You are holding a sheet. Is it the current one?
It probably says so. The architect marks the current drawing, and that marking is true as of the day it was issued.
What it cannot tell you is what happened since. If an RFI answer came back, or the owner or architect issued a change directive, and it has not been rolled into the set yet, the sheet still says current and it is still behind.
Getting that rolled in is on the GC. Knowing whether it has been is on you.
This is part of how to read HVAC drawings on a commercial job, and it is a cousin of who owns the duct design.
There are two jobs here, not one
This is the part that settles the argument, and I have watched the argument happen on a lot of jobs.
It is the general contractor’s job to update the drawings.
It is the trade’s job to make sure it is following the most recent updates.
Two jobs. Two different companies. Neither one covers for the other.
The GC publishes. You pull. If the GC never published it, that is on the GC. If they published it and your foreman is working off a sheet from March, that is on your company, and it does not matter how annoyed anybody is about it.
Word of the day: supersede. A superseded sheet is not a wrong drawing. It was the right drawing, and then something replaced it. That is what makes it dangerous. It looks exactly as correct as it did the day it was issued.
How it actually happens depends who you work for
Here is where it gets messy, and nobody writing about this will tell you, because most of what is written about drawing control is written by people selling drawing control software.
The honest answer is that it is all over the board. Right now, today, on jobs running in your town, all of these are happening at once.
A one man band or a small shop
A PDF viewer, which is fine for looking and useless for marking up. So they print. Then they overlay, with tape and paper, physically laying the new information over the old.
That is not backwards. That works. A man with tape and a current print is in better shape than a man with an iPad full of a set from two months ago.
A mid size company
Probably Bluebeam, which can genuinely supersede a drawing, if somebody at that company was willing to learn how to do it. That last part is the whole sentence.
Where nobody learned it, you get the workarounds:
- Clipping and pasting over the drawings, fighting to get the scale right.
- Emailing the marked up sheets around to the other trades.
- Reprinting a current set every few weeks and leaving it on site.
- A Bluebeam account on site, hooked to a dedicated plan table with a screen.
A large company
Everything lives in a platform. Procore, Autodesk, something in that family. Drawings, RFIs, submittals, the whole record, one place.
Bigger than that
I have never worked for one. I have sat in symposiums where they describe what they do with document control and it is unmatched, and listening to them it is clearly necessary at that size.
I am not going to pretend to teach you something I have only heard described.
And most trades
A foreman with an iPad, carrying the current drawings, updated by the GC.
That is the common one. Which means for most guys in the field, the answer to “is this current” is “whatever is on the foreman’s iPad, and when did he last sync it.”
I have done all of it
And hybrids of all of it, which is what most jobs really are.
On a six year project we were required at the outset to keep a physical paper copy of the drawings. We did. Two thousand sheets, issued in phases of five hundred over several months.
That lasted about a year before the project made us adapt. Everything moved into Bluebeam. We ran Sessions so people could be in the same document at the same time, update items, supersede drawings, put the current information in where everybody could see it. All the project documentation went there and we used it as a file share and a document control platform.
On the second six year project, everything went through Procore. Issued, updated and pushed out through one medium, used as the document control platform. We did not use the cost and billing side of it. That was in Sage.
I have also run Sage as the document control platform itself, for RFIs, submittals, costs, billings, report generation.
And before any of that, paper. We printed revisions on colored paper so the sheet was unique at a glance, and pasted it over the old one so the difference was the first thing you saw.
And before that, faxes. Faxing an RFI in and waiting on a fax back. Then email replaced it.
That is fifteen years, and I watched all of it change inside those fifteen years.
The part I will admit to
There are platforms I have not used that would probably streamline a lot of what I do.
I have not gotten to them. What I use works, so I have not changed.
It gets hard to move to something new when the thing you do is working, even when the new thing is better. That is how people in the industry get left behind, and I know it, and I need to do something about it.
I am telling you that because if you have been feeling the same thing about your own setup, you are not slow. That is just what it feels like from inside.
What this means for you
None of those methods is wrong. Paper with a pasteover is not primitive and a platform is not automatically correct. What matters is whether the current information reached the man doing the work.
So when you change companies and the new place does it a completely different way, it is not broken. It is a different point on the same line, and the question to ask is the same one every time.
How do I know this sheet is current, and who do I ask?
Ask it on your first day. Ask it again when the job moves into a new phase. Nobody is going to think less of you for it, and the alternative is finding out with a bundle of duct already cut.
The short version
- The GC updates the drawings. The trade makes sure it is following the updates. Two jobs, and neither covers the other.
- A superseded sheet looks exactly as right as it did the day it was issued. That is what makes it dangerous.
- How updates travel depends entirely on the size of the company. Tape and paper, Bluebeam, Procore, all running right now on different jobs.
- Most trades run off a foreman’s iPad. Which means the real question is when he last synced it.
- A current print beats a stale tablet. The method is not the point. Whether the information arrived is the point.
- Ask how it works on your first day, and again every time the job changes.