope wasn't defined clearly enough to prevent interpretation differences. Fix the information problem, and you fix most change orders.

The Seven Most Common Causes

1. Existing Conditions Surprises

The drawings showed open ceiling space for cable runs. Reality: a maze of HVAC ducts, sprinkler pipes, and abandoned cabling that requires twice the labor to navigate. Or the existing cabling that was supposed to be reusable turns out to be Cat5 that doesn't meet your specifications.

Prevention: Pre-bid site walks that go beyond the floor plan. Open ceiling tiles. Check pathways. Document existing infrastructure. A 2-hour site assessment can prevent a $10,000 change order.

2. Incomplete Specifications

Your spec said "Cat6A cabling" but didn't specify plenum vs. riser rating. The contractor bid riser-rated cable; the building requires plenum. Change order for the cable upgrade, plus labor to re-pull if work already started.

Prevention: Comprehensive specifications that leave nothing to interpretation. Or better: working with a contractor who knows your standards well enough to ask the right questions before bidding.

3. Scope Creep During Construction

The project starts, and someone decides the conference room needs two more data drops. The IT team wants the patch panels labeled differently than specified. The security consultant adds three camera locations. Each change is small; collectively, they add 20% to the project cost.

Prevention: Locked scope with a formal change request process. When stakeholders know that changes require documentation and approval, the casual "while you're here, can you also..." requests diminish dramatically.

4. Coordination Failures with Other Trades

The electrical contractor was supposed to provide power at IDF locations. They didn't. Now your low voltage contractor is waiting on electrical work before they can complete—and charging for the return trip. Or worse: they improvise a solution that creates problems later.

Prevention: Clear coordination requirements in the GC scope, with your low voltage contractor involved in scheduling discussions. When low voltage work gets treated as an afterthought, coordination suffers.

5. Access and Scheduling Issues

The building only allows construction work from 6 PM to 6 AM. Your contractor bid assuming normal daytime hours. Now every hour of labor costs 1.5x for night differential—a 50% increase on the largest cost component.

Prevention: Communicate building access requirements before bidding. Include work hour restrictions, delivery limitations, and any union requirements in bid documents.

6. Drawing Errors

The floor plan showed 150 workstations. Actual count: 180. The drawings indicated a 200-foot cable run to the far corner; actual measurement is 280 feet. Each discrepancy between drawings and reality creates potential change order territory.

Prevention: Field verification of critical dimensions before bid finalization. Trust but verify—especially for spaces being reconfigured from previous use.

7. Specification Interpretation Differences

Your spec said "test and certify all cable runs." You meant Fluke certification with printed results for every drop. The contractor meant a simple continuity test. Neither is wrong—but one costs significantly more than the other.

Prevention: Explicit specifications that define testing methodology, documentation requirements, and acceptance criteria. Or working with a contractor who knows what you mean because they've done it for you before.

The Institutional Knowledge Advantage

Notice a pattern in the prevention strategies? Many come down to better information flow between you and your contractor. And information flow improves dramatically when you're working with the same contractor repeatedly.

A contractor who's completed 50 projects for you knows:

• Your specifications by heart—including the unwritten expectations
• Which "standard" items you'll actually enforce vs. negotiate
• The questions to ask during site assessment
• Your IT team's preferences for labeling and documentation
• The building types where you typically encounter problems
• Your tolerance for different solution approaches

This institutional knowledge prevents change orders in two ways. First, the contractor prices jobs more accurately because they understand your actual requirements—not just your documented specifications. Second, they flag potential issues during planning rather than discovering them during construction.

A new contractor encountering a problem mid-project submits a change order. A contractor with institutional knowledge said "Hey, we usually see this issue in buildings like this—let's verify before we finalize pricing" three weeks earlier.

The Cost-Plus Alternative

Some organizations avoid change order drama by working cost-plus rather than fixed-price. You pay actual labor and materials plus a markup percentage, with no need for formal change orders when scope evolves.

Cost-plus has advantages: complete transparency into actual costs, flexibility to adjust scope without paperwork, and no incentive for contractors to cut corners to preserve margin on a fixed bid.

The trade-off: you lose budget certainty upfront. For organizations that value flexibility and transparency over fixed-price predictability, cost-plus with a trusted contractor often produces better outcomes than fixed-price with change order battles.

Building a Change Order-Resistant Process

Whether you work fixed-price or cost-plus, these practices minimize unexpected costs:

Invest in pre-bid site assessment. Two hours of site walk time can prevent twenty hours of change order negotiation. Open ceiling tiles. Check existing infrastructure. Measure critical runs. Document everything with photos.

Write specifications that leave nothing to interpretation. If it matters to you, specify it explicitly. Cable type, testing methodology, labeling conventions, documentation format—all should be defined clearly enough that two contractors would bid the same scope.

Lock scope before construction. Implement a formal change request process that requires documentation and approval. Make it slightly inconvenient to add scope, and casual additions decrease dramatically.

Build long-term contractor relationships. Institutional knowledge is valuable. A contractor who knows your requirements prices more accurately and flags issues earlier. The time invested in building that relationship pays dividends across every project.

Include contingency in your budget. Even with perfect planning, some unknowns will emerge. Build 10-15% contingency into your infrastructure budgets so that unavoidable changes don't create crisis conversations with finance.

The Bottom Line

Change orders aren't inevitable—they're symptoms of information gaps between what was assumed during bidding and what exists in reality. Close those gaps through thorough site assessment, explicit specifications, and contractor relationships that build institutional knowledge over time.

The goal isn't necessarily zero change orders—some legitimate scope changes happen on every project. The goal is eliminating surprise change orders that blow up budgets because nobody asked the right questions during planning.