Daily site records that prove facts

The eight things every entry should fix

1. Time: start, finish, interruption and resumption, not just a date.
2. Place: level, zone, grid, room. A building has hundreds of places and the claim will need the right one.
3. People: crew identifier, trade, headcount, supervision.
4. Work: the activity, and the installed quantity where there is one.
5. Cause: what prevented or changed the work, described as observation rather than blame.
6. Corroboration: who else saw it, which photographs, which request or instruction.
7. Mitigation: what the crew did instead, and what it produced.
8. Linkage: the event identifier, the programme activity, the cost code.

Photographs

A photograph with no location, date, author or direction is decoration. Capture metadata automatically wherever possible, keep the originals, and record what the photograph was taken to show. Chain of custody matters more than resolution.

Oral instructions

Record the exchange, mark it for formal confirmation, and send the confirmation. An oral instruction that was never confirmed is a dispute waiting to happen, and the note made that afternoon is usually the only surviving evidence that the conversation occurred.

What not to write

No conclusions about entitlement, no characterisation of another party’s conduct, no assessment of critical-path effect. Those are for later, by people with the whole picture. A diary that reaches them early is easy to discredit, and once one entry is discredited every other entry is read differently.