The final report, its conditions and the owner's decision

The final report is where a Performance Solution becomes part of the building. It records what was departed from, how compliance was shown, what the analysis found and, most importantly for the people who will own and run the building, what conditions must hold for the solution to remain valid. A well-written report can be read in ten years by someone who was not involved and still tell them what they must not change.

This chapter sets out what the NCC requires the report to contain, shows how to write conditions that can actually be kept, and finishes the running case. After the peer review in Chapter 9, the owner has a real choice: complete the Performance Solution with more design changes and a longer list of conditions, or move the stair and have none.

What the final report must contain

A2G2(4)(d) of NCC 2022 Volume One requires a final report that includes:

Figure 1Contents of a Performance Solution final report, NCC 2022 A2G2(4)(d)

A report that meets these headings can still be poor. The best reports also include the requirement register from Chapter 2, the agreed brief and its amendments from Chapter 4, the inputs with their sources, the sensitivity results with their margins from Chapter 7, the evidence register from Chapter 8, each Expert Judgement in its six-part form with the reliance placed on it from Chapter 9, and the peer reviewer’s findings with the responses.

Writing conditions that can be kept

Conditions are where good analysis is most often wasted. The running case’s first draft of the report contained this condition:

The fire safety systems are to be maintained appropriately and the mezzanine is to be used in a manner consistent with this report.

It sounds responsible and is almost useless. It does not say which systems, what “appropriately” means, what use is consistent, who must do what or how anyone would know if the condition had been broken. The certifier returned it, and the engineer rewrote it as a set of specific conditions. A useful test for each condition:

• Specific. It names the thing: “the smoke detectors on and under the mezzanine and the mezzanine alarm sounder”.
• Checkable. Someone walking the building, or reading a record, can tell whether it is met.
• Assigned. It is clear who must do it: the owner, the occupier, the maintenance contractor.
• Linked. It refers back to the part of the analysis it protects, so a future reader knows why it exists.
• Realistic. The business can keep it without heroic effort.

Conditions that pass these tests can be copied into the building’s fire safety records. In NSW, essential fire safety measures, including those that come from a Performance Solution, appear on the building’s fire safety schedule and are assessed each year for the owner’s annual fire safety statement.

The running case: two ways forward

This is an illustration. After the peer review, the engineer set out the two options for the owner.

Option 1: complete the Performance Solution. To make judgement 4 supportable, the mezzanine deck would be changed from particleboard to steel plate, and all tooling would be unpacked from plastic cases into steel storage. The Performance Solution could then be completed. Its conditions would be:

1. Smoke detection on and under the mezzanine, with a mezzanine alarm sounder, maintained and tested to its standard and listed among the building’s fire safety measures.
2. Whenever that detection is impaired, the mezzanine is closed to occupants, with a sign at the stair and an entry in the impairment log.
3. Only non-combustible items may be stored on the mezzanine: no plastic cases or packaging, no cardboard, no timber pallets, no packed export crates.
4. A 3 m clear zone at the stair foot, marked on the floor, kept free of combustible materials and stored goods.
5. Direction signs at every aisle junction on the mezzanine, maintained and visible.
6. The shelving layout on the mezzanine fixed as drawn; any change reviewed by a fire safety engineer.
7. No more than seven people on the mezzanine at once, and the mezzanine used only by trained staff, with contractors escorted.
8. A monthly documented inspection of conditions 2 to 7 by the operations manager.

Option 2: move the stair. Put the stair at the middle of the mezzanine’s south edge, which meets the DTS Provisions with the farthest point 18.5 m from the top riser. There is no Performance Solution and no conditions beyond those that apply to any DTS building. The cost is operational: the stair foot lands in the fabrication area, so a clear landing zone at its foot must be kept away from forklift routes, as part of normal housekeeping rather than as a code condition.

Figure 2The owner's choice after peer review

The owner’s decision

The owner chose option 2. The reasoning, recorded in the project file, is worth reading because it is the reasoning a Performance Solution process is meant to enable:

• The east-end stair was a convenience, not a necessity. Its operational benefit, a stair foot beside an exit and away from forklifts, could largely be recovered by marking a protected landing zone at the DTS stair foot.
• Option 1’s eight conditions would bind the business for the life of the building. Two of them, the storage ban and the impairment closure, would affect daily operations, and the storage ban would require changes to how tooling is received and kept.
• Option 1 would make any future change to the mezzanine harder. The owner was already considering converting the mezzanine into a quality office for inspectors, which would invalidate conditions 3, 6 and 7 at once.
• The analysis had done its job. It had shown, with numbers and reasons, what the east-end stair would cost to keep. That was the information the owner needed.

The engineer issued a short closing report recording that the Performance Solution had been investigated and not pursued, with the brief, the results and the peer review attached. That report has value too. If a future owner proposes the east-end stair again, they will find the work already done and the reasons it was set aside.

Counting the cost over the life of the building

Owners usually compare a Performance Solution with its DTS alternative on construction cost: the fire wall that is avoided, the stair that need not move, the sprinklers that are not installed. That comparison is incomplete. A Performance Solution also carries costs that recur every year: maintenance of any added systems, inspections against its conditions, the time of the person who keeps the records, the operational limits its conditions impose and the cost of review whenever the building changes.

The running case shows the pattern clearly. Option 1’s construction cost was modest: some detectors, a sounder, a steel deck and steel storage. Its recurring costs were the larger part: an annual assessment of added measures, a monthly inspection, an impairment procedure, a storage ban and a review gate for every change to the mezzanine. Option 2 cost a day of redesign and a marked landing zone. Counting the recurring costs, even roughly and without exact figures, made the decision straightforward.

Living with a Performance Solution

Many Performance Solutions do go ahead, and many are the right choice. For an owner who lives with one, three practices make the difference between a solution that stays valid and one that quietly lapses:

1. Put the conditions where people will see them. In the fire safety schedule, the maintenance contract, the induction for new managers and, where relevant, on signs in the building.
2. Make changes go through a gate. Any change that touches a condition, such as a new shelf layout, a different deck or a new use for a space, is reviewed against the final report before it is made.
3. Keep the report with the building. The final report belongs in the property records and passes to a buyer or a new tenant. A Performance Solution whose report has been lost is a solution nobody can check.

The common failure is not dramatic. A new operations manager, three years after completion, does not know why the mezzanine has a storage rule, finds it inconvenient and relaxes it. Nothing happens for years. The solution has nonetheless stopped being valid, and nobody knows. The practices above are designed to stop that drift. They cost little to set up at handover and a great deal to recreate once the people who understood the solution have moved on.

Reading someone else’s final report

Owners often inherit Performance Solutions when they buy or lease a building. A final report from years ago may be the only record of why the building is allowed to differ from the DTS Provisions. A short reading routine helps a new owner understand what they have taken on:

1. Find the departures. Which DTS Provisions were departed from, and where in the building?
2. Find the conditions. List every condition and limitation, and check whether each is still being met today.
3. Find the assumptions about use. What occupant numbers, storage, processes and hours did the analysis assume? Does the current use match?
4. Find the dependencies. Which systems does the solution rely on, and are they still installed, maintained and listed in the fire safety records?
5. Find the gaps. Is there a brief, a peer review, an evidence register? A report without them is harder to rely on, though not necessarily wrong.

If the current use or systems no longer match the report, the solution may no longer be valid, and the owner should take advice before relying on it. That is as much a due diligence question as a title search, and much cheaper to ask before settlement than after.

When a solution should be revisited

A Performance Solution is a judgement about a building at a time. It should be revisited, with the original report in hand, when:

• the use of the affected area changes, including its occupants, storage or processes;
• a system the solution relies on is changed, replaced with a different model or removed;
• the building is altered near the affected area, for example a new opening, wall or mezzanine;
• the code edition that applies to new work in the building changes in a way that affects the departed provision;
• an incident or near miss suggests the assumptions were wrong.

None of these automatically invalidates the solution. Each is a reason to check. The running case’s closing report, although no solution was adopted, lists the same triggers against the east-end stair proposal, so that anyone revisiting the idea knows what must be re-examined.

What this book has shown

The running case did not end with a Performance Solution. That is not a failure of the method; it is the method working. Each chapter added a piece of discipline: reading the requirement precisely, finding every requirement affected, building a fair reference, agreeing the brief before the numbers, choosing proportionate methods, calculating openly, testing sensitivity on the inputs that matter, evidencing every link, writing judgements that can be challenged and submitting them to review. Together, those steps turned an owner’s preference into a clear choice between two compliant buildings with different costs over time.

Figure 3Closing record for the running case

Exercise: test a future change

Suppose the owner had chosen option 1. Two years later, the stores manager proposes replacing the steel bins with plastic tote boxes because they are lighter and cheaper. Using the conditions above, explain what the owner should do.

Worked answer. Plastic tote boxes are combustible, so the proposal breaches condition 3, the restriction to non-combustible storage on the mezzanine. Condition 3 exists to support judgement 4, that a significant fire on the mezzanine is not credible, which in turn is what allows scenario D to be accepted despite the proposal’s 7.65 s longer escape time. Breaching it removes the basis on which the solution was approved.

The owner should not approve the change as a purchasing decision. They should refer it to a fire safety engineer, who would either confirm that it invalidates the Performance Solution, or assess whether some other measure could compensate. Realistic outcomes are to keep the steel bins, to move the plastic totes to a store elsewhere, or to relocate the stair to the DTS position so that the mezzanine no longer depends on the condition at all. Whatever the decision, it should be recorded against the final report and, in NSW, reflected in the fire safety records. The exercise shows why a Performance Solution’s conditions need a change gate: the most consequential decisions about them are often made by people who have never read the report.