Everyone Agrees on Early Coordination. Not Everyone Is Actually Doing It.

I spent three days at the International Mass Timber Conference in Portland last week. Hundreds of people in the room. Architects, engineers, manufacturers, developers, contractors. The energy around mass timber is real. The project pipeline is growing. The material science is advancing. None of that is the problem.

The problem is something I heard everywhere. Not just in hallway conversations after panels wrapped. On the conference floor. In the Q&A sessions. During the panels themselves. Someone would describe a project that hit cost overruns or schedule delays during construction, and the root cause almost always traced back to decisions that got locked in during design without the right people in the room. It came up so consistently, across so many different sessions and conversations, that it started to feel like the defining theme of the conference — even though it was rarely the stated topic.

This is not a new observation. Integrated project delivery, early contractor involvement, design-assist. The industry has language for this. What struck me at IMTC is that the language is everywhere but the practice still barely exists. Almost nobody I spoke with is actually doing it with the rigor the material demands. And that makes sense. Mass timber is still young enough in North America that most teams are building their first or second project. They are learning these lessons in the field instead of in the design room.

Mass timber is not forgiving of late-stage coordination. Steel and concrete have tolerances and field adjustments baked into how they get built. You can weld a connection. You can form a pour to fit. Mass timber arrives fabricated. CNC-cut. The panels and columns and beams are what they are. If the design didn't account for something, the field doesn't get to improvise its way out of it. Or if it does, the cost and schedule consequences are real. This is a development risk that compounds quickly once construction starts.

Here is where I keep seeing the breakdown happen.

Bay widths and structural grids get set by the architect and structural engineer before the timber manufacturer or erector has weighed in on what is actually efficient to fabricate and ship. A grid that works beautifully in plan might generate panels that are awkward to produce, difficult to transport, or wasteful in material yield. Changing the grid by even a small amount early in design can eliminate weeks of fabrication complexity later. But that conversation has to happen in schematic design. Not in construction documents. Not during bidding. This is procurement strategy as much as it is structural engineering. When you are dealing with a prefabricated system, the sequencing of development decisions determines whether you get an efficient build or an expensive one.

Hardware and connection detailing is another one. The structural engineer designs the connections. The manufacturer has opinions about which hardware systems work with their production line. The contractor has opinions about what can be installed efficiently in sequence. When those three conversations happen separately, you end up with connections that are technically adequate but miserable to build. I have watched this play out on projects where the field crew is fighting a connection detail that nobody flagged because nobody asked them. This is a construction sequencing problem disguised as a design problem. The productivity losses are real and measurable.

MEP coordination in mass timber is its own discipline. Penetrations through CLT panels and glulam beams are not the same as coring through concrete after the fact. They need to be planned, located, and often pre-cut before the panels leave the factory. When the mechanical engineer finalizes duct routing after the timber shop drawings are done, you are looking at field modifications to a prefabricated system. That is expensive. It is slow. And it compromises the performance of the assembly, particularly if those penetrations intersect with your air barrier or vapor control layer. The building enclosure is where these coordination failures become most visible. Every unplanned penetration is a potential weak point in the thermal and moisture control layers that you then have to remediate in the field. In a high-performance building, that is not a minor detail. It determines whether the assembly actually performs to the standard you designed it to or whether you are chasing air leakage for years after occupancy. Get this wrong and indoor air quality suffers downstream.

None of this is a mystery. The people at IMTC understand it. The manufacturers talk about it openly. The contractors who specialize in mass timber will tell you exactly what they need and when they need it. The structural engineers who have done a few of these projects know where the pain points are. And yet it keeps happening because mass timber is still new enough that most project teams are running a conventional linear design process on a material system that does not tolerate it.

So why does the gap persist.

Part of it is fee structure. Bringing a timber manufacturer into schematic design costs money or requires a commitment before the project is fully funded. That is a feasibility question that most developers are not set up to answer early. Part of it is procurement timing. Developers want to keep options open on the structural system until pricing comes back, which means the manufacturer gets engaged late by definition. Part of it is entitlement uncertainty. If you are still working through land use approvals, committing to a specific structural system and its coordination requirements feels premature. And part of it is just habit. The conventional design process is linear. Architect to engineer to contractor. Mass timber doesn't work well in a linear process. It needs a loop.

The projects succeeding with mass timber are the ones where someone on the development side is forcing that loop to happen early. Not waiting for the architect to suggest it. Not hoping the contractor will flag the issues in preconstruction. Someone with enough understanding of the fabrication constraints, the erection sequence, and the enclosure integration to insist that those conversations happen in design, when they are cheap to resolve, rather than in the field, when they are not. That is a construction management and development governance function. Someone has to own the coordination sequence across the full project timeline. When nobody does, you get the pattern I heard described over and over at IMTC. Good intentions, smart people, and avoidable failures that trace back to decisions made too late or made without the right input.

Mass timber will mature. Teams will accumulate reps. The early coordination that everyone agrees on will eventually become standard practice. But right now, the gap between knowing and doing is where most of the risk lives. And closing that gap is not a material science problem or an engineering problem. It is a development process problem. The teams that figure this out first will have a measurable productivity advantage over the ones still learning it in the field.