There is another thread ongoing at this time about monitoring.?ÿ The OP works for a very large company with multiple offices all over the country, several thousand employees, probably hundreds of surveyors.?ÿ
Apparently they leave things like monitoring completely up to the whims and prejudices of the project manager du jour. Or maybe to the party chief who happens to draw the shortest straw. I would think that any outfit that has been in business since the 1960's would have some consistent procedure policies. And with multiple offices and many employees those policies should be written down.?ÿ
Not that I'm shocked. I've worked in many offices in my time, some of them fairly large and with companies that had more than one location. Not one had any consistent written procedures for their surveying. Oh- I've seen plenty of "employee manuals". Even the smallest mom and pop frequently has such things.?ÿ So I know that such things are possible. And most state DOT's have survey manuals of various degrees. But I do not recall anything on the private side.
So thats my little rant.?ÿ Are any of you familiar with a private side outfit with comprehensive written procedures??ÿ ?ÿ ?ÿ?ÿ
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Most of the places I've worked have had some form of written procedure. I liked that there was some sort of plan in place because at least it fostered consistency. To me it doesn't really matter if 3 guys are doing something 3 different but correct ways because the confusion that arises from a simple lack of consistency negates most of the benefit gained by doing it correctly in the first place.
One area where I aleays wanted to draw the line when it came to procedure was the company specific shorthand. At the last place I worked my field notes got labeled "narrative" style and we were basically told to not do it this way. I didn't try to argue with anyone about it and tried to follow the format that was laid out-- but it always bugged me that the notes wouldn't make sense to a single person outside of the company, and probably only to half the surveyors inside the company due to the bizarre and arcane shorthand.
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I take a little bit of pride in writing notes that almost anyone on earth could pick up and have a pretty good idea of what went on at the project that day. I'm not sure why this went away because when you look back at GLO notes they're pretty simple and effective for being as old as they are.
NO.?ÿ I've worked for several engineering/surveying/architectural firms & one landscape architect/surveying firm, not one had written standardized procedures for the infrequent but specialized tasks. They have all been of the mindset that as long as the Minimum Standards are met, a licensee's experience and continued education would be enough to keep the company out of court or that any specialized tasking like remote monitoring procedures, would be covered in the specs of the project (usually written by an engineer).?ÿ
I submitted our qualifications package for a Corps project that included several dam site remote monitoring projects.?ÿ In the COE RFQ package, the monitoring procedures and deliverables were very specific.?ÿ The private sector RFQ for which I submitted a package, wanted the firms to supply their own plan of action and procedures as part of the qualifications package.
In most of my experience at a private firm, there was no formal manual, but there were a bunch of little ad hoc documents available for reference. The effort to make something durable that could apply to all places, projects, and clients seems monumental and almost impossible to me, but I would love to have something like that. I've also observed a local institutional inertia at places cobbled together by M&A. It was a big deal and took months of negotiating and planning to get everyone on the same CAD template. Years to start using the same gear.
There's an outfit in CA that has some pretty extensive documentation on their procedures.. that they share with whoever wants them.
https://www.redefinedhorizons.com/printingpress/survey-guidelines/
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In the COE RFQ package, the monitoring procedures and deliverables were very specific.
That's because they have written procedures
As the OP of the monitoring thread, and as the technical advisor to our committee responsible for settings standards at our firm, I can speak to this, at least with respect to my experience.
We have standardized field note formats, crew reports, project processing logs, static occupation forms, survey plat/ROS notes, such as they are. They differ across our offices somewhat because certain clients (usually public-sector) require certain things, and it's just easier to adopt those as our defaults.
That's fine - standards for documentation and quality control are good and should exist. We also have "how-tos" for data processing, and for some of the software-specific stuff like generating a TIN surface in C3D, or baseline processing in TBC. They're redundant, because there are already tons of tutorials and videos out there. It makes leadership feel warm and fuzzy I guess.
But when it comes to standardizing survey procedures across the board?
Everyone seems to want them, but only as a tool to avoid having to do the heavy lifting of training and mentoring their people, and to avoid the (apparently too-cumbersome) task of actual project analysis and planning. They also want the procedures to be exactly what they learned 20 or 30+ years ago.
The bottom line is that leadership conflates
"checklist of exact buttons to push for the exact gear/software that we currently have to get the exact same deliverable every single time so that we can hire mindless drones at cut-rate wages"
with
"best practices for performing [insert type of work here]".
Best practices for geomatics work is equipment-agnostic. Just like boundary analysis, they are a collection of principles and fundamental concepts that may or may not apply depending on the situation at hand. They're not a series of checklists that we just pull out and mindlessly go through. Even if the object of two projects is the same, they are still two different parcels of land in two different areas and very likely have some unique features that require the licensee (and by extension his/her team) to utilize different procedures and even different equipment at times.
There are entire books and manuals on geomatics that address best practices, fundamental theories and their applications. If it were possible to crunch them all down into index-card sized checklists, someone would have already done it.
We'd also be a trade, not a profession. And we'd be working in a shop, not an office, making widgets using the exact same procedures and exact same equipment and turning our brains off while doing so.
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This sort of situation doesn't happen overnight. It's as much a hiring/retention issue as it is a training issue.
At the risk of repeating myself from old threads, I'll throw this back out there:
The bottom line is that leadership conflates
"checklist of exact buttons to push for the exact gear/software that we currently have to get the exact same deliverable every single time so that we can hire mindless drones at cut-rate wages"
with
"best practices for performing [insert type of work here]".
This, I must agree, is frequently true. The best policies allow for departure from the norm when circumstances dictate. They should be a framework, not a cross.?ÿ?ÿ
@bstrand?ÿ
I try to work under the umbrella of if I can't write a simple outline and procedure for something I do then I don't know what I do well enough.
ymmv.
Best practices for geomatics work is equipment-agnostic. Just like boundary analysis, they are a collection of principles and fundamental concepts that may or may not apply depending on the situation at hand. They're not a series of checklists that we just pull out and mindlessly go through. Even if the object of two projects is the same, they are still two different parcels of land in two different areas and very likely have some unique features that require the licensee (and by extension his/her team) to utilize different procedures and even different equipment at times.
I like that statement.
