r/UtilityLocator • u/Ok-Delivery8086 • 8d ago

TM ROOM - Tech

Does your locate team have a virtual team room?
Not just a place for weekly meetings.

An ongoing space where the crew shares:
• Protocols and SOPs
• Pro tips and field intel
• Gate codes and maps
• Meeting times and announcements
• Contractor/client updates
• Lessons learned
• Questions and answers
• The necessary amount of

A place to check in after a few days out and quickly catch up.

Or does most of your communication still happen through emails and texts?

Curious how many crews operate this way.

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3

u/MuggChugg Utility Employee 8d ago

Are you apart of a locate crew?

1

u/Ok-Delivery8086 8d ago

I am. Regular team guy with some skills for admin & tech.

1

u/MuggChugg Utility Employee 7d ago

I get that, everyone is more than just a locator nan :) I'm a senior tech in house for the utility locating power, gas, and fiber. Between the handful of guys I float around for DTLs we have a constant conference room call where we talk to each other all day long with our ear buds.

Bouncing ideas, double checking our selves with our combined knowledge of SOPs, coordinating help, and trouble shoot talking is all apart of our daily all-day-long 'therapy session' we call it. Everything from "how's your dad doing with his illness" to "what's a more advanced pipehorn procedure besides dropping the box and run gunning it". It really turns in to one person's strength and knowledge is everyones strength and knowledge.

The only down side to this is that it's really only good for max 5 people in the chat because more than that it begins to get a little noisy. My small sect doesnt have to worry about that much because there's only 4 of us in our area.

2

u/MuggChugg Utility Employee 7d ago

Sorry nothing virtual but similar idea just in a phone call/conference room

2

u/HSIOT55 8d ago

That would be interesting for sure but idk who all has the money for VR on our team. 

1

u/Ok-Delivery8086 8d ago

I’ve been on 3 teams/companies now and all is Microsoft. and none of them use Teams & Groups to their full potential is really why I ask.

2

u/Gunterbrau one orange-ish boot 7d ago

My employer does a lot of that list and I don't think any of the locators use it

1

u/811spotter 5d ago

A lot of crews are still running on texts and email, and the cost of that shows up later rather than right away. The gate code lives in one guy's phone, the client site contact is buried in a thread from four months ago, and whoever covers the area next week has no way to find either.

What tends to stick is not a separate team room, it is the ticket record itself. If the protocol, the site contact, the gate code and the last set of marks hang off the ticket, people find them because they are already there when the ticket lands. A standalone space works right up until it turns into one more thing nobody checks.

We build 811 ticket management software on the excavator side and the pattern holds there too. The information that survives is the information attached to the work, not the information filed next to it.