The principal approved it. She left six months ago.
In a 90-person consultancy running 30 active engagements, decisions walk out the door with the people who made them. Scope agreements, technical sign-offs, fee variations — made by senior staff who are no longer there to explain them. 132 Decide keeps the decision when the person leaves.
Regional environmental & civil consultancy
An 88-person environmental and civil engineering consultancy. 4 principals, 12 senior engineers, 72 technical staff. 32 active projects ranging from $80K site assessments to $4M remediation programs.
"We had a client come back on a remediation project 14 months after completion. They disputed a technical assumption we made in year one. The senior engineer who made that call had left the firm. We spent three weeks reconstructing the reasoning from project files and emails. We never fully explained it."
Decisions leave with people
Technical assumptions, scope interpretations, and fee arrangements are held in the heads of senior staff. When they leave, so does the institutional memory. The firm inherits the risk without the context.
Principals are the only bottleneck
Every significant technical or commercial decision routes to one of four principals. They're already billing 55 hours a week. Decisions queue. Projects stall. Clients wait for answers stuck in a principal's inbox.
Scope creep is invisible
A senior engineer agrees to an additional site visit. A project manager accepts a client's schedule compression. A fee variation gets verbally agreed on a call. None of it is documented until the write-down at invoicing time.
Decisions that outlast the people who made them
Every significant technical decision — a methodological assumption, a scope addition, a risk acceptance — is captured in a structured memo. The memo documents the context, the technical rationale, the risk, and who approved it. That record stays in the platform long after the engineer moves on.
The SME input feature is particularly valuable for consultancies. When a project engineer isn't sure about a contamination assessment call, they request expert input from a principal or specialist without halting the project. The request, the response, and the reasoning are all attached to the decision record permanently.
Requesting expert input on interpolated plume extent between BH-7 and BH-11. Data gap of 40m with only one intermediate borehole. Does our current assumption hold for regulatory submission?
Given the hydraulic conductivity data from BH-9 and the groundwater gradient, the interpolation is defensible within 15% uncertainty. Conservative assumption is appropriate. Recommend noting uncertainty band in report Section 4.3. This is approvable.
Technical Assumption — Contamination Plume Boundary, Northfield Site
From institutional amnesia to permanent memory
Decisions stay when people leave
Every technical decision — the assumption, the rationale, the expert input, and the approval — is archived permanently. When a client questions the methodology two years later, the reasoning is in the platform.
SME input on the record
Request expert input from a principal or specialist without halting the project. The question, the response, and the technical note are permanently attached to the decision — not buried in a Slack thread.
Principals stop being bottlenecks
Authority levels route decisions to the right person. Senior engineers handle their scope. Principals see only what needs principal sign-off — with full context already assembled when it arrives.
Keep the decision when the engineer moves on.
$550 pilot — your firm configured, your projects set up, your users onboarded. Running in 48 hours. Then $250/month — all projects, unlimited users.