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.

The ordinary course of the job satisfies most of them. A handful decide when you can start, and they are not marked.

Sort the conditions by when they bite

The only useful grouping is by timing, which never matches their printed order.

• Before any work starts, which usually covers plans needing approval, bonds and security needing lodgement, and agreements needing signature.
• 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.

Each one takes a name, and beside it the lead time for whatever it needs. A condition requiring an approved plan from an authority carries a queue. That queue is the real duration, not the hour spent submitting.

Start the slow ones immediately

A letter satisfies some conditions. Others wait on 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 clears when you hold the document proving the work, not when you did it. 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 rather than a fortnight of searching. The fortnight is the expensive part.

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

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

A table holds it: 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 for somebody to notice.

Review the outstanding list weekly, in five minutes

Conditions do not need a meeting. They need somebody reading the outstanding list 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
• Every condition carries an owner, not merely the hard ones
• The lead time sits beside each, including the authority's queue
• Begin the slow ones before the ones that seem urgent
• The evidence records, not merely the fact somebody did it
• The outstanding list gets read weekly, and anything stalled gets chased