Practical, experience-based project management lessons for project engineers, developing project managers, and field professionals.
Friday Field Notes #08: Extra Work Needs a Paper Trail
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FRIDAY FIELD NOTES #08 Extra Work Needs a Paper Trail Good morning team, This week’s topic: documenting extra work. 1. From the Field Extra work is easiest to track when the project team begins documenting it as soon as the work is identified. Once several days have passed, labor hours blend into regular production, equipment moves to another task, and the details behind the original direction become harder to reconstruct. I’ve seen legitimate change costs become difficult to support because everyone understood that the work was extra, but nobody created a clear record while it was happening. The team relied on memory, general daily reports, and cost data that had not been separated from the base scope. A good paper trail does not need to be complicated. It should show what changed, who provided the direction, when the work occurred, and what labor, equipment, materials, subcontractors, or schedule impacts were involved. 2. Leadership Perspective Good project leaders make documentation part of the work rather than something completed after the fact. They also explain why the information matters so the field team understands that detailed records protect the project and the people performing the work. 3. Field Observation The strongest change documentation usually comes from several simple records that support one another. A follow-up email confirms the direction, the daily report explains what happened onsite, photos show the condition, and the cost log identifies the resources used. None of those records has to carry the entire change by itself. Together, they provide a much clearer explanation than a cost summary prepared weeks later. 4. Spreadsheet Tip This week’s formula: SUMIFS Use this formula to total labor hours for a specific change item and date range. =SUMIFS($F:$F,$B:$B,A2,$C:$C,”>=”&D2,$C:$C,”<=”&E2) In this example: Column F contains labor hours. Column B contains the change item number. Cell A2 contains the change item being reviewed. Column C contains the work date. Cells D2 and E2 contain the beginning and ending dates. This can help separate labor associated with a potential change from the project’s normal production hours. 5. Question for the Week Could the records being created today support the extra work if the project had to explain it several weeks from now? Have a great weekend, Dan |
Friday Field Notes
Practical, experience-based project management lessons for project engineers, developing project managers, and field professionals.
Good morning team, This week’s topic: look-ahead schedules. 1. From the Field A look-ahead should represent what the project team actually believes is going to happen over the next few weeks. That sounds obvious, but I’ve seen look-aheads continue showing activities that everyone onsite already knows are not going to start on the dates listed. At that point, the document stops being a planning tool and becomes an exercise in updating dates. A useful look-ahead should reflect current field...
Good morning team, This week’s topic: project schedules. 1. From the Field A project schedule is obviously a planning tool, but I’ve found that its real value comes from how well it helps people understand what is supposed to happen next. A schedule can be technically correct and still be difficult to use. If the field team cannot tell what areas should be available, when subcontractors are needed, or what activities are driving the next few weeks of work, the schedule is not doing much to...
If you’re new here, Friday Field Notes is a short weekly newsletter built around practical project management lessons from the field. I originally started writing these notes for Project Engineers I was helping develop. The goal was simple: give them something useful they could read in a few minutes and apply to a real project. A lot of project management is learned through formal training, procedures, software, and project controls. But some of the most important lessons come from...