The demo is always the same. Someone spins a federated model on a big screen, clicks a fire door in the corridor on level six, and a snag attaches itself to the door. Not near it. To it. The door knows it has a snag, the snag knows which door, and when you filter the model by open items the door glows. It is a good demo. I have sat through it several times and I liked it every time.
Then I think about the fit-out foreman who has to use it on Tuesday.
What object-based snagging actually needs
Object-based snagging means the snag hangs off a thing in the model, a door, a basin, a riser, rather than off a place. For it to work, three things have to be true on your job, and all three, not two.
There has to be a model, at the level of detail where the door is its own object with its own ID. It has to be kept current through construction, so the door in the model is the door that was hung, not the one from the tender set before the hardware schedule changed. And the person snagging has to be able to find that object on a phone, in a corridor, faster than they could write "L6 corridor, door 6.14, closer not adjusted".
On a hospital or a data centre with a digital engineering lead and an owner who is paying for an asset model at handover, that can all be true. On a forty-unit residential job, a townhouse development, or a fit-out, it almost never is. The model stopped being maintained around the time the steel went up. Half the trades never opened it.
Snag the room, not the object
For most builders, snagging should hang off the room, because the room is the thing everyone on site already agrees on. The owner knows which is their ensuite. The tiler knows which is unit 1204. Nobody has to open anything to understand "Level 12, Apt 1204, Ensuite, silicone missing behind the vanity".
A room is also stable in a way an object is not. Doors get swapped under a variation. Basins get replaced with a different model after a supply problem. The ensuite in 1204 stays the ensuite in 1204 from frame to settlement and through the defects liability period after it.
And a room works when the model does not exist, which on most jobs is the whole argument.
How we do it
IssuesId does not attach snags to model objects. There is no BIM viewer in it, and I would rather say that here than have you find out in a demo.
What it does is give every project a location tree: building, level, apartment, room, up to five deep. You do not have to type it. Scan drawings reads the room names off a PDF floor plan and suggests the tree, and you fix what it misread before anything is created. "Bedrrom 2" is exactly the kind of thing to expect from a hand-annotated plan.
Then a snag is logged against a room, and if the room is not precise enough, you drop a pin on the drawing. The pin sits on that revision of the drawing. When rev D comes out, the pins placed on rev C stay on rev C, so you can always see what the snag was pinned to at the time. Pin colour follows the snag's status, so a foreman looking at a marked-up plan sees open work without reading anything.
Put a QR label on the door frame of a plant room or a common area and scanning it drops you into that location, offline if the room has no signal, which the rooms worth labelling usually do not.
Where the object view is genuinely better
Rough edge, stated plainly: if your client is taking an asset model at handover and wants every open item tied to an asset ID, a room-based register does not give you that for free. You can carry the asset reference in the snag's description or classification and filter on it, and people do, but it is a text field, not a link to an object in a model.
If that is your job, look hard at the model-based tools and ask them to demo it with the model you actually have, at the level of detail you actually have, on a phone. If the demo only works on their sample model, you have learned something.
The test
Take your last snag list, the real one, the spreadsheet or the PDF from practical completion. Count how many items were described by room and how many by object ID.
On every list I have looked at, it is almost all rooms. That is the language the site already speaks. The software should speak it too. The snagging software page shows the walk from room to trade to sign-off.