The structural engineer's role once drawings are issued for construction — RFIs, shop drawing and submittal review, periodic site visits and structural observation, special inspection coordination, and evaluating the structural impact of change orders.
Issuing a stamped drawing set does not end the structural engineer of record's involvement in a project — it starts a different phase of it. This module works through construction administration (CA) as its own distinct discipline: answering RFIs without letting them quietly become an unauthorized change-order process, reviewing shop drawings and delegated-design submittals for general conformance without absorbing responsibility the contractor and specialty engineers actually hold, scheduling periodic site visits around the hold points where structural work becomes impossible to verify once it's covered, and coordinating with — but never substituting for — the owner's special inspection agency under IBC Chapter 17.
By the end of this module you should be able to explain why an EOR's CA-phase authority is deliberately narrow — limited to evaluating structural adequacy and design conformance, not directing means, methods, or site safety — and why the RFI log, submittal log, and field reports built during this phase become the primary evidence relied on if a dispute or failure investigation, the subject of Module 17, ever asks what was actually verified during construction.