Your Detailer Is Retiring The standard was never a document. It was a person.
He has drawn every set that has left the shop for as long as anyone can remember. Nothing is written down, because nothing needed to be. In a few months he stops, and the standard leaves with him.
If this sounds familiar
- The conventions exist, but only in one person’s head and one person’s habits.
- New starters learn by having their work corrected rather than by reading anything.
- Nobody else in the building can produce a set that comes back clean first time.
- When he is on holiday, drawings slow down and quality drifts, and everybody notices.
- You have tried to hire a replacement and either found nobody or found someone who draws differently.
Why it happens
Because the standard was never a document. It was a person.
That is not a failure of management. It is what happens when one capable individual does the same work well for decades. The conventions evolved to suit how your shop actually builds, they were correct, and writing them down would have felt like bureaucracy at every point along the way.
The cost only appears at the end, and by then the person who could write it down has one foot out of the door.
What can be done about it
The single most useful thing is the Standards Record. Conventions, preferences, construction defaults and the details your shop reuses, written down once, versioned, and applied to every project after that. It is what stops the knowledge being a person.
Send two of his recent sets. They contain most of the standard worth capturing.
What this is not
- Not a replacement for him.
- Thirty years of judgement about how your shop builds is not something anyone arrives with. What can be done is capture what he knows and apply it consistently.
- Not a project that has to finish before he leaves.
- Capture happens through live work rather than through a documentation exercise, which is also the only way it stays accurate.
- Not a decision about the rest of your detailing.
- Some shops use this as the point to move drawing production out. Others capture the standard and keep drawing in-house. Both are reasonable.
Services that apply
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
How much can be captured before he leaves?
It depends on how much time is left and how much live work runs in it. Capture happens through packages rather than through interviews, so the useful measure is how many sets he can still review rather than how many weeks remain.
What if he has already gone?
Conventions can be reconstructed from the sets he left. It is slower, and the reasoning behind unusual details is usually lost, but the drawings themselves carry most of what matters.
Do we have to move our detailing out to do this?
No. Some shops capture the standard and keep drawing in-house. The record is yours either way.
Will his replacement be able to use it?
That is the point of writing it down. A documented convention can be handed to someone on their first day, which is not true of a convention that lives in somebody’s habits.
Send two of his recent sets
What they contain is most of the standard, and reading them is the fastest way to see what is worth capturing.
Get a Free Drawing Review Read About the Standards Record
Send two of his recent sets. They contain most of the standard worth capturing.
How conventions are captured once and applied to every project after.
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Scope and questions come back, not a template.
