Document Issue - Phase 1 - prompting design reviews

[jgunstone]

project_number: 3870
name: document-issue-design-review
project_drivers:
  - consistency
  - quality
  - robustness
director: LH
client: LH
delivery:
  - JG
  - OH

Ensuring that design reviews happen on all jobs is a practice priority (Luke delivering the project).
The document-issue tools are a natural place to plan design reviews and to prompt users that they need to be undertaken.
A design review typically takes place after a major document issue (discuss with Luke).

Projected Timeline

Strict timeline TBC but loosely as follows:

• 2024-12-18: plan to be presented in the Eng Standards Committee meeting
• 2024-Q1: project as a whole (most of it relates to developing clear guidance and communicating that with the practice) to be delivered next quarter (probs Feb / March)
• 2024-APR: hard deadline is beginning of April

::: {.callout-important}
Delivering on-time is the priority.
Basic and on-time is better than late and fully-featured.
:::

Implementation

How to trigger a Stage Review?

• It is very typical for a design pack to be issued incrementally, therefore noting a single issue for review is not sufficient
• documents within a given Stage and a given Status should be flagged as needing a review (confirm approach with Luke)
  • currently project Stage isn't formally recorded (it is typically a free text descriptive field).
    • this needs adding
  • e.g. in this way the user could indicate a review is required when:
    • Stage = Stage 3
    • Status = S4 (P - shared (non-contractual) - Preliminary revision - Suitable for stage approval)

How to indicate that a Stage/Status information pack is complete?

If an information pack is issued incrementally there needs to be a way for the user to indicate a given Stage/Status information pack is complete and therefore ready for review. Options for this include:

1. Add something like an "is Stage/Status issue complete" tickbox
2. (preferred) Use TIDP to plan what documents are required for a given Stage/Status issue, when the documents listed have all been issued indicate that the Stage / Status is complete. This has the added bonus of being able to indicate which documents are missing from an information package.

How is this delivered to the User?

The working assumption is that given the relatively fast timeline that this will be delivered by upgrading the existing excel DNG. The downside is that there is a plan to move away from this method next year, so whilst the brief development work is valuable the implementation would result in abortive work.

Describe alternatives you've considered

There is a larger plan to update the Document Numbering and Issuing process more holistically.
This would make features like this much easier to add and deploy, and would move the document-issue record from excel spreadsheets into an SQL database, thus making document issuing information available to the WebApp. Recent updates to the document-issue (https://github.com/maxfordham/document-issue/releases/tag/0.6.0) went much of the way to fixing a standard data-structure; preparing the tool for migration to something web-based. Work done on the digital schedules means that we have standard components for creating user-interfaces quickly. The document-issue update project as a whole has many goals (e.g. Revit integration, automated generation of views and sheets ). Could part of the project be delivered with functional parity to the existing spreadsheet and these design review prompts only with the timeframes? Suggest that approx. 5days given before Christmas to scope this out.

::: {.callout-note}
The Budget shown assumes that we would migrate away from the excel DNG as part of this process.
If this unfeasible within the timeframes then an Excel update would be considered instead.
:::