Congratulations! You’re now the person responsible for making sure RFIs actually move, instead of vanishing into that mysterious gap between the field and the architect’s inbox. Where do you even begin? What’s the right approach? That’s exactly what this ZenTek Consultants blog series is here to help you figure out!

Missed Part 2? Read it here.

Part 3: Ball-in-Court Accountability

An RFI sitting in someone’s queue for three weeks isn’t a documentation problem, it’s a schedule issue wearing a documentation costume. Keeping “ball-in-court” moving is one of the most valuable, yet underappreciated disciplines a project team can put in place. Procore gives you the tools to do that; you just need people to actually use them.

Let’s start with keeping notifications limited to important info. “Overdue” notifications are the first line of defense on a construction job, but they only work if people don’t ignore them. Procore can automatically flag and notify when an RFI passes its due date, but if your team’s inbox is already flooded with system notifications, that flag loses its power fast. Configure notification settings deliberately for your project. You want overdue items to genuinely stand out, but they won’t if there’s so much noise that everything becomes “I’ll read it later” and forgotten.

Escalation needs an actual, agreed-upon process, not an assumption that someone will eventually notice. Decide explicitly: at what point does an overdue RFI get escalated, and to whom? A PM following up directly with a design team after, say, five business days past due is a very different (and more effective) habit than hoping the system notification alone does the work. Build this escalation threshold into your project’s standard operating procedure and actually follow it. We recommend using “Action Plans” for this. They let you build hold points, signature requirements, and automated notifications into a set workflow you can use for every project.

Weekly RFI review is where a lot of well-intentioned processes quietly fall apart. It’s easy to build a great submission and tracking workflow and then never actually look at the open log as a whole. Make reviewing the open RFI report, sorted by ball-in-court, by age, by criticality, a part of your standing weekly project meeting. This is where you catch the RFI that’s been sitting for two weeks because everyone assumed someone else was chasing it.

Criticality flagging deserves a mention too. Not every RFI carries equal schedule weight, and Procore lets you mark priority or schedule-impacting RFIs so they don’t get lost in a long list of routine, low-urgency questions. Use this very deliberately: if everything’s flagged urgent, then nothing actually is.

Ball-in-court accountability isn’t a software feature you turn on once and forget. It’s a habit your whole project team has to actually practice, every week, for the life of the job. Don’t miss the next installment of our “Mastering RFIs in Procore” series!