Lots of sites don’t have good documentation. Many don’t have documentation at all. System owners often don’t understand the value of their documentation because their organization manages them incorrectly. Here are some ways that mismanagement can happen:

• Flattened CADs
  Your vendors can configure CAD drawings to automate major portions of their design work. These efforts tend to be lost as soon as the CAD drawings are submitted to your document control team because most sites want all the documents flattened in order to save space. This means that when your vendors work on existing systems they have to make a choice: Re-create their documents from scratch or revise the record set without any efficiency gained from those CAD configurations. Data storage is cheap. Engineering hours are not.
• Lack of Technical Review
  A lot of the errors I see on drawings could be caught by even a perfunctory technical review. It’s usually things like wire labels not matching device tags, or a termination that is labeled as ground going to a 24v terminal. Just as document control personnel have a well-trained eye for formatting and pagination errors, a technical reviewer would quickly spot internal inconsistencies and copy-paste mistakes.
• No Periodic Verification
  Sometimes the field conditions change but the documents don’t get updated. Since most document control teams don’t have any technical experience, they can’t field-verify drawings themselves. Nevertheless, even a relatively slow rate of review could yield significant results. As a service technician, I spent a few hours a week tug-tracing wires in order to fix problems caused by outdated drawings in the document control system (and inside the panel).
• The System Won’t Store Arbitrary File Types
  Some document control teams won’t accept anything other than .DWG, .DOCX, and a few other limited file formats. Similar to Reason #1, forcing various purpose-built file types (for example, flow charts and control logic diagrams) into an arbitrary file format means losing the benefits of that file structure, and sometimes even the ability to easily modify it in the future. That seems obviously short-sighted and counterproductive. An excellent way of storing the state of a program at a given time is to store the actual program. Correlating the program to the document that explains it allows for simplified rollback, audit, and recovery.
• Lack of Document Grouping
  Once you’ve identified your project scope, how do you know which documents will require revision? Is there a way to browse all documents related to a specific process or system or building? Does your document search function return high-value results?
• The Checkout Process Provides No Technical Value
  Get the drawings associated with the SCOPE, not the system. The interdependence of your building systems means the scope of your change may be wider than you initially expected. For example, you might check out all the boiler-related documents for your project but then realize late in the game that your sequence update means adding Hot Water Request polling to your reheat boxes, which means updating the docs associated with your AHU.
• No Scope-Based Deconfliction
  Most document control systems only identify project overlap when two entities try to check out the same document for revision. This method of conflict detection relies on both entities starting the checkout process early in their project timeline, and also assumes both groups will correctly identify all of the impacted documents.
• Not Integrated with Projects Throughout
  The document management team should be a resource to project teams. The DMT should provide/manage a list of required documentation based on the project scope, and in which order they should be expected. When a required deliverable is submitted to the project, it should enter the document control system immediately as an “in-process” document. This provides better visibility into what systems are undergoing change and what those changes are, so that a project rolling into its 8th month is not a cryptic black box to the facilities team trying to keep the building running smoothly.