Ball in court names the person or company that has to do the next thing on an open item: answer the RFI, review the submittal, fix the punch item, approve the change. It moves as the item moves. When the architect answers an RFI, the ball goes back to the contractor’s RFI manager to review and distribute the answer.
Why it matters
Most late RFIs and submittals aren’t hard questions. They are items sitting with someone who doesn’t know it’s their turn. A log sorted by ball in court is a chase list: it tells the weekly meeting exactly who to ask about what, and it is the record of where time was spent if a delay is argued later.
Worked example
Illustrative, on Riverside Medical Center (sample data): RFI-212 is opened to the architect, so the ball is in the architect’s court. When the response comes in, the ball moves to the GC’s RFI manager, who checks that it answers the question, marks it official and distributes it. Sorting the RFI log by ball in court before the OAC meeting shows which open items are waiting on the design team and which are waiting on the GC.
Common mistakes
- Tracking only “open” or “closed”, so nobody knows whose turn it is.
- Updating ball in court by hand and forgetting to, so the log goes stale.
- Leaving the ball with “the team” instead of one person or company.
How os.construction handles it
On RFIs, ball in court is worked out from the RFI’s state: the creator while it’s a draft, the assignees while it’s open without a response, and the RFI manager once a response is in. Advance Ball in Court and Forward for Review move it by hand. Submittals move it step by step through their approval workflow, and punch items show it in the list. See RFIs.
