Site Visits Overview
Regular site visits are conducted throughout the course of a project for many reasons. Some of these visits may be handled by on-site personnel, but many are run by team members who are not located at the job site and are just visiting for a short period of time.
These site visits need to be officially documented into trip reports with the observations recorded by each walkthrough leader. Some of the observations may also result in action items that are assigned to other people for remedial action.
Examples of site visit field report types and participants:
Safety: Weekly and/or monthly job site sweeps for compliance. The participants are the general contractor's on-site safety supervisor, and regional/corporate safety manager.
Quality: Periodic visits to make sure installed work meets corporate standards. The participants are the general contractor's quality assurance staff.
Design: Inspections by design team to ensure that project specifications are being followed, usually planned in advance and tied to project milestones. The participants are the project architects, engineers, design consultants, and owner's representatives.
Site visit report implications
Site reports prepared by different groups have different results and implications:
● Safety observations are highly visible and require immediate attention with the project team since neglect of these issues can lead to serious injury. These site visit reports are usually a snapshot of the job on a specific day. Observations generally do not remain open between visits.
● Quality Assurance staff are usually part of the general contractor’s organization, and can give more direction on how to fix items that are not up to company or design standards. Like design issues, these items will generally remain open for at least one re-inspection, and sometimes can be open for multiple visits.
● Design observations address items where installed work does not meet the project specifications or design requirements. These issues can be broad or very specific or broad requiring research and long-term follow up. Design professionals must be very careful in the wording of their observations because there’s a point where they cannot take responsibility for the construction “means and methods” of rectifying issues.
Use Site Visits on Info Exchange to complete the following tasks:
Visiting team members (Quality Assurance, Safety, Design):
● Create an official trip report to document the results of business travel to the job site.
● Document observations resulting from a job site walkthrough.
● Verify that previous observations have been fixed and are not re-appearing on another area of the project.
● Use photos to clearly prove/explain the issue that is being observed.
Construction Management:
● Create, assign, and track Action Items to make sure that observations from a site visit are addressed and closed out.
● Manage trends and metrics.
Workflow for using site visits
The workflow for logging site visits usually begins with field notes captured on the job site. The following image shows a typical example of the process for capturing data on the job site and converting it to a site visit.
Getting Started
You can create site visits from the Site Visits log in Info Exchange or from the Field Notes mobile app..
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