Field Procedures

> While the "science of surveying" can be taught and learned with books, the mentality and heart that fuels the "art of surveying" comes much more slowly and difficult. I didn't fall off the cabbage wagon knowing it all. It took a while. And it will take a while for the crews, also.

I think the important element is personality. The old, antiquated model of surveying practice focused on figuring things out. The new, modern model of surveying focuses on using high-productivity technology to produce products that appear to the untrained eye to have figured things out.

The former model seems to have run on the intuitive thinking personality types, mostly INTJ. The updated model appears to require folks who are good at not worrying about what they didn't find or didn't do, while carefully pushing the proper sequences of buttons for maximum effect.

Well said Paden, well said.

:good:

Kent-

Well put Mon Ami !

Cheers

Derek

> The science of land surveying involves the combination of mathematical disciplines, geodesy and legal principles. The art of surveying involves such things as archeaology, sociology, botany and forensics, to name just a few. It is a fine and delicate solution of both that produce the proper results to complete a survey.

Good summation! Can I use it in the Introduction to Surveying class that I teach?

Miguel A. Escobar, LSLS, RPLS

Not to take issue with Kent's analysis but I think it is related, also, to the amont of time one spends on survey, in the field.

used to be that one really got to know a piece of property, it took a while to get the survey completed. Now it's all "blow and go", get it done faster and faster. Shoot no wonder the wrong lots gets surveyed sometimes!!!

I enjoy doing my own field work. As a longtime PLS (30 years) I can make decisions in the field as necessary, ones that I would not trust to a field crew. In addition, I can speak with clients and neighbors with some level of knowledge and authority.

As a INFJ personality type the Profession works well for me 🙂

:good:

> The art of surveying involves such things as archeaology, sociology, botany and forensics, to name just a few.

Science + Social Science + Science + Science = Art

I'd check your math 😉

Great comments

I must agree with everything posted above. Joe Newguy and Jack Groundhog (done the exact same thing 8000 times) aren't going to know enough about doing proper field research without a great deal of training. Joe Newguy may be trainable but Jack Groundhog will never learn. He doesn't want to learn. You need to keep him busy doing the mindless little things that must be done on a day to day basis.

There are occasional surveys that are so simple you can send out Joe and Jack with a checklist of precise procedure to follow. These involve known monuments with exising references that they can't screw up. Follow this with something as basic as "Using Monument A to Monument B as your baseline, go 400 feet from A towards B, set your first corner and go 500 from A towards B and set your second corner, move to the first corner and set up, turn a 90 into the property and set a corner at 200 feet, set on it, turn a 90 to the right and set your final corner at 100 feet. Move on to the next job."

Seriously, guys, how often do we get a job that simple?

Anything tougher than the example requires the field crew to evaluate what they find and to have a clue as to where to search in order to find ANYTHING, let alone what they NEED TO FIND. There is an art to using metal detectors close to objects that will always SING such as guy rods and chainlink fences. There is a right way and wrong way to get through shrubbery and flower gardens on the way to a property corner. Only one of those ways prevents the boss from receiving an irate phone call from the owner of said plants. If the notes tell you to find a 1/2" iron bar and you find a 2.5" pipe that resembles the remnant of an ancient pipe corner post, DO NOT ASSUME THE NOTES ARE WRONG. If you are looking for a 5/8" iron bar set in 1944 and discover a recently-poured concrete slab with a shiny-topped 1/2" iron bar sticking out of it precisely 1/2", DO NOT ASSUME THAT IS THE TRUE CORNER AS MARKED IN 1944. Never leave the boss a note explaining you couldn't search for a certain corner because there was a killer attack 'cheewahwah' growling at you.

Knowledge, experience, and character. Personality types don't figure in.

Surveying is an outdoor sport, kids. What we survey is outside. Sending crews out without proper direction and field time isn't surveying. Being responsible for more than a couple of crews, never going to the field to see the site, isn't surveying. Sadly, it isn't just the big engineering firms that have done this to the profession. I've seen smalltime surveyors with low ethics try the same thing. Hiring fast food employees and sending them out with a total station and a daily quota. Surprisingly the results are exactly what you might expect from this arrangement.

I'd take a conscientious surveyor with good character over a particular personality any day.

> :good:
>
> > The art of surveying involves such things as archeaology, sociology, botany and forensics, to name just a few.
>
> Science + Social Science + Science + Science = Art
>
> I'd check your math 😉

That's funny. I copied you summation of 'surveying' to my quotables list Paden Cash. Very well said. I had never taken the Myers Briggs Test before. Did so just now. INTJ although I think we use quite a bit of all of them.

:good: :good:

Great comments

> I must agree with everything posted above. Joe Newguy and Jack Groundhog (done the exact same thing 8000 times) aren't going to know enough about doing proper field research without a great deal of training. Joe Newguy may be trainable but Jack Groundhog will never learn. He doesn't want to learn. You need to keep him busy doing the mindless little things that must be done on a day to day basis.

Your comment here Holy Cow crystalized a dilema of mine that has been a pebble in my shoe for the last few years. I have a Jack Groundhog as an instrument man. Let me preface this by saying I don't run multiple crews or even have my own company, yet. (I'm working on that) I work for a phone company co-op and I do it all from start to finish. Great gig, IBEW, benefits, steady stream of work, no hunting for my next job or chasing people down to get paid. But, I have one helper and I've tried and tried to teach him to have critical thinking skills and he just doesn't have them. He has to be directed to do everything and questions nothing. He's just not a curious person. He's 57 years old and forgive me for saying this, just not the sharpest tool in the shed. Upside is he is reliable and easy to get along with, non confrontational. This is the best job he will ever have. Frankly I just like the guy even if he makes me insane at times with his lack of focus.

My dilmea is I feel I'm wasting my time teaching him anything and maybe the best thing would be to let him go and find someone younger and hungry that will take what I have to teach them and run with it. Someone who can fill my shoes when I want to take a couple weeks off to go hunting or at least call me on something they don't agree with and be able to articulate a good argument as to why they don't agree.

Guess I just needed to get this out. Hopefully not as a rant. This is something I need to figure out on my own.

Field and Office Divide

From what I can tell the role of party chief has changed fairly drastically over say the last twenty years or so with the adoption of computer aided computations in the office and data collectors in the field.

The party chiefs that I trained under when I fist started surveying back in 2001 were all older and came from what I consider a more classic tradition. During this time as well as I understand it, a crew would go to field, measure, resolve boundary and begin the drafting process on mylar. It was the job of the drafter to make the product "look pretty" after the party chief had drafted the boundary and substantive topographic features and the stamping LS had reviewed the boundary.

During this time the tools used by the party chief to resolve a boundary were virtually the same as that which would be employed in the office by a more senior surveyor.

As technology progressed those who were from the classic tradition, if they were able, willing and enabled to continued to execute field surveys in this manner but did so with modern computer aided software in both the field and office.

However, this tradition was not handed down in total and a new model emerged. In the new model crews were sent to field to measure and return with data which would then be analyzed and processed in the office. The tools available to the office and field became different in that boundary would be resolved in a CAD environment using a skill set not always known by the party chief. The same goes for drafting, the skill set to draft was no longer a given with party chiefs.

As a aside I also think that the availability of online records has decreased the necessity of planning and research before sending a crew out and has that the ease of research has paradoxically enough resulted in crews often being sent out with less rather than more in the rush to get a job moving.

In this new model the skill set was often replaced by rigorous rules and guidelines for field personal. A set of standards to eliminate the need for nuanced judgement.

I believe that the natural desire of most employees is to do good work and that in order to do so they must be properly trained and enabled.

It is my assertion that if you want to improve the performance of field crew it is necessary for them to understand what happens with the data after they return from the field. Nothing drives home the frustration of having garbage data like looking at a monitor, knowing that you have absolutely nothing and that ten minutes more in the field or ten minutes spent differently would resolve the issue at hand.

So instead of driving out into the field to show em how it is done perhaps your training budget of time would be better spent bring the field in the office a bit to help them understand the bigger picture. I bet they would appreciate it more.

Sorry for rambling, while I had the enthusiasm to write out a long winded post I do not seem to have it in me to edit it:)

Also, be careful casting judgement, from bubbles post the problems went all the way through, starting with a rush job to sloppy field work to the people at the top stamping substandard product to the guy in the middle airing out the dirty laundry on a public board.

Field and Office Divide

Well said. While I was still an instrument man a few years ago, our boss had everyone sit down in the office. He gave us a 24x36 with many dots and elevations printed on it. He took thirty minutes to explain to us how to hand contour a topo, and told us to have fun. To this day it is the best piece of training I have ever received. You are right when you say a party chief has to understand not only what he is doing, but what the software/PLS in the office is doing. It is the only way to make sure the job in the field gets done right the first time, every time.

Good post. Just finished reading the E-myth by Gerber. It's got me thinking about how to produce effective results when relying upon others. Can you break down the various tasks that you want your field crew to perform and specify these broken down tasks on a checklist, which they have to sign for upon returning to the office? Signing the checklist indicating that all procedures have been followed, but in actuality have not been followed would be grounds for dismissal?

Field and Office Divide

You are right when you say a party chief has to understand not only what he is doing, but what the software/PLS in the office is doing.

That is exactly the point that I have been attempting to convey to instrument men when they come to me wanting Party Chief pay.

I have been looking for that rare personality that is willing to learn more skills and have more knowledge than they currently posses.

> Quite often I take a 'lunch' with a can-o'-paint, pin-finder, shovel and a handful of pin-flags and visit some of the jobs we've got up on the screen. More often than not I find things that the crew missed.
>

This is something that is often missing in organizations with the LS in the office and several crews lead by unlicensed chiefs in the field. I would often make such trips to the field when sending out crews. Kind of a progress recon visit. Before I was licensed, I've had bosses that would occasionally spend time in the field with one crew or another, and I've worked in places where the boss never even considered going to the field for fear of dust or mud ruining the shine on the shoes. The latter tended to have crews that produced garbage data far more than actually useful data. Those offices would produce maps from the data whether good or garbage.

> Sometimes I'm displeased (pissed) and give them advice (throw crap and yell like a baboon on crack).
>

At one former employer, the boss had called in one of the other chiefs to question him about a stake out that turned out to be bad because of poor field calcs. It was a simple construction staking task, the calcs were easy, and the result should have been subject to the "do these grades make sense" test. The contractor had caught it and called the boss.

The chief's excuse was that his calculator had given him bad numbers, but that he hadn't done anything wrong. So the boss says "Something wrong with the calculator huh?"

"Yeah. I don't know why, it just spit out bad numbers."

"Let me take a look at it. I've seen this problem before."

"Here you go."

"This calculator here is the one that messed up?"

"Yeah."

Boss turns it over, makes a show of pressing some buttons, and then zings the chiefs 41CX against the block wall where it explodes into several shards of plastic and electronic bits.

As everyone stands there in complete shock, the boss calmly says "There, now it won't give you anymore bad calcs. Better go get a new one that works right and won't cost you your job."

>
> Field crews that don't perform adequately haven't been supervised adequately. There's someone there to blame, but it's not any of the hands.

Sometimes the hands are to blame for poor performance. Continued poor field crew performance though, is solely the responsibility of the LS.

You can send a crew out to do your construction staking; that's just engineering.
You can NOT send a crew out alone to do a boundary; that's art and experience and instinct. You need to be there. Period.

Don

Knowledge, experience, and character.

> Knowledge, experience, and character. Personality types don't figure in.

> I'd take a conscientious surveyor with good character over a particular personality any day.

The problem with that is unless you have the right personality type, it's all for naught. You can have all sorts of textbook knowledge, but unless you have well developed intuition (a personality trait), you'll never have that sixth sense that a good surveyor needs. The intuitive is the person who sees the hidden pattern, instead of being distracted by the obvious details.

Obviously, the sort of experience a surveyor has is more important than how long he or she has worked. Struggling with that native deficit of personality just means the experience is more apt to be low-grade, less useful experience.

As for conscientiousness, that's certainly "E" for effort, but without natural ability, I think the best one can hope for is a plodder who doesn't cheat on his or her time cards. Not that that's bad, but it doesn't seem to really get to the problem solving aspect of land surveying at all.

One of the most significant implications of type is that the most developed areas of personality tend to show by implication the least developed. It is there in those inferior parts of the personality where things go to hell. What knowledge and experience bring is a certain level of self-awareness that steers surveyors into particular niches best suited to their own personalities, and I suspect this is part of the self-selection process one observes. The profession pretty much sorts itself out by personality type and to ignore that is to sleep through the movie.