Your access to the shared platform ends with the appointment
A shared platform feels like somewhere safe to leave things. It is. For the length of the appointment.
Most projects now run on somebody else's platform. The contractor's common data environment, the client's portal, the lead consultant's licence. It works, everybody can see the current drawing and nobody emails a 200MB file at eleven at night.
Then the project closes. Or the licence renewal comes round and the account holder decides they are paying for one seat too many. Or somebody sensible has a tidy up. Your access goes at the same moment, usually without an email and often years before your liability for the work ends.
Three ways it happens, none of them dramatic
- The appointment ends. Access was granted to a project team. You are no longer on it. This one is at least predictable
- The licence lapses. The platform was paid for by a firm that has finished with the job. Nobody bought a seat for the archive
- Somebody tidies up. A new information manager inherits forty projects and closes the ones marked complete. Entirely reasonable. Irreversible from your side
A fourth, quieter version: the consultant's firm changes platform, or is acquired, so the old environment is migrated selectively. What migrates is what the new owner needs, which is not necessarily what you need.
The drawings are the easy part
Most practices do keep a set of issued drawings. That much usually survives, because it was transmitted and somebody filed it.
What does not survive is everything around them. The comment threads where a detail was questioned and resolved. The markup on revision C that explains why revision D exists. The transmittal record showing what was issued, to whom, on what date. The approval that somebody gave in a web form rather than in an email. The version history that shows a change was made before an instruction, not after it.
That material is the answer to "why did you do it that way", asked years later by somebody who is not being friendly about it. It lives in the platform, in the platform's own format. It is the first thing to become unreadable when the licence goes.
Building safety duties have raised the bar here. Showing a set of outputs is no longer the same as showing how decisions were made. If the record of the decision sits in a system you cannot open, you have the drawing but not the defence.
Decide who holds the record copy, at the start
A five-minute conversation at appointment stage that nobody has. A very expensive afternoon in year seven.
- Name the record holder in the appointment. Not "the CDE" — a firm, with a duty to keep it and a duty to hand it over
- Agree what you get on completion, in what format and by when. "Access until project close" is not an archive arrangement
- Export on a schedule, not at the end. Quarterly, or at each stage gate. The end is exactly when goodwill and licences run out
- Export what carries the meaning, not just the files: issue sheets, transmittals, comment threads, approval records, version history
- Open the export without the platform. If it only makes sense inside the tool you no longer have, you have backed up a shape rather than a record
Point four is the one practices skip, because it is the one the platform makes hardest. Every CDE will give you the documents. Few make it easy to take the conversation that surrounds them. That is the part you were relying on.
This is an IT job, not a filing job
It sounds like admin. In practice it is a scheduled export, somewhere sensible to put it, a naming convention that still means something in a decade, an index that lives outside the archive and a restore test that somebody actually runs.
That is our side of the fence. It is far cheaper to set up while the project is live than to reconstruct once the account is closed.
Which of your live projects runs on a platform somebody else pays for? What happens to your access the day that invoice is questioned? We set up cloud and CDE arrangements for AEC firms, the backup and archive behind them as part of managed IT support and the everyday IT support architecture practices run on. If you do not know who holds the record copy on your current jobs, that is worth an hour.
