Field notes › Compliance
When a client adds a new ticket requirement halfway through a contract
Halfway through a contract, an email lands from the client's safety team. From a date not far off, everyone on site needs a ticket or an extra induction that wasn't part of the job when you priced it. Sometimes it follows an incident on site, sometimes an audit finding or a change at the principal contractor. Either way, a crew that was fully compliant yesterday may not be compliant on the day the change takes effect.
Pin down exactly what has changed
Before counting who is affected, get the requirement nailed down. What is the exact name of the ticket or induction, and will the site accept an equivalent? Does it apply to everyone through the gate, to certain roles, or only to particular tasks and shifts? From what date, and is that a hard stop at the gate or something they plan to phase in?
Vague requirements cost money. A line saying everyone needs working at heights might mean every worker, or it might mean the people who work on one part of the plant. Train the whole crew when the site meant a few roles and you have paid for a misunderstanding. Get the answer in writing, from someone at the site who is actually able to make the call.
Find out who falls short
Next, work out who on the current crew already holds it, who holds something that might count, and who has nothing. If your competency records are in good shape that is a quick filter. If they're scattered across spreadsheets and email attachments, this is where you find out, and the answer takes days. Include the people rostered for later swings who aren't on site today, and anyone you tend to send as cover.
Look past whether a ticket is recorded to whether it is current and verified. A requirement that suddenly matters is a good moment to find the certificate that was uploaded months back and never checked, or the one that expires a fortnight after the new rule starts.
Agree the transition, and who pays for it
With the list in hand, go back to the client. How long do you have to close the gap, and can people who are booked into training keep working on site in the meantime, or does the site want them off from the start date? A transition window is a reasonable thing to ask for, particularly where course places are hard to get in regional areas. What you want to avoid is agreeing a window over the phone and then having the gate enforce a different date.
Then there's the cost. Course fees, wages for time spent training, travel to get there and cover for the shifts people miss all add up. Whether that sits with you, the client or the worker depends on your contract and the employment arrangements, and a requirement introduced mid-contract is a fair basis for a conversation about it. Read the contract before you have that conversation, and get advice where the employment side is unclear. Don't let the default be that you absorb it because nobody raised it.
Stop rostering people who no longer qualify
The quiet risk is the roster you've already built. Shifts after the effective date were crewed under the old requirement, and nothing about those bookings changes because an email arrived. Unless someone goes back through them, a worker without the new ticket turns up on the first day it applies and gets sent home, or gets waved through by a gate that hasn't caught up.
In Mustr, requirements can be set per client site, per role and per individual shift, so a site-wide ticket goes on the site and a task-specific one goes on the role or the shifts where it applies. Every booking is checked on the server when the worker is assigned, so once the requirement is added, anyone who doesn't hold it current and verified can't be booked where it applies, and the reason is shown on screen. Shifts crewed before the change were booked under the old rules, so go back through those by hand.
For the workers doing the course, uploading the certificate from their phone camera puts it straight onto the office's to-approve list. The ticket can be checked and verified the day they have it, instead of waiting for paperwork to find its way back to the office.
There's more on how site, role and shift requirements are set on the compliance page, and if the exercise shows your records need rebuilding, building a competency matrix that survives contact with reality is the place to start.