In documenting construction, traceability is the capacity to provide a rational explanation for each element of the building process and to follow a connected chain back to the source of the decision beyond the construction process. An example would be demonstrating that the specified wall assembly has a fire resistance rating that has been traced through the code requirement, through the specification, the construction drawing, and the approved submittal, and where all of the elements are consistent throughout the chain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Traceability is most appreciated in situations where information is disputed and must be validated after the fact. For example, clear traceability is helpful in answering the following types of questions: what was actually required at the time, why a construction inspection failed, or as a defence to a claim made against the work many years after the work was completed. A project that includes strong traceability would be most helpful in answering these questions with relevant documentation. A project without it would need to recreate the answer from fragments of records and, quite often, from blurry memory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There’s no tool or checklist that can be used once and develop documentation traceability. It comes from developing a new discipline that needs to be applied at every stage of project documentation, from drawings and specifications to submittals, RFIs, and change orders. Weakened overall traceability results from neglect and from breaking a single chain, such as a change order that doesn’t reference the related bulletin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
More and more, the ability to retain data history across trade outputs is what makes AI-powered document review tools from different vendors useful. Specifically, being able to identify the extracted information and show how it ties back to the drawing note will distinguish tools that “just” provide a list of extraction outputs from those that actually provide useful output.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This forward and backward tracking of key requirements while checking the integrity of the links is an exercise that every team should perform from time to time on a given project. Performing this exercise proactively (“before the game”) instead of reactively (“after the game”) usually yields a better outcome for the project. If this exercise is performed after the traceability breaks (and someone is left trying to answer an important question), then someone is bound to discover gaps that could cause major problems for the project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Those projects that lack the discipline of traceability “early and often” make the question of how previous work was done (and why) quite difficult to answer. It is much easier to answer “how” and “why” (traceability) from the beginning of a project rather than trying to answer it once the project is underway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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In documenting construction, traceability is the capacity to provide a rational explanation for each element of the building process and to follow a connected chain back to the source of the decision beyond the construction process. An example would be demonstrating that the specified wall assembly has a fire resistance rating that has been traced […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-t"],"yoast_head":"\n