Getting the databook table of contents approved at kickoff

A line that shows up in plenty of book specifications: submit the databook structure and table of contents for approval within some number of days of order. The customer wants to agree on the shape of the book before you build anything, which is reasonable of them and awkward for you, because at that point you have no documents. You have a document list and a specification.

Producing that approval copy by hand is a real deliverable with real hours in it. And it’s worth doing well, because the alternative is having the argument about structure at handover, when the book is built, the equipment has shipped, and restructuring means redoing the bookmarks, contents and pagination on a finished book.

The manual version

Work from two inputs: the customer’s book specification and your document list.

Build the table of contents in Excel. Sections in the specified order, numbered to the specified depth, and under each section the actual documents the order owes: their numbers, their titles, their tags. Resist the shortcut of listing document types instead of documents; a contents page that says “Section 4: Test Reports” gets a comment asking which ones, and the whole point of the exercise is to close those questions in week one.

Include the codes that don’t apply to your scope, marked the way the customer’s format expects, so the contents visibly answer their whole required list.

Then keep it alive. The document list moves in the first weeks of a project (change orders, clarifications, exceptions taken), and an approved contents page based on a stale list is an argument deferred, not avoided. Re-issue it when the list settles.

The trap in all this is effort: done properly it’s a day or more of careful work, at exactly the point in the project when setup is eating every hour you have. Which is why it often gets done thinly, and the structure argument lands at handover after all.

Where DocBoss comes in

The document list generally exists at kickoff, and in DocBoss the book’s full table of contents generates from it: the real documents, their numbers and their tags, in the customer’s layout, before a single file has been produced. Send that for approval and the structure argument happens in week one, when it’s cheap. If the customer wants to see the shape rather than the detail, the book can also generate as structure only, with no files in it. Either way, the kickoff deliverable stops being a day of careful Excel work and becomes a generate.

If your specifications carry a structure-approval clause, this is one of the quickest wins to see live.