Approval conditions: the ones that hold up a start

An approval arrives as a relief and a document. The document runs to pages of conditions, numbered in the council's order, which is nobody's working order.

Most of them are satisfied by the ordinary course of the job. A handful decide when you can start, and they are not marked.

Sort the conditions by when they bite

The only useful grouping is the timing one, and it is not the order they are printed in.

• Before any work starts, which usually includes plans to be approved, bonds and security to be lodged, and agreements to be executed.
• Before a particular stage, such as footings, or connection to a service.
• During construction, which are mostly ongoing obligations about hours, noise, sediment and access.
• Before occupation, which is where landscaping, parking and final certificates sit.

Re number them into those four groups on the day the approval lands. The first group is your critical path, and it is usually shorter than people fear and slower than they expect.

Give every condition an owner and a lead time

A condition with no owner belongs to the project manager by default, which means it belongs to whoever is least able to do it. Most conditions need a consultant rather than a manager.

Put a name against each one, and beside it the lead time for the thing it needs. A condition requiring an approved plan from an authority has a queue attached to it, and that queue is the real duration rather than the hour it takes to submit.

Start the slow ones immediately

Some conditions are satisfied by a letter and some by an authority that takes eight weeks to answer. The second kind should be moving before anything else, including the ones that look more important.

The usual delay on a development start is not a hard condition. It is an easy condition that nobody began until the rest of the work was ready, and then everybody waited for it.

Track evidence, not completion

A condition is not satisfied when you did the thing, it is satisfied when you hold the document proving you did. Those are often weeks apart, and the gap is invisible if you record conditions as done.

Hold the reference and the document against each condition. When a certifier asks for the evidence, the question takes a minute instead of a fortnight of searching, and the fortnight is the part that costs money.

Keep it where it can be read, not in the approval

A marked up PDF works for the person who marked it up. Everybody else needs to see what is outstanding, whose it is and when it is needed.

Build it as a table: the condition number, the group, the owner, the due date, the status and the evidence. Then it can sit on a dashboard, and the ones due next month reach their owner rather than waiting to be looked for.

Review the outstanding list weekly, in five minutes

Conditions do not need a meeting. They need somebody reading the list of what is outstanding in the first group, every week, and asking the owner of anything that has not moved.

That review is where a lead time problem surfaces while there is still time. Discovered at the site meeting before a start, the same problem is a delay everybody watches.

What to do first

• Regroup the conditions by when they bite, the day the approval lands
• Name an owner for every condition, not just the hard ones
• Write the lead time beside each, including the authority's queue
• Begin the slow ones before the ones that seem urgent
• Record the evidence, not the fact that somebody did it
• Read the outstanding list weekly and chase anything that has not moved