Construction Project Startup Checklist: What to Prepare Before Work Begins

Most construction project problems that surface in week three were actually created in week zero: a drawing that was never finalized, a subcontractor agreement that was handshake-only, a permit that was assumed to be "in process." None of these are dramatic on their own, but each one tends to surface at the worst possible time, once work is already underway and stopping is expensive. A short, deliberate startup review catches most of this before it costs you anything.

Confirm you're working from the current, approved set of drawings and specifications, not an earlier version still circulating by email. Verify the scope of work is written down and agreed to by everyone paying for or performing it, including what's explicitly excluded. Scope disagreements are far cheaper to resolve on paper before work starts than to resolve on site after it's built the wrong way.

Every party doing work on the project, including subcontractors, suppliers with installation obligations, and specialty trades, should have a signed agreement in place before they mobilize, not after. At minimum, confirm the agreement covers scope, price, schedule expectations, and change-order procedure. Verbal understandings are the single most common source of billing disputes once a project is underway.

Confirm which permits and approvals your specific project actually needs, and that they're filed, or already issued, before the relevant work begins. Permit and approval requirements vary significantly by state, city, and even by individual project scope, so there is no universal checklist of "the permits you need." Treat this section as a prompt to verify with your local building department, not as a substitute for doing so.

If your project is in New York City, see our guide to NYC DOB complaints and violations for how the city's enforcement process works once work is underway. Once permits are in hand, tracking their expiration dates is a separate problem worth planning for now, not after one lapses.

Confirm the project's required insurance coverage (general liability, workers' compensation, and any project-specific requirements a client or lender has asked for) is active, and that you have current certificates of insurance on file for every subcontractor working on site. Required coverage types and minimums vary by project, contract, and jurisdiction, so confirm specifics with your insurance provider or client rather than assuming a standard set of coverage applies.

Have a schedule with real milestones, not just a start date and an end date, before work begins. Identify the few dates that, if missed, would push everything after them: a foundation pour, an inspection, a material delivery with a long lead time. Those are the dates worth building the rest of the schedule around.

Walk through the practical logistics before the crew shows up: where material gets delivered and staged, where vehicles park, how the site is secured after hours, and what the site-specific safety plan requires (site-specific hazards, required PPE, emergency procedures). These are easy to treat as obvious and skip writing down, until something goes wrong and nobody's clear on who was responsible for what.

Before work starts, confirm who owns what, not just at the trade level, but at the individual task level. Every early task should have one clearly assigned, named owner. Dedicated task management makes this easier to maintain once the project is running, but the habit of assigning clear ownership needs to start on day one, not get introduced after confusion has already set in.

Decide, before work begins, how the team will communicate day to day: who needs to be looped in on which decisions, how field questions get answered quickly, and how updates get documented instead of living only in a phone call nobody else heard. Keeping communication tied to the specific task it concerns is far easier to set up as a habit from day one than to retrofit once everyone's used to a group chat.

Decide up front how you'll document progress: photos tied to specific tasks or dates, written daily or weekly logs, or both. This matters for your own project management, and it also matters if a dispute, insurance claim, or inspection ever requires you to show what the site looked like at a given point in time. Deciding this after the fact usually means you don't have what you need when you need it.

• Current, approved drawings and a written scope of work, including exclusions
• Signed agreements in place with every subcontractor and relevant supplier
• Required permits and approvals confirmed with your local building department and filed or issued
• Active, confirmed insurance coverage and current certificates of insurance on file for all subcontractors
• A schedule with real milestones, including any dates the rest of the schedule depends on
• A site logistics plan: deliveries, staging, parking, after-hours security
• A site-specific safety plan covering known hazards, required PPE, and emergency procedures
• Clear, named ownership for early tasks, not just trade-level assignments
• An agreed communication procedure for day-to-day questions and decisions
• A documentation plan for photos, logs, and progress records from day one