Say your surveying a large shopping center, and you need to do a lot of locations. Do you have a physical checklist that you go thru to make sure you locate all the items necessary to complete the survey? Or do you just have a mental check list?
excellent question
I'm a mental note type of guy. I don't necessarily recommend it though. My purpose in doing it that way is that I run the categories of shots through my head over and over. That list will spin through the mind several times per hour. In my case, having a single list for which each item finally gets a checkmark, invites me to overlook things. I want to make the checkmark. I run quickly through the possibilities one time. That's not good enough for me.
I love shopping center surveys, and I do them very methodically. Start in one corner and get all of the stripes and curb islands, then the lights and the utilities, then the street features like curbs, walks, and the medians. Last thing is reflectorless for the building corners and facades.
I have a checklist for a few things that are critical or easy to miss (eg: overhead power). Other than that, just work your way through the features. I usually work areas, and break those areas down by major features such as kerbs, and then work my way through string features to point features.
As a general rule, I use mental checklists for everything. Whenever I have used checklists in the past, I never learned how to do the job. As soon as I threw the checklists away, I quickly learned what I needed and no longer needed the crutch of a list.
I used to have a checklist for my crews to use on ALTA surveys but I found that they started just completing the checklist items and not looking around for anything site specific that need to be located. In short it stifled their critical thinking.
Interesting topic. We use checklists on everything where I work, not just the surveying. I wonder what pilots think about them. Do they feel that it stifles their critical thinking? Would you want to be a passenger on a plane that the pilot did not run down his checklist?
> I wonder what pilots think about them. Do they feel that it stifles their critical thinking?
I'm 100% sure it does. I'm also 100% sure that just because it's the best practice for piloting an aircraft has no bearing on whether it is the best practice for performing a topo survey.
The staff I manage are performing boundary and topo surveys, other crews in this office spent a decade staking out this:
I want both to adapt their procedures to the task at hand; use checklists and standard procedures when appropriate, be empowered to deviate from then when appropriate, and to know the difference.
No list ... If its not moving shoot it. Goes for striping too.
CIGARS for takeoff. (Controls, Instruments, Attitude, Runup, Seatbelts)
GLUMPS for landing. (Gas, Landing light, undercarriage, mixture, prop, seatbelts)
Inverted L for emergencies (fuel, mixture, prop, throttle, carb heat)
I'm sort of like Bruce. I usually divide the site into sections and don't move to the next section until everything is located in the active one.
Checklists are great when you are checking, not doing.
