Working documentation (the design/working split)

CIS jurisdictions split documentation into two codified stages. Design documentation establishes the project's substance — layouts, engineering solutions, cost estimates — in a regulated structure, and it is this stage that goes through state examination and grounds the construction permit. Working documentation is then developed from the approved design: the detailed drawings, schedules and specifications the site actually builds from, roughly analogous to detailed-design deliverables or construction documents elsewhere, but defined by its own norms.

The split has a consequence worth understanding: the examined stage and the built-from stage are different document sets. The working documentation must conform to the approved design documentation, and divergence between them — accumulated through detail development and field decisions — is a compliance question, not merely a coordination one, with re-examination triggered if the changes cross defined thresholds.

International projects stumble on the mapping. The two-stage split is close enough to FEED-then-detailed-design to invite one-to-one translation and different enough to punish it; content that belongs in one system's first stage sits in the other's second, and a schedule or contract built on the false equivalence misplaces both the review cycle and the freeze point.