Instruction and Approval Record Checklist

Write down who is entitled to give instructions to the people carrying out the work, and confirm that arrangement with everybody it affects before work starts.

The route by which instructions are given is a contractual matter; confirm it with your own legal adviser and the appointed professionals.

Ask whether you as the owner may instruct anybody directly, and what you are expected to do instead where you may not.

Owners frequently instruct trades in good faith without realising that doing so cuts across an arrangement everybody else is relying on.

Identify who speaks for each trade and each supplier, and record how to reach that person rather than whoever happens to be on site that morning.

Instructions given to whoever is present travel unevenly, and the person you spoke to may have no way of passing them on.

Ask who receives instructions on your behalf, and whether anything you say directly should also be repeated to that person.

Where a professional administers the work, an owner conversation that bypasses them creates two versions of what was asked for.

Ask whether there are things that cannot be instructed on site at all and must go through a different route, and write down what they are.

Certain matters must be dealt with by qualified professionals or the relevant authority; ask which subjects fall outside site-level instruction.

Record the whole arrangement on a single sheet everybody has seen, rather than leaving it distributed across separate conversations with each party.

Each party usually knows their own half of the arrangement, and the mismatch only becomes visible when something urgent happens.

Write up any site conversation that settled something while you still remember the wording, rather than at the end of a busy stretch of work.

Recollection of who said what fades quickly and merges with later conversations, usually in the direction of what you wanted to hear.

Record what was settled rather than what was discussed, and say plainly where a conversation ended without anything being settled at all.

Notes that summarise a discussion without stating the outcome are the least useful kind, because everybody reads their own conclusion into them.

Name everybody who was present, including anybody who arrived partway through, since they are the people who can confirm or correct your account.

A conversation with a witness is a very different thing from one held alone in a doorway.

Photograph whatever was being pointed at during the conversation, including enough of the room around it for somebody else to see what was meant.

Site conversations are full of demonstrative language, and a photograph is the only way that survives into a written note.

Note where instructions are being given in a messaging thread, and ask for anything of substance to be repeated somewhere it can be found later.

Messaging threads are difficult to search and easy to lose; ask the appointed professionals how instructions should properly be issued.

Say clearly when you are thinking aloud rather than asking for something to be done, because on site the difference is not always obvious.

Owners musing about possibilities in front of a trade is a well-known way for work to start on something nobody decided.

Send your own short written confirmation of anything settled verbally, stating what you understood was agreed and inviting correction if you have it wrong.

An account offered for correction is far more robust than one nobody was given the chance to disagree with.

Say which drawing, schedule or document the instruction relates to, and at which issue, so the confirmation points at something specific.

Confirmations that describe work without naming a document cannot be matched to anything afterwards.

Keep one instruction to one written note wherever you can, rather than bundling several unrelated matters into a single long message.

Bundled instructions are answered in part, and the unanswered part is invisible to everybody including you.

Ask whether the instruction needs to be issued formally by somebody else, and do not treat your own confirmation as if it were that issue.

An owner note is not a formal instruction; ask the appointed professionals to issue anything that requires their authority.

Where you are told an instruction came from you and you have no record of giving it, say so promptly and in writing.

Do not let a disputed instruction stand uncorrected; raise it with the appointed professionals as soon as you become aware of it.

Keep confirmations somewhere they can be read in order, rather than replying inside unrelated threads where they become impossible to find.

A confirmation buried in a reply about something else is functionally the same as never having written it.

Ask what your acceptance covers and what it leaves open, before agreeing to anything presented for your view.

Ask the appointed professionals to state in writing what an acceptance commits you to under the arrangement in place.

Where you are shown something to look at, note that you are commenting on appearance and ask who is dealing with whether it is suitable.

Suitability, safety and adequacy are professional judgements and are never settled by an owner saying they like how something looks.

Ask what happens if you say nothing at all, since some arrangements treat silence as acceptance and others treat it as a question left open.

Whether silence counts as acceptance depends on your contract; your own legal adviser is the person to read that arrangement for you.

Record what you were actually shown at the moment you accepted something, including the sample, sheet or mock-up in front of you.

Acceptance of a thing you can no longer identify is worth very little when the delivered item turns out to differ.

Where your acceptance depends on something else being true, write that condition into your reply rather than mentioning it in conversation.

Conditional acceptances given verbally are remembered as unconditional ones by everybody who wanted them to be.

Avoid accepting anything on behalf of a professional you have appointed, even where you are asked to save time by doing so.

Acceptance that properly belongs to an appointed professional must come from them; passing it on as an owner removes the check it was meant to provide.

Ask what specifically is waiting on your answer, since the honest answer is sometimes less urgent than the way the question was put.

Establishing what is genuinely held up turns an impossible decision into a manageable one surprisingly often.

Ask for the narrowest decision that would release the work, so you are not settling a whole area to unblock one afternoon of it.

Broad decisions taken under pressure carry consequences into rooms and trades that were never part of the question.

Say plainly when you do not know, and ask who should be answering instead rather than producing an answer to end the conversation.

Questions that belong with a qualified professional should be passed to them; an owner guess given on site can be treated as an instruction.

Write your note of an on-the-spot decision before leaving the room, while the thing you decided about is still in front of you.

On-the-spot decisions are the ones least likely to be written up, because there is no message trail to remind you they happened.

Where you give a provisional answer, say what would cause you to change it and by what point the answer needs to be settled properly.

Provisional answers harden into decisions unless the provisional part is written down as plainly as the answer itself.

Ask what a decision made now would rule out later, so that a small answer does not quietly close off something you cared about.

Working out what a decision forecloses needs the appointed professionals; do not rely on your own reading of what it might close off.

Agree in writing what should happen when you cannot be reached, including whether work continues, pauses in that area or moves elsewhere.

Whether work may continue without an owner answer is a matter for the appointed professionals and your contract; agree it in advance.

Where somebody else may speak for you, name them in writing to everybody involved and state what they may and may not settle.

Authority given to another person has contractual consequences; take the arrangement to your own legal adviser before putting it in place.

List in advance the kinds of decision you are content to have made without you and the kinds you want to be consulted on whatever the circumstances.

A list made calmly beforehand is far better than a judgement made by somebody guessing what you would have wanted.

Give one reliable route for reaching you and say what it is not, so people do not spread the same question across several channels.

Questions asked in three places get three partial answers and no record of which one was acted on.

Ask for anything settled in your absence to be written up and sent to you, rather than described when you next visit the property.

Decisions taken while you were away are the ones you will most want a contemporaneous record of, and the least likely to have one.

On returning, work through what happened in date order rather than starting with whatever is being raised most loudly.

Reading events in sequence shows which decision led to which, which is invisible when you start at the current crisis.

Keep instructions and acceptances in one list rather than two, since the interesting question is usually what was settled and when, not which kind it was.

Splitting them means an owner has to remember which list to search, and something always ends up in neither.

Record for each entry who gave it, who received it and who else was told, since instructions that reached only one person are the ones that fail.

The distribution matters more than the wording when a trade later arrives having never heard about it.

Point each entry at the message, note or document that carries it, so the list can be checked rather than believed.

A log without references becomes a second account competing with the original messages instead of a way of finding them.

Mark any entry that changed what was agreed, so instructions amounting to changes can be picked out from the ordinary running ones.

A log entry does not make an instruction a change to the agreed work; that determination rests with the appointed professionals and your own legal adviser.

Read through entries with no recorded outcome at each meeting, so instructions that were given and never acted on come back into view.

Instructions rarely fail loudly; they simply sit unactioned while everybody assumes they were dealt with.

Keep the log after the work is finished, together with the messages it points at, rather than clearing it out with the rest of the project material.

Questions about what was instructed tend to arrive well after everybody has stopped thinking about the project.