When a submittal comes back marked revise and resubmit for the second or third time, most project teams treat it as a communication failure between the contractor and the design team. That framing is not wrong, but it usually stops short of the more useful question: what would have to change, structurally, for that back-and-forth to happen less often in the first place.
Reducing submittal cycles is rarely about working faster within the existing process. It is about changing the conditions that make revise-and-resubmit the default outcome rather than the exception, and those conditions are set well before the first submittal ever reaches a reviewer’s desk.
The Contract Already Requires a Coordinated Schedule
Most project teams assume the submittal schedule is a formality, something to file away once it has been approved. In practice, it is one of the few tools available to prevent the review queue from becoming chaotic in the first place, and it is written directly into standard contract language for exactly that reason.
According to a legal analysis published by the construction law firm Allensworth, AIA document A201-2017 requires the contractor to prepare and keep current, for the architect’s approval, a schedule of submittals which is coordinated with the contractor’s construction schedule and allows the architect reasonable time to review submittals. This is not a minor administrative footnote buried in the general conditions. It is the contractual mechanism meant to prevent exactly the pattern most teams experience: a flood of submittals arriving faster than any reviewer can reasonably process them, followed by rushed reviews, followed by a wave of revise-and-resubmit notices that could have been avoided with better upfront sequencing. When a contractor fails to follow that schedule, late submittals pile up and interfere with the orderly flow of construction, putting pressure on the design professional to hastily review submittals, or forgo review altogether, just to help the project escape a backlog it should never have accumulated in the first place. The contract does not merely permit a coordinated schedule. It requires one, precisely because an uncoordinated flow of submittals is a predictable source of the back-and-forth everyone is trying to avoid.
This is where the practical value of a disciplined submittal review sits, not as a downstream fix applied after problems surface, but as the mechanism that keeps the whole schedule from collapsing into a pile of late, rushed, and poorly sequenced reviews competing for the same limited attention.
What Actually Changes Outcomes: Collaboration, Not Just Speed
It is tempting to assume that reducing back-and-forth is mostly a matter of moving faster: faster preparation, faster review, faster turnaround on comments. The available research on project performance points somewhere else.
A 2025 report from Dodge Construction Network and the Lean Construction Institute, based on surveys spanning 2013 to 2024, found that teams applying a broad range of Lean and collaborative practices consistently outperformed their peers on schedule adherence, budget performance, and the quality of communication between design and construction teams. The same report found that 61 percent of owners still report schedule delays on typical projects, and that only a small share of teams, roughly 6 percent, are deeply engaged in the collaborative practices associated with better outcomes. The gap between those two numbers is instructive: the industry largely knows what reduces friction between design teams and contractors, but most projects are not structured to take advantage of it.
The specific practices that correlated with better outcomes were not primarily about speed. They centered on stronger communication, clearer alignment on expectations, and more consistent coordination between the parties actually doing the reviewing and the parties actually preparing the submittals. That distinction matters because it reframes the goal. The objective is not to compress the timeline of an adversarial process. It is to change the process so it stops generating adversarial friction in the first place.
Why Design Teams Cannot Simply Review Faster
Even with perfect coordination on the contractor’s side, there is a structural limit to how quickly a design team can move through its share of the process, and that limit is worth understanding rather than fighting.
According to the AIA’s most recent Architecture Billings Index report, architecture firm backlogs averaged 6.3 months industry-wide as of the end of 2025, with large firms carrying backlogs as long as 8.6 months. A design team is never reviewing a single project’s submittals in isolation. It is allocating a finite pool of technical staff across every active commitment on its books, and a submittal arriving from a well-coordinated project competes for the same attention as one arriving from a poorly coordinated one. The difference is that a well-prepared submittal, arriving on a schedule the design team has already agreed to, moves through that competition faster and with fewer objections, simply because there is less for the reviewer to flag.
This is why efforts to reduce back-and-forth that focus entirely on the contractor’s side, tightening internal checklists, adding another layer of pre-submission review, tend to produce smaller gains than efforts that also address how the two sides plan and communicate together. A submittal schedule negotiated collaboratively at the start of a project, and honored by both parties as the work proceeds, does more to prevent revise-and-resubmit cycles than almost any downstream fix applied after a rejection has already happened.
Part of what makes this counterintuitive is that revise-and-resubmit cycles look, from the outside, like a technical failure: a wrong refrigerant type, a missing certification, an incomplete data sheet. Those technical issues are real, but the research on collaborative practice suggests they are frequently symptoms of a coordination gap rather than isolated errors. A contractor working from a schedule that was never realistically coordinated with the design team’s actual capacity is more likely to submit incomplete packages under deadline pressure. A design team that receives submittals in an unpredictable, uncoordinated flow is more likely to review them hastily or inconsistently. Fixing the technical error in front of a reviewer does nothing to fix the scheduling condition that produced it, which is why the same categories of mistakes tend to recur project after project even as individual teams get more careful.
Building the Coordination In, Rather Than Bolting It On
None of this suggests that thorough technical review is optional, or that collaboration is a substitute for getting the details right. Design teams still have a contractual and professional obligation to check submittals against design intent, and contractors still have to verify every dimension, rating, and certification before anything leaves their desk. What changes is where the effort to reduce back-and-forth actually gets applied.
Teams that see fewer resubmissions tend to treat the submittal schedule as a living coordination tool rather than a document filed away after initial approval. They revisit it as the project evolves, flag long-lead items early enough that a design team has genuine time to review them without rushing, and treat late or rushed submittals as a shared problem rather than something one party inflicts on the other. That shift, from managing the review as an adversarial checkpoint to managing it as a coordinated handoff between two parties with a shared interest in getting it right the first time, is what actually reduces the number of times a submittal has to make the round trip.
The payoff compounds over the life of a project. Early submittals set the tone for everything that follows: a design team that receives clean, well-sequenced packages in the first month tends to extend a degree of trust to that contractor for the remainder of the job, reviewing later submittals with less suspicion and fewer exhaustive line-by-line objections. A design team that receives a chaotic flood of late, incomplete packages in that same window tends to respond in kind, scrutinizing everything more heavily because the early evidence suggested it needed to. Neither posture is really about the individual submittal in front of the reviewer. Both are downstream consequences of how the relationship was established at the start, which is exactly why the coordination effort belongs at the beginning of the process rather than at the point where a rejection has already strained the relationship.
