Before you can cut RFI turnaround, you have to be honest about where the time goes. The Navigant Construction Forum data is blunt: a ~9.7-day median, ~$1,080 per RFI, ~$859,000 of RFI labor on the average project. But the engineer's actual ruling usually takes minutes. The 9.7 days is everything around the ruling — finding the right sheet, confirming the revision, checking for a change order, chasing the right person. So the entire game is removing search time while keeping the judgment intact.
Centralize the latest revision — and make "latest" obvious
The single most expensive RFI mistake is answering from a superseded set. If your team can't tell at a glance which revision governs, every answer carries re-work risk. One source of truth for current revisions — with superseded sets clearly marked — kills a whole category of delay and a whole category of disputes.
Require a citation on every single answer
An answer without a source just starts a second argument. "It's fine" gets challenged in the field; "Per E-2.1, Rev 3, detail 4" ends the conversation. Make the citation non-negotiable — sheet, detail, spec section, or change-order number. This is also what lets a junior PM answer confidently and a senior PM approve in seconds instead of re-deriving the answer.
Triage routine answers from judgment calls
Most RFIs are "where is this / what does the document say" — purely document-grounded, no judgment required. A smaller share are genuine engineering, cost, code, or safety decisions. Separate them. Route the routine ones to a fast, grounded answer path and reserve your senior people's time for the calls that actually need a human. Mixing the two is why simple questions wait a week behind hard ones.
Put a grounded answer layer in front of the documents
This is the step that turns days into minutes. Instead of a person opening the drawing set to hunt, your team emails the question and gets back a cited answer from the latest revision automatically — "what's the panel rating on E-2.1?", "did the latest CO move the slab pour?". The person's job shifts from finding to reviewing, which is a 10x time difference. This is exactly what IntelMS does, and it flags document conflicts and escalates anything contractual, cost, code, or safety to a human instead of guessing.
Keep a cited Q&A record automatically
Half the RFIs on a job are variations of questions already answered. A searchable, cited Q&A history means the second time a question comes up, the answer is instant — and at closeout or in a dispute, you have a defensible, dated record of every decision and its source.
Run the numbers on your own job
See what your current RFI turnaround is costing per year — then see a real cited answer from a live project.
Open the RFI cost calculator →Frequently asked
What is a good RFI turnaround time?
Contracts often specify 5–10 business days; the real-world median is ~9.7 days. Strong teams answer routine, document-grounded RFIs same-day by removing the search time.
Why do RFIs take so long?
The decision is fast, the search is slow. Most of the time is locating the governing document, confirming the revision, and checking for change orders — not the ruling itself.
Can I speed up RFIs without cutting diligence?
Yes — that's the whole point. You cut the search, not the judgment. Humans stay on every contractual, cost, code, or safety call; the grounded layer just removes the clerical hunt.