The snag list, done properly: how good projects close

Snagging is the process of finding and fixing the defects that stand between "the works are finished" and "the works are accepted": the door that catches, the paint that shadows, the socket that reads live-neutral reversed. Individually small, they decide whether handover takes two weeks or six months — and whether retention money moves. In North America the same document is called a punch list.

A snag is a record, not a remark

The unit of a working snag process is a record with five fields: WHERE (room or grid reference, not "upstairs"), WHAT (observed defect, not diagnosis), EVIDENCE (a photo from a repeatable angle), WHO (the trade responsible for closing it), and STATUS (open, fixed, verified — with verification done by the person who raised it, never the person who fixed it).

• —Walk methodically — room by room, one trade lens at a time. A general wander finds the obvious and misses the pattern.
• —Number every snag and never reuse a number. A deleted item must leave a closed record, not a gap someone can argue about later.
• —Photograph on raising AND on verifying — the pair is what makes the closure defensible.
• —Track age by trade. A snag list where one subcontractor's items never close is telling you something about your retention position.

Why paper snag lists decay

A snag list in a notebook dies of versioning: three walkthroughs produce three lists, the subcontractor works from the oldest, and nobody can say which items are verified-closed versus claimed-closed. The list needs one live copy, attached to the project, where raising, fixing and verifying are three timestamps on one record — which is how snags work inside Ofivio's site and quality tooling, alongside the daily site reports that feed it.