Field notes 1 min read
A job is finished when the file is
What someone opening a switchboard five years from now needs is not the board — it is the board's file.
On the electrical side, what marks a job as finished is not that the board works. Boards work. The real question is what happens when there is a fault five years later, and who does what.
What the file contains
- Single-line diagram and layout
- Bill of materials, brands and models included
- Test and measurement reports
- Labelling plan
Without those four, the next intervention starts with a survey from scratch — and the person doing that survey is usually not us.
The software equivalent
The same logic holds on the software side: repository transfer, deployment script, restore-from-backup steps. Being able to run the system without us is a condition of this phase, not a task for the next one.