Meet for Decisions, Not Status: Improving Geotechnical Laboratory Management
Managing a complex site investigation programme requires clear visibility into samples, testing progress, approvals and outstanding actions. But there is a difference between a meeting used to make decisions and a meeting used simply to work out where things stand. On many geotechnical laboratory programmes, a significant part of the weekly meeting can be spent going […]
Excel, email, and SharePoint are not a lab workflow
Friday afternoon. Someone on the project asks a question that should be simple: Which test result is final? Nobody points to one screen and answers it. Someone opens SharePoint and finds final_v3 — and final_v3_revised. Someone else pulls conditions from an email thread that may not match the PDF in the folder. The schedule lives in Excel, edited yesterday […]
Who Set the Test Conditions — and Who Approved Them?
A laboratory test can be executed perfectly and still create a problem for the project. Why? Because the test may have been run under the wrong conditions. Geotechnical laboratory test conditions can be critical. Confining pressure, consolidation stress, loading direction, drainage conditions, stress path, cyclic loading parameters and other requirements can directly affect whether the […]
Geotechnical Laboratory Test Status: Live Visibility
You know the question. Midweek, someone on the project asks: “What’s the status of my test?” Unsure looks appear and everyone starts to dig into project documentation to understand exactly what has been happening in the laboratory. One person opens an old spreadsheet while another person scrolls through a cluttered email inbox to track down […]