Quality Labeling and Where To Draw The Line

Introduction

All roadway projects for the Departments of Transportation look the same at first glance. Each project has the same looking title sheet with their plan sheets in the same organization as all the others. Every state has their own sheet borders and blocks. Eventually, with enough paper cuts, you can flip through a plan set and argue you’ve seen them all. Now, that is hyperbolic, sure, but it can be a feeling we all get after a few years.

There are several things that shock a sleeping man out of his monotonous plan review; the one I want to discuss is how the labeling looks. Nice labeling on a plan set is a large advantage that engineers set their concentrations on in order to stand out of the crowd. I say nice because that is what you hear coming from central command. “Make it look nice.”

This subject is a fascinating piece to stop and look at. There are many wonderful truths in the idea; however, many saw this advantage turn into a budget buster. A time waster. A lost cause. So then, what is nice? When do I stop trying to make it nicer? When is it nice enough? I will share with you how I think it ought to be defined as well as some of common pitfalls. Hopefully we can maintain the advantageous hill and keep the cart before the buggy.

Stay With Me Here

Stay with me here as I start going. It takes a moment and I do not want to dilute what needs pointing out. The lazy way to explain this all is to say, “there is a balance in how we handle labeling,” as I wave my hands like an Italian as I emphasize balance. That statement, however vaguely true it may be, usually assumes labeling effort is a dichotomy with only two ways to fall. One side is no effort on labeling and the other too much effort on labeling. In the introduction, I called labeling an advantageous hill. There are several sides of a hill to fall off of and only one way to stay on it. I will package that up for you to take to-go:

A Quality Labeling Illustration

Let us re-brand the words nice labels into something of a fancier class. Let us use Quality Labeling. If it were a house and we looked inside one of the side windows, so as to not rouse suspicion of nearby onlookers in the streets, we would see tidy rooms with furniture arranged in a meaningful way. We would start to suppose that the furniture was arranged to compliment each other rather than to compete for attention. There would not be chairs equally spaced from each other nor would the forks on the table be perfectly rotated to the same angle. We conclude the house and its insides are quite admirable and then we step away before someone catches us being weird and make for the street again with our hands in our pockets, whistling a tune.

There are some houses nearby, envious of how well that one neighbor decorated their home in the newest shabby-chic-farmhouse-meets-boho style, who try to decorate their furniture in the same nice manner. As we return to the street with no one aware of our previous trespassing, we overhear the redecorating, and it is quite the commotion. One of those cartoon moments when the house jerks this way and that way. We look inside some to see all the chairs not arranged around tables, but in one solitary row. The forks are all at the same angle and their spoon and knife counterparts are perfectly spaced 1 inch apart. Suddenly, an apple-sauce-soaked child darts through a room and places a hand on one of the chairs. Someone shouts, “Now I have to rearrange all the chairs again, Hank!” But we do not find out who it was before we dart back to the street.

Some people in this neighborhood are quite human in their home layouts and others are psychopaths.

I could extend this amusing illustration but I would have found that I was only amusing myself at the expense of the reader. Oh well.

A Recipe Card

I want to explain some of the concepts that were in that illustration. Quality Labeling is not perfect but it is pleasing. Here is a list containing what is in the potpourri:

1. Spacing from each other with no overlapping text or crossing leader lines
2. Legibility without the need to rotate your head like a dog listening for a mole
3. Consistency in text size, font, and line weight
4. Distinction in style for different types of labels
5. Wisdom to place labels near features or grouped on a table if it clutters a page
6. And something the box calls Natural Flavoring

The First Slope: Too Much Time

The first slope of this hill that many fall off of is the time aspect. This is what happens when you leave the potpourri on the stove too long and it starts to burn. Concentrating too much of the project budget for labeling is a real pitfall for us. It is right to say that Quality Labeling adds value to the project. You will find me on your side, wearing your team jersey. After a certain point in time though, tweaking the labeling no longer adds any value to the project but instead adds even more work when design adjustments are made.

The Second Slope: Poor Definition

Another slope others fall off of looks unsuspectingly slippery but if you start up the hill on this side, you will greatly risk falling off. This is when the term Quality Labeling is defined poorly from the beginning as just make it look nice. This is not a standard that others can look at and understand what the end product looks like. Newer recruits will be forced to learn only by personal mistakes, which is not wisdom. Learning from others before you is wisdom. I can take a sharp left here and talk on this till the next New Moon but I will restrain myself for now. In addition to the aimless new recruits groping blindly for what nice might mean, more experienced folks have no milestone to control themselves when they blaze the budget in a quest for the nicest plan set they have ever made. “All my labels are at a perfect 35.5 degree skew. Surely, these are the nicest the team has ever seen! Ah shoot, the last label will not fit at that angle. Let’s go back again and try a 37 degree skew! Then they will be ultra nice!”

That slope is dangerous because there are no clearly defined milestones. If you knew when you have achieved Quality Labeling, then you would have stopped and moved onto something else in the project, thus adding more value you otherwise would not have had time for! If you knew what Quality Labeling was, then you could have stopped your nice crusade before you sacked Constantinople itself. Without a milestone, only an engineer’s digestion tells them when they are done with the labels!

The Third Slope: A Standard Too Brittle

On the third slope, folks voluntarily choose to tumble down and take several others with them. This is when the standard for Quality Labeling is inflexible. A leader may call for all leader lines to be at a specific angle and reject any plan set that does not have all their leader lines in perfect order. Another may see a well placed label clearly pointing at a feature and mark it up because it is closer than 5 units to a nearby label. This pitfall is to have no variation in the most minimal of things at the cost of the projects budget and team resources.

This idea works best in the car making industry where there is an actual assembly line. For the regular roadway team though, every team member labels things slightly differently and not in a bad way either. There are many more important things such as design decisions that the team ought to be doing with minimal variation between each other. It would seem wasteful here then for a leader to spend much time and energy on making sure everyone always maintains a specific spacing of labels and skew angle of leader lines.

Mere Quality Labeling

Quality Labeling is not a compromise of quality. I am arguing that there is a need for a set of clear concepts that declare what makes a label good while avoiding any unyielding rules on specific details such as skew angles. Like all aspects of a project, Quality Labeling needs to be timely executed in a way that requires minimal rework or minimizes risk of rework if something changes down the line. I think if we considered adopting Quality Labeling, then our plan sets would always look professional and of high-quality. Budget and energy would move to more value-creating tasks like QAQC of design elements. Team morale would be saved from the 3rd set of check set reviews about labeling. “These labels still do not feel right. It’s just not nice yet. Keep trying!”

Actions for Teams

Here are some actionable items for teams when they want to determine their own idea of what Quality Labeling is:

1. Make a 1-pager describing what your plan set labels ought to have. (See Recipe Card section of this post)
2. Grab an example plan sheet with no labels, have the whole team label it on their own and share the results together. Go through each of them and point out what is and is not acceptable.
3. A slight variation of step 2 but have team members markup each other’s plan sheet while having the 1-pager next to them.
4. Find or make a terrible example plan sheet and have the whole team mark up what they think is wrong.
5. Have self awareness when you are asking for a vague quality like nice. Likewise, when being told to make it look nice, catch it, and ask for clarity of what that means. Do not let a vague vibe be the rubric to what makes a plan set great.

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