Approve a scope somebody can be sent to build

Whose job: the city manager. You should see an approved work extent, with the officer who approved it and the date.

What you are doing

You are turning a proposal into a decision. The programme ranked the work and grouped it into runs a crew could be sent to; none of that commits the council to anything. This step is where somebody puts their name to a scope and a date beside it.

It is deliberately not the engineer's step. Running the programme is engineering — it produces an argument. Approving a scope is governance: it is the sentence a council procures against, and the one somebody will be asked about at a committee meeting or by an auditor. So it sits behind its own permission, and in most councils that is the manager rather than the person who built the list.

What PaveKeep does with it

A work extent: which pavement, which treatment, how long, how much, who approved it and when — plus the assumptions the programme was run under, so the record still explains itself a year later without anybody re-running anything.

Two things about how it is stored are worth knowing, because both are promises rather than implementation details.

IT IS HELD AGAINST THE ROAD, NOT AGAINST THE ROWS. The scope is a range of distances along the carriageway, so when your GIS team next re-draws that road and the data is imported again, your approval is still describing the same pavement. An approval keyed to the pieces the road happened to be cut into would be destroyed by somebody else's map edit.

AND IT CANNOT BE EDITED. Not by you, not by us, not by a later version of this product. If a scope was approved wrongly it is WITHDRAWN, which records who withdrew it and why and leaves the original readable — because a tender may have been advertised, or a figure filed, while it stood. Changing your mind twice is two decisions, and the second one is a fresh approval rather than the first row coming back.

What it will not do

• The method — Approving a scope is not a work order and not a contract. It says this is the scope the council intends to let; who builds it, when, and for what price are the next object along and the product does not hold one yet.
• What you have not got yet — It can only approve what the programme proposed. If the condition or your unit rates have moved since the schedule was read, that scope is no longer on the list and the approval is refused rather than honoured — which is the right answer, because approving a figure nobody is looking at any more is how a committee gets shown one number and a crew gets sent to another.
• Your role — It is its own capability, held by the city manager. An engineer can build the programme, read it, export it and argue about it, and cannot approve from it. That separation is the point rather than an inconvenience.
• Your subscription — The approved scopes are a list and a set of totals, split between resurfacing and spot repair because those are different procurements. Packaging several of them into one contract is not built.

How you know it worked

Before: a programme you have run, read at the work-extent grain — which is what it shows by default. Each row is a continuous run of one treatment on one carriageway, with its chainage range, and marked resurfacing or spot repair.

Do: Reports, programme. Find the row you intend to let and approve it.

Why read it at that grain first: a 50 m analysis row is not evidence of a job. The extent is the proposal for one, which is why it carries a chainage range a crew could be given and the segment rows do not.

After: the row is marked approved with the date, and it stops offering the button — so nobody approves the same pavement twice. The approved list and its totals are separately readable.

If it was wrong, withdraw it. The scope stays on the record with who withdrew it, and the pavement becomes approvable again as a new decision with its own date. There is no edit, on purpose.

Hand to: the engineer who will scope and let the work. What they need from you is not the list — it is the fact that these ones are decided and the rest are not.

If it went in wrong: this step can be undone, and the undoing stays on the record rather than erasing what happened.

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