Stop 6 of 8 · Daily
Daily reports and owner updates
Field notes into the daily report at four o'clock, the owner update on Friday, and a clear line between what a project engineer states and what waits for the PM.
Four o'clock, not nine o'clock
The daily report is a legal record and everybody treats it like homework. Hany's version used to get written at nine at night from memory, which is how three deliveries and a two hour water shutdown vanish from the record of a day.
The fix is not discipline. It is making the four o'clock version take ninety seconds.
The daily report from a voice note
Here is my voice note from the end of today on the hotel job, plus today's sign-in sheet and delivery tickets. Write the daily report in the format used in the last ten reports in this Project: date, weather, crew count by trade, work completed by area and level, deliveries received, visitors and inspections, and anything that stopped or delayed work with the time it started and stopped. Facts only. Do not write a cause, a fault or an impact. If my note contains one, put it at the end under FOR THE PM and leave it out of the report.
That last rule is the whole stop in one sentence. A project engineer records what happened. Why it happened, whose fault it was and what it means for the date are conclusions with contractual weight, and they belong to the PM.
What is stated and what waits
| Hany states it | It waits for the PM |
|---|---|
| Crew, work, deliveries, visitors, weather | Completion dates and schedule impact |
| An RFI is open and was raised on a date | Whether the RFI is causing delay |
| A submittal was returned revise and resubmit | Whether the return was unreasonable |
| A trade did not have access to an area | Who is responsible for the access |
The weekly owner update
Friday's owner update
Draft this week's owner update from the daily reports, the coordination minutes and the site photos in this Project for the last seven days. Four short paragraphs: work completed by area and level, work planned for next week, decisions we are waiting on from the owner or the architect with the date each was raised and who has it, and anything the owner needs to action with a date. No completion dates, no schedule impact, no cost, no adjectives. Put anything that reads like one at the end under FOR THE PM with the sentence it came from.
The photo page
Pick eight photos from this week's site photos that show the work described in the update above, one per area mentioned. For each, write a caption of under fifteen words naming the level, the area and the work. Do not caption anything that shows a defect or an incomplete area that is not already in the update.
The gap check
Compare this week's daily reports against the three week look-ahead in this Project. List every activity that was scheduled to start or finish this week and does not appear anywhere in the reports. Do not conclude anything about delay, just tell me what is missing from the record.