Anyone else lose half their inspection records to OneDrive every summer, or is that just us?
I work in municipal stormwater somewhere damp. I am pretty solid at the inspections themselves. I am catastrophically bad at the part that comes after.
The inspection is maybe 45 minutes. Drive out, walk the perimeter, check the BMPs, take photos of the catch basin that has somehow grown a small ecosystem, write the corrective actions, drive back. Easy.
Then I sit down at my desk and the wheels come off.
- Photos in one OneDrive folder
- Notes in a different OneDrive folder
- Follow-up living in an email chain with four people, two of whom are out
- GIS edits saved to a place nobody can actually locate
- The "master tracker" spreadsheet, currently titled FINAL_final_USE_THIS_ONE_v7_updated
- One binder from 2019 that we still reference for some reason
- The one person who actually knows where everything lives, on PTO until the 18th
By August the whole system is just rain, moss, and unanswered Outlook chains. By annual report season it stops feeling like compliance work and starts feeling like an archaeological dig. Brush in one hand, headlamp on, going "ah yes, the great March 14th inspection, lost to OneDrive for centuries."
The thing I keep getting stuck on is that the inspection is not the hard part. The hard part is what happens to the inspection record for the next eleven months. The site, the photos, the corrective action, the follow-up task, the field markup, the property owner contact, the evidence the annual report eventually has to point at. None of it lives in one place. You end up hunting for context more than doing actual work.
I have been building something called NPDESTracker around this exact problem because I am tired of stormwater coordinators also being full-time librarians. Not pitching anyone here. I just genuinely want to know how everyone else is surviving the mystery-puddle-to-spreadsheet pipeline. My own work won't even look at my app, so it's pretty much useless.
Real question for the public works, MS4, and stormwater folks. What are you actually using to keep this from imploding? I've worked a few phase 1 cities and we had a lot of different systems, but still, that's much better then this little rural phase 2 city i'm working for now.
Spreadsheets and a prayer? Cityworks? Cartegraph? ArcGIS plus a shared drive? PDFs in OneDrive? Lucity? Something I have not heard of yet? Genuinely curious what is working and what is not.