Hold

The word carries two related instruments, and this glossary's intro warned you about words like this. On documents, a hold is a clouded area of a drawing marked HOLD, flagging content that is unresolved — awaiting vendor data, a pending decision, an unconfirmed interface — on a document otherwise mature enough to issue. The hold list is tracked, and each hold is a small debt: the drawing is usable everywhere except the one place it isn't.

In quality plans, a hold point is a stage in the work — before the concrete pour, before the weld is covered — past which the contractor may not proceed until a designated party has inspected and released it. Its softer sibling, the witness point, requires notification but allows work to continue; the hold point stops the job. The distinction is who bears the cost of proceeding: past a witness point, the inspector missed it; past a hold point, the contractor broke it.

Both instruments fail the same way — under schedule pressure. Documents get issued for construction with holds still open, transferring the unresolved question to the field; hold points get worked through with the release signature collected afterwards. In each case the mechanism functioned perfectly as paperwork and not at all as control.