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 leader. Some of the observations may also result in action items being assigned to other people for remedial action.

Examples of site visit report types & participants:

Safety:  Weekly and/or monthly job site sweeps for compliance.

Participants: The GC’s on-site safety supervisor; regional/corporate safety manager.

Quality:  Periodic visits to make sure installed work meets corporate standards.

Participants: The GC’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.

Participants: Project architects, engineers, design consultants, owner’s representatives.

Site reports prepared by different groups have different results and implications:

Safety observations are high visibility 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 GC’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 is not meeting the project specifications or design requirements. These issues can be broad or very specific, 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 methods of rectifying issues.

Objectives

Site visits enable you to:

Create an official report to document the results of business travel to the job site.

Document observations resulting from a site visit.

Verify that previous observations have been fixed and are not re-appearing in another area of the project.

Use photos to clearly prove/explain the issue that is being observed.

Create, assign, and track action items to make sure that observations from a site visit are addressed and closed out.

Track trends and metrics.

Site visits workflow

Permissions

You must have a Professional User role to have full access to site visits.

Getting started

You can log site visits from the following locations:

The Site Visits activity center in Project Center;

The Field Notes Activity Center in Project Center;

The Site Visits log in Info Exchange;

An iOS or Android-based Smartphone or tablet via field notes entered in the Field Notes app.