In this YouTube discussion, William Doyle MRICS explains how comprehensive site records that are linked to work activities and commercial events serve as a single trusted source of truth. This alignment helps cost engineers, quantity surveyors, and productivity analysts retrieve and present data for various purposes, and it reduces the likelihood of disputes because parties can collaborate on payment applications and compensation events with confidence in the data. Speaker B questions whether any adjudication has ever been based on a fully agreed set of site records, suggesting that such consensus is rare and disputes are usually resolved informally. William proposes consulting Robert Chadwick to quantify the time and cost of establishing records after the fact, arguing that the aggregate expense of retroactive record‑establishment far exceeds the cost of implementing an agreed‑upon record‑keeping system from the start. The conversation underscores the principle that prevention—through proactive, agreed‑upon site records—is far more efficient than cure.
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So perhaps they were more about points of principle. And I think again, the ability to link site records to the activities of work and to the commercial events makes their recall, their presentation, their orientation for those different uses, whether it's a cost engineer or a QS or somebody looking at productivity when it comes to programming. I think the other thing with having good records is that we're less likely to get into dispute because, particularly if it's a single truth, because the teams, when putting their applications to payment together or their assessment of payment, when they're putting quotations together for compensation events, if they're dealing with a trusted source of truth, then they're able to collaborate more easily and it becomes familiar. We trust that, that's something we just go for. You're taking things off the table, aren't you? I mean, you're taking more off the table. Yeah, you're with a small a, I've said before, you're kind of agreeing big swathes of it, and then you've got more time then, right, to think about, uh, and more certainty to think about perhaps some points of principle.
Um, I mean, I'd like to test this by getting some feedback, but I wonder how many times someone's gone to adjudication with a completely agreed set of site records, because my feeling is that probably never happens. Yeah, that if you were in a place where you had a completely— you probably would have worked it out amongst yourselves, I suspect. I don't know, it'd be interesting to know. It would be really good. Well, whether any adjudication has a completely defined set of records that everyone agrees on.
Well, we could ask, you mentioned Robert Chadwick, I'm sure he would tell us how long he typically spends establishing the records on something. I'd be interested to know how much that costs. I was going to say the cost of it. Because I bet that in aggregate is far more than it would be to implement something from the beginning that meant you both agree it had this. Yeah. I mean, why would we do anything else?
Yeah.
Prevention is better than cure, isn't it really?
We need to get ahead of it and not just wait for it to go wrong.
