2024
Rebuilding a seven-year evidence trail to reach occupancy
The program’s oldest facility, a fragmented compliance record, and occupancy achieved within eight months.
- Compliance evidence
- Records reconstruction
- Stakeholder coordination
The problem
The compliance review for the program’s oldest facility required an evidence trail seven to eight years old. In the intervening period systems had changed, custodians had moved on, and the building’s use had shifted. The record existed, but in pieces, in places nobody had a map to.
What I did
I treated it as a reconstruction problem rather than a retrieval problem — working out what the requirement actually demanded, then assembling a defensible record from multiple partial and disconnected sources, and documenting the provenance of each piece so it would hold up under review.
What changed
The facility achieved occupancy within eight months of the review opening.
What I took from it
Almost every hard commissioning problem I have met since has been a version of this one: the testing was done, and the difficulty was proving it. That is why I now design the evidence structure before the testing starts.