The As-Built Redline Program: Managed by Ryan Crawford, PMP

Skills Developed:
Construction Management - Redline As-built - AutoCAD Civil3D - Quality Assurance - Quality Control - Scheduling - Scope Management - Risk Management - Leadership - Employee Training - Stakeholder Engagement

I was originally hired on to my company after they had gained a contract with Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E). The purpose of this contract was to provide land surveying services to the Hydrotest project for gas transmission pipeline. When pipe is installed, it is required to put it under pressure to determine the quality of the welds and integrity of the line. This is performed by taking set lengths of pipe, filling it with water, and capping both ends to pressurize the line and see if the pressure holds for the required duration of the test. This process is a hydro-static strength test, or hydrotest for short.

My role began as an office admin and aid, putting together packets of information, scanning documentation, and organizing the paperwork. Very quickly I was brought on board to begin learning the main bulk of office side work, conducting as-built redlines. In the real world, almost nothing is built exactly to plan, there are small variations that happen within tolerances, and occasionally change requests are filed after the engineering plans have hit the contractors in the field. Because of these variances, you update construction plans to reflect the real world conditions as they were built, hence as-built. Redline simply refers to the fact that you often marked up your documents in red so as to reflect as-built information and not conflate it with original engineered information.

I was brought on when there was only one other person in the office handling the work necessary, and became the de facto senior when it came to the work that we were doing. As a result of this I effectively ran a program for how our company handled as-built redlines for PG&E.

Having held numerous conversations with both field engineers at PG&E as well as document review and oversight technicians at the California Public Utility Comission, I was deeply knowledgeable about what was required of these documents, and even helped write some of the standard operating procedure for PG&E. Using this knowledge, I ran a team of up to 15 people providing guidance and oversight to the work they performed, and was the final QA sign-off for our deliverables.

Up until I took over the role of UAV program management, I was the principal trainer for all staff on-boarded to the office that worked on the as-built program, leading our team to deliver over a hundred projects annually, with 95% of project being delivered on schedule and within budget.