By Greg Allan, tradesman and creator of Data First Coaching
Why does every field crew member seem to capture a boundary survey differently?
In most surveying businesses this happens because the systems live in the owner’s head rather than on paper. A new field crew member or GPS operator arrives having learned boundary survey, detail survey and set out work at a previous firm, with their own habits for how they peg a corner, pick a contour or note a title discrepancy on site. Without a documented standard for the firm, each one defaults to the way they already know.
The owner ends up repeating the same instructions to every new hire, on every job, with no real way to hold a field crew member or drafter accountable to doing a detail survey or an as-built the way the business needs it done. One crew captures contour data at a tighter interval than another. One drafter reads a set out plan differently to the next. None of it looks wrong on its own, but across a growing firm it adds up to a business that cannot promise a council, a developer or a builder the same standard of work twice.
Where does that inconsistency actually show up, and who carries the risk?
It shows up on the plan, the subdivision certificate, or the set out pegs on site, after the field work and the drafting are both done and the job has already gone out the door. By then it is the surveyor’s name and licence on the document, not the crew member’s.
A detail survey drawn slightly differently to the firm’s usual way might pass unnoticed on a straightforward job. On a subdivision, where a title boundary, a council requirement and a developer’s engineering plan all have to line up, the same small inconsistency can mean a rejected submission, a return visit to site, or a correction on a cadastral plan that already has a licensed surveyor’s name against it. The field crew member who captured the data has moved on to the next job. The surveyor who signs the plan carries the risk, the rework, and the conversation with the council or the builder.
How do you find where that inconsistency in your survey business actually starts?
You look at the number behind the pattern, not the memory of which job went wrong. Which field crew member’s jobs come back for rework, which drafter’s plans get queried by council, and how often, tells you where the gap in knowledge actually sits, rather than where it happened to surface last.
A decision made on memory, on a guess at which GPS operator it probably was, is usually a decision made on an old picture of the business. The job that needed rework last month might have been caused three steps earlier, at the point of capture, not at the point of drafting where the problem was noticed. Your own job data, read properly, shows which part of the field to plan workflow is the actual root rather than the symptom. That is a data first way of protecting a licence that sits on every plan the firm sends out, instead of waiting for a council to flag the next one.
How do AI agents fit into a surveying business’s systems?
An AI agent is software that does a job the way you would, with your pricing, your wording and your rules, so the non-billable parts of running jobs get done consistently without taking a field crew member or a drafter off paid work. In a surveying business that can mean the reporting and quoting work around a boundary survey or a subdivision, done the firm’s way every time.
AI agents do not replace the judgement a licensed surveyor applies to a boundary dispute or a complex title. What they can take on is the repeatable office work around it: preparing a quote for a set out the way you always price it, drafting the report wording you always use for an as-built, or keeping a job’s documentation consistent before it reaches a council submission. That frees field crew and drafting time for the measurement and plan work only a surveyor’s team can do, and it means the firm’s standard travels with every job, not just the ones the owner personally checks.
Should you build your own survey systems or rent off-the-shelf software?
Some off-the-shelf survey and project tools suit a growing firm well, and your own job data shows which ones earn their place. The real choice most owners miss is whether their systems are shaped around how their jobs actually run, boundary through to drafting through to report, or whether the firm is bending its workflow to fit a tool built for every trade at once.
A GPS data package or a drafting package built for general use rarely knows that your firm always captures contour at a particular interval, always notes a title discrepancy a certain way, or always structures an as-built report in the same order for the same developer. Systems built on a surveying business’s own data, shaped around its own field crew and its own customers, can hold that standard in a way a generic tool cannot. That is a choice to make with the numbers, not a reason to walk away from what currently works.
How does Data First Coaching approach this?
Data First Coaching starts from the surveying firm’s own job data through the Trade Business Intelligence, not from the owner describing the business from memory. It looks for where a field crew member’s or drafter’s output actually starts to drift from the standard, because as Greg puts it, “it’s not my people, it’s my systems”. The how, breaking the business into roles of field crew, drafting and reporting, and documenting what each must know, is worked through inside the Academy, with other members, because the Trade Business Intelligence is powered by every member for every member, and the Academy is built for surveyors and other owners who are open minded, innovative and willing to share what they learn.
