The lift plan is complete. It has been reviewed, approved and signed off, the crane is ready and the team understands what is expected. On paper, everything is in place.
A lift can be well planned on paper, but the reality on site can still be different. By the time the team is ready to carry out the job, conditions may have changed, access may be tighter than expected, other activity could be affecting the lift area or the load may not behave exactly as anticipated.
A good plan should give the team a clear picture of how the lift is intended to be carried out before the crane starts moving. It should help everyone understand where the main risks are, what controls need to be in place and, just as importantly, when the job in front of them is no longer the job that was originally planned.
The questions that shape the lift
Before a lift begins, there are a lot of practical questions that need to be worked through. Where is the load coming from and where is it going? Is there enough room to position the equipment safely? What else is happening in the area? Are the exclusion zone and access arrangements suitable? Can everyone involved see and communicate with the people they need to? Is the lifting equipment right for the load and the planned configuration? And is anything different from the last time the lift was carried out?
None of those questions is particularly complicated, but in my experience they are often where the most useful discussions begin.
A task may look routine because it has been done many times before, but the conditions are rarely identical. The equipment might be different, the work area may have changed, conditions may have moved on or there may simply be different people involved on the day. Familiarity is useful, but it can also work against us. When something has been done many times before, it becomes easier to assume that today will be the same as yesterday. The aim is not to make straightforward lifting work unnecessarily complicated. It is to make sure assumptions are picked up early, while there is still time to do something about them.
One thing I would encourage teams to do is test the plan before the lift starts, rather than simply confirm that it has been reviewed and signed off. Ask three simple questions:
- What has changed since we planned this lift?
- What are we assuming will go as expected?
- What would make us stop and reassess?
In my experience, it is often the assumptions that are worth spending a little more time on, because they are the things we can easily take for granted.
Everyone involved should also be clear that they can stop the job if something does not look or feel right. Stopping a lift to check something is not a failure of the plan. Quite often, it shows that the planning and briefing have worked.
The people closest to the job often see the most
Some of the best input into a lift plan comes from the people who are actually going to carry out the work. Crane operators, lifting supervisors, banksmen, slingers and others involved in the task will often see practical issues that are difficult to pick up from a drawing, photograph or procedure.. They may know that visibility is poor from a particular position, that access becomes restricted at certain points or that a load is likely to behave differently once tension is applied.
I have seen plenty of examples where a simple question from someone on the team has changed the way a lift is approached. It might look like a minor point on paper, but it can be obvious to the person who actually has to make the lift work on site. Input should be encouraged, not treated as a challenge to the person who prepared or approved the plan. Nobody involved has the full picture on their own, and the quality of the final approach usually improves when the people closest to the task are part of the discussion.
That discussion also helps confirm something equally important: that everyone understands their role, the communication arrangements, the lift sequence, the exclusion zone and what is expected if the lift does not progress as planned.
When the job does not go exactly to plan
Even with good preparation, there will be occasions when something changes once the team is ready to start.
Weather can deteriorate. Access can become restricted. Another activity may affect the lift area. Equipment might not be positioned as expected. Visibility or communications may be poorer than anticipated, or the load may respond differently once it is picked up. You cannot predict every possible scenario, nor should you try to. The important thing is that the team understands the lift well enough to recognise when the situation in front of them is no longer the one they planned for.
At that point, the right decision may simply be to stop.
The team can then make the area safe, bring the right people back together and decide what needs to change. That could involve repositioning equipment, changing the lifting arrangement or sequence, introducing additional controls or revising the plan altogether.
Where the change affects the approved lift plan, load path, equipment selection, configuration, risk assessment or agreed controls, it should be formally reassessed and the lift plan amended and reapproved as required before work continues.
One thing we need to be careful of is allowing an approved lift plan to create the impression that all of the decisions have already been made. Approval confirms that the proposed lift has been assessed and accepted based on the information available at the time. It does not remove the need to think once the team gets to the job.
If conditions have changed, the fact that the paperwork has been signed off should never become the reason for carrying on.
More than a completed document
There is good reason for the level of planning and documentation required around lifting operations. It gives structure to the job, records important decisions, identifies the equipment and controls required and provides a common reference point for everyone involved.
But the real test is not whether the lift plan has been completed and signed off. It is whether the people carrying out the lift understand the job, know their roles, have challenged the assumptions and can recognise when something has changed enough to stop and reassess.
Before the load leaves the ground, have we genuinely thought this lift through — and does what we see in front of us still match what we planned?
