Conventions first, because everything after them is written to obey them

The order of the sections

1. Conventions. How ports are numbered, how sockets are labelled, how a device is named, which colour of patch lead means an uplink and which means an ordinary run. Each one is given with an example taken from this building rather than from a manual.
2. The register. Every counted item on one line, in the five categories, under the names the conventions section just defined.
3. The elevation. The cabinet drawn unit by unit, each one labelled for what it does rather than for what is printed on its front, with the spare units left as outlines.
4. The accounts. Each login written against the person who uses it or the purpose that needs it, and the unowned ones listed by name.
5. The dates. Every renewal on one page in date order, so one sheet answers the question the whole of the rest of the document cannot.

Named for what it does

A unit in the elevation is labelled as a patch panel of twenty-four ports, an eight-port switch, a router, a shelf, a power strip. It is not labelled with a model, a product line or a manufacturer, for two reasons that both matter. The first is that the person reading the document in a year wants to know what the unit is for, and the model number answers a different question. The second is that equipment gets replaced with something else of the same kind far more often than its job changes, and a record written around the job survives that swap without being rewritten.

The same discipline runs through the register. A line reads as the thing it is and the place it sits, which is what somebody standing in the room needs in order to agree or disagree with it.

Every record carries the day it was last true

A record without a date is a claim about the present made by somebody who has left the building. With a date it becomes something far more useful: a claim about a particular day, which can be checked against the room and either confirmed or marked stale. That single habit is what makes coverage measurable at all, because a count of records is meaningless until you can say how many of them still describe what is there.

The coverage sheet on the standing index works that figure through: the records held against the items counted, the ones describing something that has since changed, and the number still to be written to reach a stated level. A document that knows which of its own pages have gone out of date is the difference between a record and a reassurance.