A snagging list records the defects found before handover. Its value is entirely in the timing — the same defect is a five-minute fix before completion and an argument afterwards.
A snagging list is the record of defects and unfinished items identified when work is inspected before handover — doors that catch, paint runs, missing seals, sockets that do not work, tiles laid short. It is produced by the client, their surveyor or the contractor’s own supervisor, and it exists because the moment of practical completion is the last point at which the incentive to fix things is on someone else.
That timing is the whole point. Before handover, the outstanding items are the contractor’s obligation and there is retention money against them. Afterwards the same items become a defects-liability negotiation, and the ones nobody wrote down become yours.
A snagging list fails on ambiguity more than on omission. If the contractor cannot find the item from the description, it comes back unfixed and the exchange costs both sides a week. A photograph attached to the entry, plus a room name and a position within the room, converts a disputed item into a work instruction. It also settles the argument that matters later: whether the defect was present at handover.
A defect is not the same as a snag caused by later use or by normal drying and settlement. New buildings crack slightly as they dry, and disputes over hairline cracking are routine. Photographing the state at handover is the only thing that separates the two categories afterwards.
The list is a work queue, not a document — each item has a status, an owner and a date, and the point of the exercise is getting every one to closed with evidence. A board with a column per status and a card per item is the natural shape: Ettex Board tracks the items to closure with the photographs attached, Ettex Forms collects them on site as they are found rather than from notes typed up afterwards, and Ettex Records keeps the issued list, the re-inspection and the sign-off as the file you can produce if the retention is questioned — the same file the handover document should point at.
Directly: none of this is a substitute for a professional pre-completion inspection where the value at stake justifies one, and the rights you have at handover come from your contract and your jurisdiction, not from the list. What the list does is make sure that whatever those rights are, you can exercise them on a specific item with a date and a photograph.
A numbered record of defects and unfinished items found on inspection before handover, each with a location, a description and normally a photograph.
Before practical completion or handover, while the incentive and the retention still sit with the contractor. A second inspection near the end of the defects liability period catches what emerged in use.
Fixing the items is the contractor’s obligation under the contract. An independent inspection is usually commissioned and paid for by the client.
In practice they overlap; a snag is usually a minor finishing item and a defect a failure of workmanship or materials. The distinction matters mainly for which contractual route resolves it.
Almost everything that goes wrong at a company event was decidable weeks earlier. A checklist ordered by deadline rather than by category is what turns the last week from firefighting into confirmation.
Most OKRs fail in the writing, not the doing. An objective nobody can picture and key results that are really a task list produce a document reviewed twice and abandoned by week six.
KPIs tell you whether the business is healthy. OKRs describe what you are trying to change. Teams get into trouble by turning healthy numbers into quarterly targets, which is how the routine work quietly stops.