A short engagement is four passes and a condition that ends it

The boundary is agreed first

The boundary is a sentence, and it names a place: one office, one floor, one cabinet and everything that reaches it. Drawing it that way matters more than it sounds, because almost every argument about scope is really an argument about where the edge of the network was assumed to be. A laptop in somebody’s house, a mail service nobody administers from the building, a line installed for a tenant upstairs — each of those is either inside the sentence or outside it, and saying so in advance costs a minute.

Two other things are settled at the same time. The first is who can open the cabinet, because a survey that cannot see the back of a switch is a survey of the front of it. The second is which existing documents already describe any of this, so that the work begins by reading them rather than by repeating them.

The four passes

• Pass one — the count

  Devices, links, accounts, renewals and existing records are counted and nothing is graded. The figures are written on a sheet and dated, and every later judgement has to agree with that sheet or explain itself.

• Pass two — the drawing

  The cabinet is drawn as an elevation, unit by unit, with each one named for what it does. Empty units are drawn as outlines, so the spare height is as plain on the page as the height in use.

• Pass three — the writing

  The conventions go down first — numbering, naming, the colour that means uplink — and the register is then written to obey them. Each record carries the date on which it was last true.

• Pass four — the handover

  The document is read back against the room it describes, the gaps are named inside it rather than left out of it, and the folder changes hands.

The condition that ends it

An engagement is finished when somebody at the company who was not present for the survey can open the folder, find a given socket, and walk to it. That is a condition, and it can be tested in the building in a few minutes. A date cannot be tested at all, which is why the date is the thing that gets met while the work quietly is not.

Where the condition cannot be met, the reason is written into the document as its own entry: a cabinet that could not be opened, a line whose far end sits in a demise under somebody else’s control, an account whose owner nobody could name. A record that admits what is missing is worth more than one that is silently incomplete, because the next person can act on the first and will be misled by the second.