Trends

From shared drive to single source of truth

The real incumbent in design management is not Aconex, Asite or any other platform with a sales team. It is Excel, running on a shared drive, and it deserves more respect than software people give it. The register workbook is brilliant: flexible, instantly understood by everyone on the job, shaped over years to exactly the fields the work needs. The problem was never Excel. The problem is what happens to a workbook the moment a project starts moving.

The disease of divergent copies

It starts innocently. Someone needs the register while a colleague has it open, so they save a copy. The QS exports a version for the valuation. A package manager keeps a personal one "just for joinery". Within a month there are five registers, every one of them slightly different, and the question "what revision is the level two ceiling plan at?" has five answers. The register says P03; the folder says P04; the truth is in someone's sent items. A register only one person can safely edit is a register that is already out of date.

Why the heavyweight platforms did not fix it

The enterprise CDEs solved document storage and transmittal, and they solved it well, at a price set for Tier 1 head offices. But they still expect you to author the register, the TIDP and the programme yourself, then maintain them inside someone else's silo. For the design manager the daily experience barely changed: the spreadsheet just moved, and now your data lives in a warehouse you rent and your IT department gets nervous about. Storage was never the bottleneck. Authoring and upkeep were.

What a single source of truth actually means

It means one master record per deliverable, with everything else as a live view of it. The TIDP, the programme view, the dropline Gantt, the drawing registry: projections of one spine, never copies that can drift. Change the record once and it is right everywhere, in every count and every KPI, instantly. Add controlled picklists so statuses come from a list rather than someone's keyboard, generate document numbers from the naming convention rather than typing them, and let overdue flags raise themselves. That is Excel's superpower with Excel's disease cured.

And it should live where your files already live

The quiet second half of the fix: the documents themselves should stay in your own Microsoft tenant, in a CDE folder structure that makes sense, governed by the IT policies you already have. The single source of truth is the register spine; the files it points at never need to leave your SharePoint. When the platform writes the workbook back through Microsoft Graph, even the commercial team who will never leave Excel keep their xlsx, fed from the spine instead of feeding the disease.

That is the architecture dpow.app is built on: one live register as the spine of the job, every view a projection, your documents in your tenant, and the whole structure generated from your contract documents on day one rather than rebuilt by hand from the last job's files.