It Was Signed Off. Finding It Is the Problem.
- WorkMobileForms.com
- Jan 1
- 3 min read
Updated: 12 hours ago
Turning up at an airport knowing you booked the flight is a very specific kind of certainty. You remember doing it. You remember thinking it was sorted.
That certainty lasts right up until you’re standing there, phone in hand, scrolling through emails instead of boarding.
At that point, knowing it exists doesn’t help much. What matters is whether you can actually show it.
Civil engineering relies on formal approval at every stage. Permits are issued, designs are signed off, inspections are completed, and changes are authorised before work continues. These steps are treated seriously and usually carried out properly.
The difficulty is that civil projects are long-running and fragmented. Work moves between phases, teams, and locations. What feels final at the moment of sign-off often becomes uncertain later, not because the approval was missed, but because it is no longer easy to locate or verify.
When someone asks whether something was signed off, the question is rarely about whether it happened. It is about how quickly it can be produced.
Approvals on live projects are created in different places. Some sit in email chains. Others are attached to drawings, stored in shared folders, or logged in systems that only certain people can access. Over time, teams change, responsibilities shift, and the context around those decisions fades.
Nothing disappears in a dramatic sense. The information still exists. It is just scattered.
When approvals are needed later, answering a simple question turns into a search. Time is spent checking folders, chasing colleagues, and rebuilding timelines instead of confirming the decision and moving on.
Once approvals are hard to produce, the effect spreads. Programmes pause while confirmation is sought. Contractors hesitate to proceed. Clients and regulators ask for reassurance before allowing work to continue.
At this point, the problem is no longer technical. It is operational. Decisions that were sound at the time start to be questioned because the evidence is not immediately to hand.
For directors and project leads, this is where exposure increases. Not because approvals were missed, but because they cannot be surfaced quickly when challenged.
Use case: producing a sign-off months after it was given
A common situation is a routine approval given early in a job.
A permit is signed off, or a design detail is approved so work can continue. The decision is correct and properly made. The project moves on and the approval fades into the background.
Months later, the work reaches a review point. A regulator, client, or internal team asks to see confirmation that the approval was in place before work proceeded.
The approval exists, but it is not obvious where. It might be referenced in an email, attached to a drawing revision, or stored in a folder that only one person still remembers. Time is spent searching rather than answering the question.
On projects using WorkMobile, that review usually looks different.
The sign-off is recorded against the activity it relates to at the time it is given. The approval sits alongside the permit, inspection, or task, rather than being separated from it.
When the question is asked later, the response is immediate. The approval can be produced without retracing steps or relying on memory.
Civil assets are built to operate for decades. The records that support them need to last just as long.
When sign-off remains easy to retrieve long after it was given, work continues without delay and decisions are not reopened months later. When it is not, time is lost proving something that was already agreed.
Sign-off should not fade with time. If it does, the problem is not that it happened, but that it was not recorded in a way that holds up when needed.
About WorkMobileForms
WorkMobileForms is a mobile data capture platform used by field teams to record jobs, inspections, photos, and sign-off as work is carried out.
Information is available to office teams instantly, without waiting for paperwork, re-keying, or end-of-day updates.
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