RFI (Request for Information)
A formal question from the contractor to the designer or engineer, asking for clarification of the design or the specification. It is the mechanism by which ambiguity gets resolved — and the mechanism by which delay gets evidenced.
An RFI is two things at once, and teams that treat it as only the first are giving away the second. It is a question that needs an answer. It is also a dated record establishing that the contractor asked, when it asked, and how long it waited — which is the raw material of a late-information claim.
Which is why the RFI log matters more than any individual RFI. A log showing a pattern of slow or absent responses is a far stronger piece of evidence than any single unanswered question, and it is available to any project that keeps one properly.