Mitigating risk in construction projects between different organizations requires a systematic approach to the causes of risk. A key cause of project risk is project teams mistakenly working with out-of-date documents.
Version control helps ensure that collaborating team members are working on the latest revision of a document. Construction document management software should support five principles for sound version control:
- A project-wide document numbering system. Participants should agree on this at the start of the project to avoid confusion resulting from multiple internal numbering systems.
- No duplicate document numbers within the same project. Participants should agree on protocols for registering identical documents in more than one format – e.g., file name suffixes to identify file types (PDF, DWF, ZIP, DWG, DGN).
- A consistent revision coding system. Participants should agree on this as part of the project-wide document numbering system. Revision codes can be numeric (1, 2, 3), alphabetic (A, B, C) or a combination of the two (A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2).
- Sequential coding of revisions for the life of documents. This enables all participants, including those not involved in the creation of a document, to understand how different versions of documents relate to each other.
- Clear identification of revisions within a document. This can vary depending on the format of a document – e.g., revision clouds with letters for drawings, tracked changes for Word documents, colored text or cell backgrounds for Excel documents, etc.
Revisions should be annotated with the current revision number and date on the document or drawing cover. Each annotation should include the reason for the revision – e.g., coordination between disciplines or the owner’s instruction to make a change – which supports cross-checking for cost control and variation management. Since most documents are revised frequently during the course of a project, each version should be maintained for comparison, auditing, time reporting, cost management, and other purposes.
Project Risk Multiplied by Inadequate Document Version Control
Document management software that tracks document revisions chronologically by issue date helps reduce the time required for project teams to review and compare historical information. Conversely, a document version control process that is inadequately planned or managed can cause changes in design, scope of works and materials to be overlooked, impacting all participants and multiplying project risk:
- Unidentified changes can mislead the owner, making it difficult to manage expectations.
- Project teams can lose confidence in the reliability of documents, which adversely affects the efficiency and quality of collaboration between them. For example, flawed revision control in the design phase can make tender information incorrect, which increases the number of requests for information (RFIs) and tender queries, as well as overall uncertainty and financial risk.
- Document updates can take more time, which requires substantiation of both time and cost increases due to earlier information mismanagement.
- If contractors and subcontractors perceive increased project risk because of issues with document quality, interdisciplinary coordination or version control, their RFIs and tenders will reflect this.
All project participants should be able to compare historical versions of the same document. This can be difficult and time-consuming, even more so when an annotation of changes is unclear or missing. Electronic comparison of sequential versions makes the process fast, easy and accurate.
