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Build from what your people already produce

A new form sent from the office gets dropped, but the records your site already keeps for wages and plant keep going. Add what the subcontract needs to those sheets and photos, instead of adding new paperwork.

Updated: . By Jack Butler-Kettle, Construction Claims Consultant.

Why it matters

A new form competes with everything the site already does, and the site wins. The foreman fills it in for a fortnight, the job gets busy, and the form stops. Meanwhile the site produces records every day without being asked: allocation sheets for wages, day sheets for plant, photos on WhatsApp. They keep going because somebody needs them to get paid or to do the job. Adding the detail the subcontract needs costs a column, not a new routine, and a column survives the busy weeks.

How to do it

  1. Spend a day on site listing what your people already write down or photograph, and who does it.
  2. Compare that with what the subcontract and a claim would need, and mark the gaps: usually a location, a cause and a reference number.
  3. Add the missing fields to the sheets you already use, and show each person the one extra thing to write.
  4. Save the WhatsApp photos to the project folder every week, with the date and area, instead of asking people to stop using the group.

Example

Illustrative example. The scenario and figures are invented.

The facts

A civils subcontractor's commercial manager needs a disruption record on a £2,300,000 job. The site team has already ignored two diary templates. The gangs fill in daily allocation sheets for wages, and the supervisors post photos to a site WhatsApp group.

What happens

  1. The manager adds two columns to the allocation sheet: area worked, and the reason for any non-productive hours.
  2. The supervisors add the area to each WhatsApp photo caption, and the office saves the group's photos to the project folder every Friday.
  3. The sheets keep being filled in because wages depend on them, and the two new columns come with them.

The outcome

After 9 months, the disruption claim is built from 190 daily sheets with the area and cause on every line. The photos are filed by week. The third template was never needed.

To have this set up for you, see our Delay & Disruption Loss Prevention service.