Chapter 01
From camera count to capture plan
Why the procurement question "how many cameras?" produces the wrong plan, and how a workflow-led capture plan changes the conversation, the budget, and the project outcome.
01
The wrong question, asked early
Most capture conversations begin in procurement with a single number: how many cameras does the project need. The number is usually pulled from a previous job of similar size, or from a vendor proposal that anchors on hardware count because hardware is what the vendor sells. The question is wrong because it skips the workflows the cameras are meant to serve. Once the count is signed off, the project carries that figure as a constraint. Coverage decisions become a backwards rationalisation of an existing budget. Workflows that emerge later — a claims defence on a delay event, a defects cycle that needs a 360 baseline, a logistics dispute that needs a gate view — get shoehorned into whatever cameras happen to exist. The team learns to live with gaps because the count is fixed. Procurement has not bought capture; it has bought the appearance of capture.
02
Start from the workflows
A capture plan begins with the workflows the project has committed to running. Progress verification against the programme baseline. Claims and evidence for the commercial team. Safety monitoring for high-risk operations. Gate and logistics for material flow. Subcontractor attendance where the contract allows it. Each named workflow has evidence requirements: cadence, vantage, integrity, retention. Those requirements translate into capture sources. A tower crane camera serves progress verification on the structural frame and gives a wide shot for monthly stakeholder reporting. A 360 walk on the fitout floors serves quality verification and as-built capture. A gate camera serves logistics and delivery verification. The capture plan is the smallest set of sources that closes those workflows, sized to the contract value at risk rather than the floor area.
03
How the procurement conversation changes
When the project starts from workflows, the supplier conversation looks different. The vendor proposes against named workflows rather than against a square-metre rate. The project can interrogate whether the proposed mix of fixed, 360, and drone closes each loop, and where the residual gaps sit. Negotiation moves from price-per-camera to coverage-per-workflow, which makes line items easier to defend at the cost report. The procurement decision aligns with the operational decision, which is the only durable basis for either. It also makes underspend visible: a workflow with no capture source is a decision the project has made, even if no one wrote it down.
04
Failure modes when capture is bought by the count
Three failure modes recur. First, congested deliveries arrive at a gate that has no camera because gate logistics was not in the original workflow scope, and the project cannot verify a stand-down claim. Second, scaffold-bound fitout floors run for a year with no 360 baseline because the budget was already committed to fixed cameras on the structural frame, and the defects cycle at handover has nothing to compare against. Third, a delay event hinges on weather correlation but the time-aligned record is missing the relevant front. Each failure traces back to the same cause: capture was bought before the workflows were named. The plan that would have prevented the failure is the same one the team now writes after the fact, at a higher cost.
Practice
01. Take your most recent project. List the five workflows you actually used capture for. Now list the workflows you wish you had used capture for but could not. Identify the procurement decision that produced the gap.
Look for: A typical answer names progress verification and claims as workflows that worked because fixed cameras were placed at the structural fronts, and identifies gate logistics or fitout 360 as gaps because no source was specified during procurement. The procurement decision that produced the gap is usually a camera count agreed before the workflow scope was written down, or a 360 line item dropped during value engineering.
02. Draft a one-page workflow-led capture brief for a notional project of your scale. Name three workflows in scope and the minimum capture sources each needs. Cost it as a coverage budget rather than a hardware budget.
Look for: A workable brief lists progress verification (one or two fixed cameras at primary work fronts plus monthly drone), claims and evidence (gate camera plus time-aligned coverage of the contested fronts), and quality verification (fortnightly 360 walks on fitout floors). The coverage budget shows cost per workflow per month rather than cost per camera per month, which exposes which workflows are over- or under-resourced.
Checkpoint
For your next project mobilisation, can you name the workflows in scope and the evidence each needs before any camera count is signed off?
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