Consultant Drawing Review

Three disciplines have a review skill here and a project has eight consultants. The acoustician, the kitchen consultant, the security consultant and the landscape architect all issue drawings that nobody reads against the architectural set until somebody notices a conflict on site.

The failures are the same whatever the discipline, which is why one skill covers all of them.

Workflow

Step 1. Establish what you are comparing

Ask, in one message:

1. Which consultant, and what is their scope?
2. What revision is each set, and which architectural background were the consultant's drawings drawn on?
3. What are they issued for: coordination, tender, construction?
4. What are the architectural constraints that matter here: clear heights, fixed dimensions, spaces that must stay clear?
5. Is there a federated model, or separate drawings?

Question 2 first, every time. A consultant's set drawn on a superseded background will disagree with the current plans everywhere, and reviewing it line by line before establishing that wastes the review and insults the consultant. If the background is old, stop and say so.

Step 2. Grids, levels and names

Nothing after this is meaningful if these disagree:

• Grid designations and spacing, both sets.
• Level names and their elevations, both sets.
• What each set means by a level name. Top of slab, finished floor, top of structure: the same name meaning different things is the single most productive source of error between two sets.
• The building outline and the north point.
• Room names and numbers, if the consultant uses them.

Step 3. Find what lands where it cannot

Whatever the discipline, the drawing puts things in space:

Location	What the consultant shows	What is there architecturally	Conflict

Work through: anything in a room that has to stay clear, anything in a required clearance zone, anything crossing a rated assembly, anything in a ceiling void that is already full, anything on a wall that is glazed, anything in a shaft, anything above a space with a fixed clear height, and anything outside the building that lands in a route, a setback or a planting area.

Report both values on every conflict and rule on neither.

Step 4. Find what they have deferred, and to whom

Every consultant's set defers work, legitimately, and the deferral has to land on somebody:

• Anything marked by others, by contractor, delegated design, or to be confirmed.
• Anything shown diagrammatically that somebody will have to draw properly.
• Anything requiring a builder's work opening, a support, a plinth, or backing that is nobody's drawing yet.
• Anything requiring access that no ceiling or panel currently provides.

A deferred item with no owner is a gap the architect stands in. List each with who should own it.

Step 5. Find what neither set shows

The most valuable list and the hardest to produce. Go through what this consultant's scope implies and check each appears somewhere: on their drawings, on the architectural, or nowhere.

Report the third category individually. On a project with eight consultants, most of what gets found on site is in that list.

Step 6. Report

#	Finding	Consultant shows	Architectural shows	Kind

Kind is background, grid or level, conflict, deferred, gap, or duplicate.

Order: background and level problems first, since they invalidate the rest, then conflicts affecting a fixed dimension, then deferred items with no owner, then gaps.

Close by saying no engineering was reviewed, and point at coordination-log.

Step 7. Save, if asked

Ask whether to write the review to a file and where.

Rules

• Check the background revision before reading anything. Stop if it is old.
• Never check or comment on the engineering.
• Establish what each set means by a level name.
• Report both values on every conflict and decide neither.
• List every deferred item with an owner, or flag that it has none.
• Produce the list of what neither set shows.
• Where a deeper skill exists for that discipline, name it.

Anti-patterns

• Reviewing a consultant's set drawn on a superseded background, line by line.
• Checking whether the engineering is right.
• Assuming two sets mean the same thing by the same level name.
• Choosing which set is correct.
• Treating a deferred note as somebody else's problem by default.
• Reviewing only the disciplines that have their own skill.
• Reporting conflicts and never producing the gap list.

Resources

None. This skill is one file. Output is written directly at the path you choose.