Across every service · Conflicting evidence

What should you do when drawings, schedules and site conditions disagree?

What changes the answer

• Which document creates the requirement. A fire engineering report, a specification, a drawing note and a schedule do not carry equal weight, and the one that governs is rarely the one nearest to hand.
• Whether the disagreement is about what is required, or about what is actually there. Those are two different problems and mixing them wastes a week.
• Whether any document is superseded, and whether everyone on the job is working from the same revision.
• Whether the work is already installed, because that changes it from a question into a variation.
• Whether the conflict repeats across the job, which usually means it is a documentation fault rather than a site one.
• Who on the project is actually entitled to resolve it. A verbal answer from someone who cannot give one is worse than no answer.

What to check on site

• The revision and date on every document you are holding, and whether a later one exists that you have not been sent.
• The fire engineering report, which usually outranks a drawing note and is the document most often left out of the conversation.
• The condition on site, photographed, with dimensions rather than adjectives.
• Whether the schedule and the drawing are describing the same element, or two different elements that have been confused.
• What was installed either side of it. A pattern tells you which document the job has in practice been following.

What to do next

Send the conflicting documents with their revisions, and a photograph of the condition on site. We will tell you which one creates the requirement, what the difference actually costs, and put the answer in writing — so it exists somewhere other than in a conversation nobody can produce later.