Detailed design workshop and strange places discussion
Date: 2025-07-29
Summary
The speaker began by returning from a brief absence, apologizing for a minor illness, and initiated the first detailed design workshop. The goal was to clarify requirements lacking details to ensure precise understanding for development. The workshop focused on grouping requirements into categories such as "plan check feedback," with plans to cover assignment services if time allowed. An icebreaker involved discussing strange locations visited, leading to some participant anecdotes about unique places like Death Valley and Devil's Tower.
Attention shifted to detailed design parts, emphasizing creating stories detailed enough for developers. Discussions covered the necessity to review unclear areas, ensuring all required details were available. It was noted that not all aspects were final, requiring further revisions. The system discussed would allow applicants to respond to feedback interactively, enhancing clarity in responses and preventing unsolicited changes mid-review.
They deliberated the self-certification program, where certified architects could bypass plan checks under specific circumstances, reflecting on its implications and necessary criteria. Additionally, the possibility of creating ad hoc tasks or to-do lists for both staff and applicants was examined to enhance efficiency, though concerns about complexity and management arose.
Overall, discussions aimed to refine processes, improve plan check systems, and ensure clarity in roles and tasks to enhance project management and accountability.
Main points
- Speaker returning from time away, mentions being a bit sick.
- First detailed design workshop to address missing details in requirements.
- Requirements are reviewed and categorized; starting with plan check feedback.
- Icebreaker prompt about strangest places visited: Sherwood Forest, Death Valley, volcanic hot spring in Iceland, Devil's Tower.
- Detailed design aims to produce stories detailed enough for developers to build a new system.
- Discussion on requirements related to plan check feedback, including Bluebeam integration.
- Consideration of self-certification process for plan checks bypassing certain protocols.
- System shall allow customer to respond to comments, generate corrections letter, potentially create a table for response.
- System shall have the ability to prevent actions until comments are addressed, requiring responses.
- Plan to potentially block re-submissions to avoid confusion for applicants.
- Self-certification program exists, linked to certain conditions for applications and users.
- Discussion about ad hoc plan check checklist tasks, leaning towards the use of reviews instead of a traditional checklist.
- Concern over tasks for applicants leading to incomplete tasks and confusion.
- Clarification needed on terminology and record-keeping for comments and objections in the system.
Transcript
All right. Thank you. Welcome back, I guess. I was away, but nobody else was away, so welcome back to me. I am a little bit sick, so I apologize if I'm not really audible. Just let me know if you can't hear what I'm saying or anything like that.
So today we're going to be getting into some detailed design. I think this is the first detailed design workshop that we've had. And so what I've done for these is I've sort of reviewed all of the requirements that we have where we don't really have enough detail to sort of move forward, or where we think we need further discussion. You know, maybe we
I think we know what the ask is but we want to make sure that we are absolutely certain on that and that we're not missing anything. So I've grouped all of those into a few different sort of categories and the first one that we're looking at today is plan check feedback and then we have another one on meetings a little bit later today as well. So essentially we're just going to go through
really just like look through some of the requirements and discuss and I have some notes on there we can go look at my demo system if that's helpful for people and we will see how far we get if we get through all of them I do have some other content that I wanted to cover as well with regard to the assignment service
So we'll potentially see if we can get through that. And if we don't get through it this morning, then maybe we'll have time for it this afternoon. So I have enough to keep us occupied. I realized that I hadn't done an icebreaker for a while. Since this is a little bit of a longer meeting, I feel like I have enough time to do that. When I was in the UK, I went to Sherwood Forest, which is where Robin Hood supposedly lived, if you're familiar with that story.
But it's a very kind of weird place, especially at night. It's lots of very old kind of crazy looking trees that are hundreds and thousands of years old. So it's quite a strange place to visit. So that's my prompt for today is what's the strangest place that you visited? I'll chime in. I think I went to Death Valley. That place is kind of strange.
Oh, yeah. Was that last year? Yeah, I went there a couple times last year. On another note, Topher made it. I saw that. Yeah. Excellent. Does anybody else have any? Oh, actually, my parents also went to a volcanic hot spring in Iceland, which is just built on top of a volcano. I thought that was an interesting one.
There's a place in Wyoming that I visited when I was about nine on a cross-country trip with my family called Devil's Tower. It's in a relatively flat area, and it's just this straight abutment of rock sticking straight up. I put a link in the chat. It's really kind of cool. And, you know, kids go and hike it and rock climb it. I didn't do that, but it's a really unique thing in the middle of Wyoming.
Nice, I feel like I might have heard of them. What was Ish's? A ghost town? It was featured in Close Encounters of the Third Kind as well. The Devil's Tower was? Yeah. Cool! That's a good reference, I like that. Anything else?
For me, it was kind of a, I wouldn't call it a specific play, but a type of plays. Because when I was growing up, I was watching a lot of these Chinese martial arts movies, and they would show these kind of open markets where you have beef and almost like a whole pig hung in the market for sale. And when I went to Vietnam...
the place was pretty very fairly at least when they took us on the tour it's very very modern and so on but then one day I decided to explore the area without the tour guys and I started walking outside them the hotel walk maybe like three four hundred feet away and I saw a market that looked just like it and I going kind of odd we're going all the way back to like medieval times
that's crazy especially that they have also the sort of tourist friendly markets and then they have the real markets yeah I like that all right this is good thank you uh okay so this is pretty much the same as before I'm not going to reread this again
so for detailed design and we've talked about this and referred to it a few times as we've been going through some of the as-is and 2b sessions as well this is really where we get into the fine detail of how the 2b processes will work this is where all of those things where earlier on we said we'll come back to this in detailed design or we'll come back to this later this is where we need to come back to some of those things and maybe step through some really specific examples in more detail than we have
previously. So the real sort of outcome that we're working towards is stories that are detailed enough that developers can actually use them to build the new system. If you look at some of the Miro board flows, you'll probably see that some of that is kind of high level, like it's not extremely specific in certain areas, like, for example, what fields are included in reports or list views or things like that.
That's a level of detail that we need to be able to configure the system. I'm not planning to talk through those things, you know, one at a time specifically, but that's just an example of something that would be part of the detailed design. So for this session, we're talking about plan check feedback. So revisions, I feel that the Bluebeam integration is sort of part of this whole set of functionality as well. Comments and then what people can do online as well.
so we have some requirements in relation to this that we wanted to talk through so I couldn't really think of a super entertaining way to do this so I've just got a big table which we will get to in a second the way that I've sort of encapsulated this plan check feedback process is that it starts
with the first set of corrections that are issued to the customer and it ends with an accepted final plan. So in between that, we might be going through multiple cycles. We might be going through multiple meetings, which we'll be talking about a little bit later. And we will be looking at plans, marking up plans, sending that markup to the customer and so on. So...
that was pretty quick so that leaves us a lot of time for the requirements so for each of these what I've done is listed out the requirement some of these are the interpretation of the requirement because that's what we're working with if there is an interpretation if there isn't it's just the exact requirement from the RFP and I've got some notes here as well so
I'm open to doing this different ways if people prefer but my plan is pretty much just to sort of talk through these and I'll try to make sure that we get through all of them just for everybody's knowledge we have about 15 I think in relation to plan check feedback to get through and hopefully we can get through all of those and have some time to talk about the plan check assignment as well so and feel free to
Interrupt, raise hands, bring up anything that isn't specifically covered here, but you feel is related and we should be discussing. All questions welcome. So this first one, the system shall, we did talk about this very briefly, I think, in another session. System shall allow an applicant to choose to end the plan check process early and immediately preceding
the entire plant set. So what I'm thinking of here is that we would have an option at the application level for someone to cancel the pending reviews and effectively allow the user to initiate the cycle process themselves. Sorry, Topher.
I think we decided we had had a meeting a couple weeks back about this requirement and we decided that it's not going to be required um what we're trying to avoid is customers being able to change the goal post while the review has already been started yeah so um one of the things that you know they get they get a comment back from zoning say they
and then just update the system. And now our staff is reviewing a much different project than what was originally submitted. So we decided that this idea, I think, is something that could have worked. We want them to be able to withdraw an application. That's a different story, but that's not what they're talking about here. They're talking about basically cutting us off from in the middle of our plan check
and coming back with a revised set of plans, which is not what we want to have happen in any means. So this requirement we already got rid of because while it sounds like a good idea, it'll be problematic in practice. So we decided to get rid of it. Okay, excellent. Let me see. I don't think we can do a strikethrough on this. Okay, I'm going to make it red. That's good because, yeah, I did have some concerns about this in terms of the rework, but also just on the process side. So excellent.
systems shall allow the customer to respond to each comment. So this is something that is not out of the box exactly, but we have done it for customers before. So there's two sort of parts that this can go down and they're not mutually exclusive, we can do both.
so the typical way that we do this in Clarity is we generate a corrections letter or a comments letter and that is usually done as part of the sort of feedback process when everybody has completed their reviews typically the plan checker or the the individual that owns that permit or application would be creating the letter from the template in Clarity which pulls all of those comments in
and we'll say here's everything that you need to fix essentially and so that's the sort of standard way that we do it that doesn't really meet this requirement here of being able to allow the customer or enable a customer to respond to each comment something else that we've done before is to create a table of comments so that is through the public portal you can
If we want to, let's say, prevent an action from happening until the user has responded to all the comments, we can do that. So those comments would be pulled in through the Bluebeam integration. So I don't know if that's... What do we think about it? Like I said, we could also do both. Not everybody's going to be looking at this.
So one thing that I, so a lot of times the applicant will, you know, split the corrections and give some to the engineer, some to the architect, you know, whoever, right? Depending on the discipline. So I like the idea of creating a, I know Bluebeam has this as a kind of a summary of the comments, right? As a Bluebeam function. I like the idea of creating that.
as basically a punch list in addition to our corrections list, which is a different ballgame. But I like the idea of automatically creating that and having it be in a tabular format that the customer can put in and provide responses to, right? Provide a response to this, provide a response to that. And for them to actually have it be a...
a document that they can upload, like a kind of submission template, right? That they can upload saying, here's my response to corrections. I know at the counter, we do ask for them to have a, when they upload to ePlan, we ask for, they don't always give it, but we ask for a response to corrections document where the applicant actually, you know, we have a punch list of corrections and here's the response, right? Okay, I updated this, I changed that.
I do like the idea of having that be built into the system so it's not a separate thing that either the customer creates or that we have to manually create. I don't know about electrical or mechanical, but I think that would be a good option. Yes. Yes, Topher, thank you for bringing that up. So I was going to say it's kind of random when we ask for it. I would say most of the time we ask for it for bigger plans with...
you know several corrections more than 10 or so not necessarily at the counter the counter we only give you know one to five maybe a little more but
We do ask for that tabular response letter maybe half the time. So it would be great to have it in the system as well where all your corrections are generated in one row, I would say, and then leave the next row over empty for them to respond to.
Yeah, and that's actually pretty much how we've done it before. As a portal user, when you go to fill this out, you just get a table that has the comments in one column. I unfortunately don't have a screenshot of this. You'd have the comments in one column and then your response in the other column. And then on the back office view, you would see each comment and then the response to it below. All right.
it is pretty basic in that you can't really do sort of like breading of responses and things like that like it's really intended to be a sort of here's the comment did you address it how did you address it that kind of thing and we could layer on some sort of additional kind of flags or something like that if that's necessary but it sounds like this is potentially the way we want to go
As I said, we could also generate the corrections letter if we need to have something that is a document that lists out the comments. And I've heard mixed things. Some clients want that. They want to have that document just in case it gets audited and you need to provide those documents or something like that. And I've also heard from some jurisdictions that they don't want any
paper documents at all, and they're happy with the comment records approach. We can do both. We don't need to decide that today. And the correction letter can also be automatically generated based on a certain set of conditions as well. The other thing that I wanted to mention there, which I don't know if this is desirable, is that we can prevent somebody from resubmitting
based on conditions. So that can be let's say based on a phase and status. It could be when you are responding to the comments, we want you to also provide a document at that time.
we won't let you upload a new submission until you've gone through and responded to all the comments. So yeah, thoughts about that? I think any sort of block like that is going to confuse our applicants. Okay. Unless it's extremely well documented for the customers. So I kind of have a little bit of a pause because
you know a lot of times our staff will just kind of look and say oh just re-upload the e-plan and we'll check right or re-upload the system and we'll check it and if there's any sort of block that prevents them from re-uploading you know our staff might not necessarily know that you know it just becomes a thing where our staff are giving instructions that the customer can't follow and I'm a little hesitant on that but I do like the idea of making you know or our
a response to corrections document is required, right? So they can actually do a checkbox to say, hey, or some way of saying, hey, we want the customer to be forced to add this as part of their submission packet for the next verification. Okay. Yeah, so I think the way that we would do that is...
maybe that would be through a manual submission and the submission would be tied to that whole comments form. So I might have to go back and look and see how we've done that before, but I'm fairly certain that that is possible, that is how we've done it before. Okay? This is good. And we do, I know that for building plan check and I think also for electrical and mechanical, we do kind of have a hybrid. The way that we provide corrections is both with a correction list, that's basically just a punch list,
and with a set of plans that have a set of corrections on them. Right, yeah. Kind of a mixture of the two that you discussed, right? We have the correction list and that's how we want to continue because the correction list is a good way of getting the exact wording we want and then the plans are where we address, you know, how it's actually implemented on the plans. So we like having both of those as the official set of corrections.
Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, so typically, along with the corrections letter template, you would probably be including your markup summary from Bluebeam as well. So yeah, I think that's a good reason to keep doing that. So that makes sense. Okay. The system shall have the ability for applicants to self-certify any subset of objections online.
so I wanted to ask about this one because I wasn't clear my assumption is that self-certify any subset of objections is saying yes I've resolved this issue and you don't need to check that I've resolved it is that kind of what we're saying there yes okay do we have examples of of what
some types of objections that would fall into that category would be that we would allow somebody to stop search display. I think the biggest, okay, go ahead, Craig. I was gonna say the way they did it right now, they implemented it was the person has to get kind of authorized so the user ID would have some sort of capability
but it's also only certain codes potentially, right? It could be like only building codes certified for. The program's pretty open in that sense. It hasn't, it's just kind of brand new. And right now it's in the palace.
Oh, they skip it entirely. Yeah, there's an audit that happens like something like 10% of the plans need to be audited. But other than that, it completely skips plan check. So do you see this requirement as being sort of related to that? Saying like, we can flag an applicant? Yeah, that's what I would gather. It would be the user or the applicant would have this special privilege
and they'd be allowed to bypass PlanCheck for specific application types. Okay. So are we thinking that this would be based on the permit type and also the PlanCheck type as well? Yeah, I think so. Isn't that the same thing? I meant PlanCheck type in the sense of just like building in a...
more broad sense electrical mechanical yeah okay but then maybe for certain permit types like for example maybe like we don't allow that for demolition permits or something like that yeah or elevators maybe something like that yeah yeah yeah okay yeah go ahead uh yeah yes uh quick question uh what is the self certification uh
are we talking about a contractor can pull a permit rather than come to plan check or I'm not too sure I might have missed a meeting Sam there's a program today it was recently implemented as a response to the Palisades fire and so an architect can get self-certified they have to like take a test they have to sign something get something notarized and once they get self-certified they can bypass the plan check process today for I think it's for new building permits in the Palisades
the thought would be that this program would expand. And that's why the requirement. I see. I see. So these plans wouldn't come to plan check. They would just pull a permit right away. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Sounds good. Thank you. And they would also not be subject to plan check fees too. Would not be subject to plan check fees. Yeah. I'm aware of that process. I just wasn't sure that it also skips a plan check altogether. Thanks.
Yeah, just to clarify, they still submit something to us. We still have to issue a permit with the inventory and everything based on information that's on their plan. While we're not checking, we still need to issue something. So they still come to plan check for all intents and purposes, but we're not checking anything. We're just issuing the permit.
There's nothing in mechanical, right? That's just building. That is my understanding, yeah. I mean, I don't know if they want to do something that requires mechanical. Let's say they want to do 800 meter panel or some heavy duty equipment that doesn't fall standard. What happens there? I mean, the test that they're taking
doesn't have anything to do with mechanical systems. It's only residential codes and building code stuff. That makes sense. Thanks, Janine. Yeah, the other, yeah, so self-certification is its own little subset, and it'll be a different, I think it would be basically a different plan check category. So you know how right now we have plan check yes, plan check no?
I think there'd be a third category of plan checks self-certify. I think that would probably be the best way to kind of group it so that we have a way to group those in a specific category. Does that make sense? Yeah, I like that idea. Okay, so it sounds like there's going to be conditions that will be both on the permit application side and also on the user side that will determine if this is going to be an option.
So I think what we'll probably need here is either a list of those conditions or at least maybe a couple of specific examples that we can use to sort of make sure that we have this covered. Right. Systems shall have the ability to create ad hoc plan checklist tasks for an application. I wanted to just check here.
based on what we've talked about so far are we thinking that plan check checklist tasks are equivalent to reviews I know that they're not really a checklist and technically they're not really a task either but they are a sort of list of items that can be assigned to an individual that can be completed deferred have a data sign those kind of things do we think that's a reasonable equivalency to create because it is mentioned a few times in other requirements as well
Topher, I'll talk a little bit. I guess I don't remember this requirement offhand, but I almost feel like this could tie in with AI, like when a plan check comes in or a
but I'm not sure we have standard items we'd want people to check off on. Yeah, and I think that would be challenging to manage. We do have checklist functionality in Clarity, and from what I recall, we've sort of gone back and forth on it because it is difficult to manage.
why we're sort of drifting away from using checklists specifically and wondering if we could do the same thing by essentially saying we can manually create any type of review on a plan check for a supervisor, for a plan checker themselves, for another department to review, those kind of things. Do we feel that that meets this requirement? And if not, what's the gap?
So I think on this one I'd have to see ad hoc plan check checklist tasks. And we do have plan check checklist tasks, which is challenging to say. It's mentioned in a few of the other requirements as well.
and I think initially I had interpreted this as being an actual checklist but then when I looked into it we haven't really used the checklist functionality very much in Clarity as I said it's difficult to manage and it's not the best experience for users as well it tends to be sort of difficult to create that balance of creating a checklist that is actually useful for people because it is
giving them information that's helpful without either telling them to do things that they would already be doing or just giving them sort of redundant information. So I think what I'm thinking of in terms of this is almost like a to-do list for it almost seems like there's a to-do list that we want
That's my thought as well, Topher. It's like in order to keep moving forward, you got to check for this or check for that. I'm actually thinking on two sides. I'm thinking one for the applicant and also one for the plan checker themselves. Like if I need to do an internal reminder, what do I need to do on this application to get this thing approved? You know what I mean? I don't know if that's the intent of this requirement or...
So I see supervisor for a checker, right? Or a checker on their own. So I think that kind of tells me if I'm a supervisor and I'm, you know, a backroom supervisor doing a supervisor review for an application or for a permit, I can actually add a checklist item. Hey, make sure you do this. Make sure you do that. That's visible to the plan checker. Does that make sense?
yeah yeah and i think the the part that i'm a bit more hesitant about is sort of the the non-ad hoc checklist tasks so that you know essentially kind of like the happy path stuff you have to do this stuff every time which is really just sort of telling the plan checker how to do the work that they're already doing um but yeah i think tasks are generally
supported their own object, they can be associated with a record. If we allow for somebody to create a task related to a project and assign it to someone else, does that meet this need? Again, it's not technically a checklist, but it would be that same sort of functionality that we talked about before, which could also be for the applicant. I'd be a little bit more hesitant to do it for the applicant, just because
if we force them to complete the task before they do something, then we're putting in blocks on the application process. And if we don't, then we're setting up a scenario where somebody might have hundreds of incomplete tasks and then the whole sort of utility of the task system is reduced. We could still do it, but that's kind of, Lauren. So I think for this one, I think what would be good is to see
kind of the out-of-the-box, because I have not actually seen the out-of-the-box experience for tasks for Clarity. So if we can get a quick demo at some point of what that looks like, and then I can use that to formulate questions and see how that works into this requirement. Because as of right now, it's kind of a nebulous idea in my head. So I think it would be good to have an idea of how that works and then what tweaks we might want to make to that system
to see if we can make it work for this requirement. Sounds good. Ish, can you take that as an action item for me? Maybe record something. Hey. Took you in the wrong place. All right. Systems shall have the ability to enter updates or notes on existing objections. So I mostly wanted to just sort of make sure we're aligned in terms of the terminology here.
so it sounds like an objection is going to be a comment whether it is an ad hoc comment in the system or whether it's a comment that is brought in through the Bluebeam integration it is going to be a comment that is tied to a cycle of plan check so what are some of the and that is possible we can have notes and things like that on there
what kind of things we would be doing here. The risk once you start getting into adding notes on various different records is that information can get stranded very easily. There isn't really a sort of simple, unified, here are all of the notes and comments on this record and everything related to it sort of functioning in clarity. So I wanted to sort of sanity check what we're wanting to do here.
I'm just looking at all the different ones that say objections because it does seem that we're using a different terminology for corrections versus objections, right? Possibly, yes.
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