Routes that survive a crew change

I have a specific fear, and it is not poetic. It is a Tuesday when the person who knows the route is out, and the person who covers it does a sincere, slightly wrong walk, and nobody can tell until something that was obvious to the first person is expensive. Water systems are full of this. Campuses are full of this. Plants pretend they are not, until a supervisor takes a week off.

A route survives a crew change when a competent stranger can walk it without a phone call. Not a stranger to the trade. A stranger to this hill, this gate, this trap. The route has to carry the parts that live in someone’s head and evaporate when they are sick.

Order is the first part, and people under-specify it because they think order is obvious. It is obvious if you have done it for nine years. It is not obvious at a fork in a plant road. Write the order you actually walk, including the stop you make only because the gate is on the way. A route sorted by asset number looks organized and walks badly. Organized for whom.

Access is the second part. Not “access via gate.” Which gate, which side the conduit is on, where the key is if the code is not allowed in the note. I have watched a cover inspector lose forty minutes to a lockbox that was on the other truck. That fact belongs in the note. If your security rule forbids the code in the software, write the rule’s answer, not a blank. A blank is how the cover person starts texting the person on leave, which is the failure.

What normal looks like is the third part, and it is the one veterans skip because normal is in their hands. A reading without a sentence about normal is a number in a void. “Toe drain usually a damp patch the size of a hand, not a flow” is the difference between a panic and a Tuesday. Put it on the check as the limit or as the note beside the limit. Readings is Ada’s territory. I only insist that the veteran’s body knowledge is not a backup plan.

Then stop. Do not encode the veteran’s entire personality. Jokes, suspicions about a contractor, and the history of a feud with the neighbor do not belong in the route. The neighbor’s drive, if you must not block it before 7, does belong. I make this cut in implementation because crews, given a text box, will write the feud, and the cover person cannot tell the feud from the instruction.

St. Brice is the clean version. One notebook, one mechanic, traps in the order of the tunnels. June walked it with him and argued about names. The second and third walkers were slower, and the notes were too thin until someone who did not know the door wrote them again. “Door sticks” failed. “Hinge side, shoulder height, hits the conduit” worked. I tell that story because the first draft of a route, written by the expert, is always too thin. The expert cannot see what they are not saying. The second walker is the editor. If your implementation ends before the second walker has marked the route up, you have a copy of the notebook, not a route.

There is a sentimental version of this essay in which we honor the old hand. Honor them by getting the order right while they are in the room to disagree. Disagreement on day one is cheap. Disagreement in January, when they are in Florida and a trap has failed open, is a phone call you should be ashamed to make.

I do not think software creates loyalty, and I do not think a route replaces apprenticeship. A new inspector should still ride along. The route is what makes the ride-along stick after the ride is over. If they only have the ride-along, they have a memory, and memories are what retire.

When you hire, have them walk an existing route before they invent a better one. People new to a yard love a better order. Sometimes they are right. Let them be right after they have walked the old one once and written down what was wrong, in the notes, with their name. That revision is the job. A route nobody is allowed to edit is a plaque.

If you do nothing else this month, pick the route that depends on one person and have someone else walk it while the person is still employed and in a good mood. Bring the notes back. Edit them the same day. That is the whole method. Everything we build is a place to put the result.