8 Signs It's Time to Stop Reviewing Plans on Paper and Email

We're headed to another conference this week (the Building Officials of Texas conference in Waco - stop by and see us if you're planning on attending!) and we expect to talk to at least a handful of building officials and community development team members that are wondering, "Is it finally time for us to get off paper, email, and shared drives?" 

They usually do not need anyone to tell them the problems with their process. They already know. 

What they are looking for is a clearer way to determine whether those problems have become serious enough to justify a change.

Earlier this year, we recorded a conversation about that question at the National Planning Conference. We discussed a few of the most common signs that a municipality has outgrown paper-based plan review.

The video covers several of the clearest warning signs: lost plan sets, reviews involving multiple people and departments, growing communities with limited staff, and increasing pressure to meet turnaround expectations.

But the case for electronic plan review is rarely based on one problem alone. It usually becomes clear when several problems begin to appear at the same time.

Here are eight signs it may be time to move away from paper and email.

1. Plan sets disappear into email or shared drives

A plan set does not have to be permanently lost to create a problem.

It might be sitting in the wrong inbox. It may have been saved under an unexpected file name. Someone may assume another reviewer has already started working on it when, in reality, nobody has touched it.

Then there is the version-control problem.

One person is reviewing the original submission while another has already downloaded a revised set. Files accumulate names like “Final,” “Final Revised,” and “Final Revised 2,” leaving staff to determine which version is actually current.

Once a submission enters the “black hole of email,” the department has to spend time reconstructing what happened.

An electronic plan review system creates a controlled record of plan versions, assignments, markups, comments, and resubmittals. Reviewers can quickly see which set is current, who has worked on it, and what still needs to happen to get it approved.

Your staff should not have to search through inboxes to find the plans they are responsible for reviewing.

2. Several reviewers or departments need to work on the same plans

Paper-based plan review becomes much harder to manage as the number of reviewers increases.

A single reviewer may be able to keep track of a small number of paper plan sets. But once three, four, or five people are reviewing multiple projects at the same time, the process becomes much more complicated.

It becomes harder still when reviews must move between building, planning, fire, engineering, public works, and outside consultants.

In a paper process, each department may have to wait for the physical plan set to arrive before starting. Email can recreate the same problem digitally as files are forwarded, downloaded, renamed, and uploaded again.

Every handoff introduces another opportunity for delay, confusion, or work on the wrong version.

Electronic plan review gives departments a way to work from the same current plan set. Reviews can happen concurrently when appropriate, rather than requiring every department to wait its turn.

The need to coordinate does not disappear. The coordination simply happens inside a shared process instead of through a series of manual handoffs.

3. Your community is growing faster than your review capacity

Growth is good for a community. It is also difficult for a plan review department to absorb.

More development means more applications, more plan sets, more questions, and more pressure to complete reviews quickly. But most agencies cannot simply hire a new reviewer every time submission volume increases.

Qualified plan reviewers are already difficult to find. Hiring takes time, and experienced reviewers carry knowledge that cannot be replaced immediately.

That means growing municipalities must find ways to make their existing resources more productive without sacrificing review quality.

Electronic plan review software cannot replace the judgment of a qualified reviewer. It can reduce the administrative work surrounding that judgment.

Reviewers spend less time locating plans, moving files, checking versions, combining comments, and answering avoidable status questions. That leaves more time for the part of the job that requires their expertise: reviewing plans and making sound decisions.

If development is increasing but staffing is not, improving the process becomes increasingly important.

4. You're adopting new SLAs (internal or external) 

Applicants have always wanted faster answers. Increasingly, municipalities are also establishing formal expectations for how quickly reviews should be completed.

That may mean an internal target, a public commitment, or a service-level agreement requiring reviewers to approve plans or return comments within a certain number of days.

These expectations are difficult to manage when the department cannot see where plans are waiting or how long each stage has taken.

How much time passed before the review was assigned? Which department currently has it? Is the reviewer actively working on it, or is the submission waiting in a queue? How long did the applicant take to respond?

Paper and email make those questions difficult to answer.

An electronic plan review workflow creates clearer assignments, deadlines, notifications, and records of completed steps. Managers can identify where reviews are slowing down and address the actual source of the delay.

Not every review will be fast. Some projects are complex and deserve careful attention. But the department should be able to explain where the time went.

5. Answering “Where is my permit?” requires an investigation

When an applicant calls for an update, can your staff answer by looking in one place?

Or does someone have to search an inbox, check a shared drive, call another department, or physically locate a folder?

Applicants should not need to contact several people to determine whether their plans have been received or assigned. Staff should not have to interrupt review work to reconstruct the status of an application. Electronic plan review gives staff a shared view of where plans are, who is responsible for the next step, and what has already been completed. It also gives them a much faster and more accurate way to confirm the status of reviews and clearer information they can share with applicants about what happens next.

That reduces uncertainty for applicants and removes avoidable status calls from the department’s workload.

6. Too much of the process lives in your best reviewer’s head

Experienced plan reviewers develop an enormous amount of institutional knowledge.

They know what to look for, which issues appear most often, how to explain corrections clearly, and which unofficial steps are required to keep a complicated review moving.

That knowledge becomes a risk when it belongs to one or two people rather than the department.

An electronic plan review system will not capture every piece of judgment an experienced reviewer has developed. It can, however, help turn common comments, code references, and review practices into shared resources.

A standard comment library makes frequent corrections easier to reuse. It helps newer reviewers learn. It also creates more consistency between reviewers and departments.

One retirement should not force everyone else to reverse-engineer how the plan review process works.

But for too many agencies still relying on paper and email, it could.

7. Reviewers write the same comments over and over

Most departments see the same deficiencies regularly.

A required document is missing. A detail has been left out. A familiar code issue appears again. A reviewer types an explanation they have already written dozens of times.

When reviewers recreate these comments from scratch, the department loses time and introduces unnecessary variation. Two reviewers may explain the same correction differently even when they are applying the same standard.

A shared comment library lets reviewers find common language and code references, adapt them when necessary, and produce more consistent correction reports.

The reviewer still makes the decision. The software simply removes the need to rebuild the explanation every time.

A comment library can also help department leaders understand which deficiencies appear most often. That information may reveal opportunities to improve applicant instructions, checklists, or intake requirements before plans reach a reviewer.

8. Nights and weekends are the only way to control the backlog

When reviewers regularly come in early, stay late, or use weekends to prevent the queue from growing, the department is solving a process problem with additional hours.

That may work for a short period. It is not a sustainable operating model.

Chronic overtime creates burnout and increases the risk of turnover in a field where experienced people are already difficult to replace.

The answer is not always to ask reviewers to work faster. It is often to remove the administrative work that prevents them from spending more of their time reviewing.

That includes printing and scanning plans, routing documents, locating files, checking versions, retyping common comments, combining corrections from different departments, and answering status calls.

Overtime should help a department manage an unusual spike in demand. It should not be a permanent step in the plan review workflow.

How to know it's time to consider electronic plan review

One of these problems by itself may not justify changing your entire process.

But when several are happening at once, they are probably not isolated annoyances. They are signs that the department lacks a shared system for managing plan review.

Reviewers are spending time locating and moving files instead of reviewing them. Applicants are calling because they cannot see what is happening. Leaders cannot easily measure workloads or identify bottlenecks. Important parts of the process depend on individual memory.

At that point, paper and email are no longer simply familiar tools. They are limiting how effectively the department can operate.

You may not need to replace your permitting system

Some municipalities delay electronic plan review because they assume it requires replacing every other system at the same time.

It does not have to.

A dedicated electronic plan review solution can work alongside an existing permitting system. The systems can be connected so permit information and plan review activity move through a coordinated workflow without requiring staff to manage everything through duplicate uploads and manual transfers.

Separating the projects can also make implementation more manageable. An agency can improve its plan review process without taking on a complete replacement of its permitting technology at the same time.

A useful first step is to document how plans move through the department today.

Where do files wait? Which handoffs are manual? What work gets repeated? Where do staff and applicants lose visibility? Which steps depend on one person knowing what to do next?

Those answers give the agency a practical set of requirements for evaluating electronic plan review software.

Final thoughts

Moving away from paper is not valuable simply because paper is "the old way of doing things." 

The reason to digitize is to give reviewers more time to review, give applicants clearer answers and better feedback, and give department leaders a process they can understand and improve.

If any of these signs resonate with you, we would be glad to show you what electronic plan review could look like for your agency—and how we can make it easy to move away from paper and email.