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Insights

Writing on what happens between building something and owning it.

Structural rather than anecdotal. Each piece belongs to one stage of the lifecycle and examines one recurring failure, with the reasoning shown rather than asserted.

Projects Advisors. Reuse: https://projects-advisors.com/licenceHow the writing is organisedFour lifecycle stages stacked vertically with the three seams between them marked. Every article is filed under one stage.01Inception & DevelopmentSeam02Delivery & ControlsSeam03Handover & TransitionSeam04Operations & Asset Management
Every article is filed under the stage it mainly concerns, and some carry their argument across more than one. The writing builds into a single argument rather than a pile of posts.
019

Inception & Development

0217

Delivery & Controls

0312

Handover & Transition

0416

Operations & Asset Management

Or enter by what you are answerable for: the role entry points gather this writing behind the standard an auditor, an accountant or a cost controller already works under.

Operations

What capital figures record, and what they leave elsewhere

Gross fixed capital formation records the fixed assets acquired in a year, less disposals; in plain terms, investment spending. It does not measure what an asset is worth, what has been completed or what has entered service. Across the asset's lifecycle, its operation, maintenance, information, replacement and eventual disposal are governed and recorded under different rules, in budgets, registers, contracts and accounting records. What the figures show, what they cannot show, and where to look for the rest.

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Delivery

An extension of time is tested against records made during the delay

A claim for more time turns on three separate questions. Was the contract's notice procedure satisfied? Is the event one for which the contract allows an extension, or whose risk it otherwise places on the employer? Did it actually delay completion? Money is a separate claim, with its own proof of causation and amount. Each question is later tested against what was written down while the event was happening, by whichever party has to prove the point. Records do not create entitlement, a record of an event does not prove that it delayed completion, and the prevention principle does not rescue a claim under every contract or every governing law.

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Handover

A delivered file is not an accepted record

A handover contract can test that the information arrived and that the Engineer had no objection to it. That proves receipt. It does not prove that the data passed a schema, that its identifiers reconcile with the finance and maintenance records, or that the receiving system can run a transaction on it. Those are three further tests, and where a contract's information conditions end at delivery and absence of objection, each can fail while those information obligations are performed in full.

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Inception

Operations is told to take part in the business case. Nobody asks it to sign.

Business case method already asks for the operating cost and for affordability across the asset's life, and EXPRO's business case procedures, built on HM Treasury's guide, ask for both. What the documents reviewed here do not ask for is a record that the unit which will run the asset has accepted the operating estimate as a claim on its future budget. The capital sum has an approver. The running cost has a description and a statement of support.

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Handover

The project crosswalk reaches capitalisation. What survives it?

NASA requires a project work breakdown structure to correlate exactly through seven levels to the financial accounting structure, and EXPRO's cost and commitment procedure reconciles the project cost report to the corporate general ledger on a named form with a named owner. Both requirements are scoped to the project. The Saudi Ministry of Finance's asset manual then has finance allocate the project's cost to assets and components at capitalisation. None of the public documents reviewed here says the project's identifiers stay on the asset record after that.

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Delivery

Every award rule makes you publish the weighting. None makes you defend it.

The WTO agreement, the UNCITRAL Model Law and the EU directive all require the relative importance of the evaluation criteria to appear in the tender documents. None says what the weighting should be, and the Model Law's own commentary calls it discretionary. All three specify the arithmetic completely in exactly one situation, an electronic auction, where a machine does the ranking. Meanwhile a 70/30 split under the World Bank's own price formula prices one technical point at 3.4% of the contract and puts a 30 point quality lead beyond the reach of any price at all.

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Delivery

Private projects overrun too. The difference is who counts.

Government projects are said to run late and over budget while private ones finish. The first study to test ownership statistically found privately owned bridges and tunnels escalated more than publicly owned ones, and its authors called the conventional view an oversimplification. What differs is not the outcome. It is who is counted, and what a private owner has that a public one does not, which is structure rather than virtue.

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Delivery

The payment chain is a loan, and the contractor is the lender

A monthly certificate under Saudi Article 109 takes 80 days as the regulation is written, 86 on a real calendar with every office on time, and 128 if one payment order is returned at the wrong moment. On a programme of 1.2bn a year that is 283m to 421m of the contractor's own money standing in the project permanently, borrowed at the contractor's rate, and priced back into the tender. No rule names it, and nothing in the chain prices it.

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Delivery

Reliability can be specified like mass. Building owners do not.

The committee that writes the world's dependability standards says reliability should be specified the way dimensions and mass are. Rail has had a published process for specifying and demonstrating it since 2002. The buildings sector's reference specification for what a contractor hands over asks for the manufacturer's projection of how many hours a repair will take, and never how often one will be needed.

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Delivery

A dashboard computed from your own beliefs is not information

The test for any instrument on a capital programme is whether its output contains something the inputs did not. A rule applied, a calculation done, a source consulted. A rating a team gives itself contains none of these, and colouring it does not add one. One public dashboard has carried both kinds side by side since 2009, and an auditor has re-rated the self-assessed column and published the result.

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Operations

Conformance is not maturity, and the body that says so is selling nothing

Twelve national asset management societies agreed a position statement that says conformance to ISO 55001 may not deliver the value stakeholders want. It names four levels and publishes the characteristics of a mature organisation. It says it is not itself an assessment tool, points to companion guidelines for assessing maturity, and expects each member society to write its own detailed guidance. An owner is better off knowing whose scale produced a maturity score than buying the first ladder they are offered.

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Operations

Nobody will give you a deterioration curve

Three global bodies govern how infrastructure is meant to be maintained, and each publishes the shape of the calculation without the numbers that make it run. ISO gives a seven-factor equation and says it will not tell you the factors. The World Road Association's free manual on deterioration models is two paragraphs long and points you at your own records. The owner is told the curve decides when to intervene, and is handed no curve. The organisation that solved this owns 165,000 buildings, and it did not find a curve. It built something that generates one.

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Handover

The evidence finance needs is in a file finance never sees

Accounting asks one question at handover, whether the asset is capable of operating as management intended, and answers it with a certificate written for a different purpose. The document that actually tests capability, against the owner's stated requirements, with dates and measurements, is the commissioning file. The two are produced for different purposes and routed to different functions, so they do not meet.

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Handover

Under FIDIC, taking over comes before acceptance

Under FIDIC 2017, taking over and contractual acceptance of the works are separate. At taking over the owner takes possession and may begin operating; Sub-Clause 11.9 makes the Performance Certificate the document that constitutes acceptance, and it follows a Defects Notification Period of one year unless the Contract Data states otherwise. A general law-firm summary lists what can change at practical completion or taking over: the contractor's insurance of the works ends, the risk of loss transfers, exposure to delay damages stops, and, where the contract provides for it, retention and the performance bond can begin to release. Where they do, much of the hold on the contractor loosens just as the owner's exposure begins.

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Delivery

Your contingency and their contingency are different money

Two bodies an owner is likely to cite define contingency and management reserve in opposite directions. One says contingency is for unknown unknowns and sits with the owner. The other treats it as the allowance for what experience says will happen. Both are defensible, and an owner and a contractor using the word across a table are frequently discussing different money, held by different people, against different risks.

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Correspondence

If something here is wrong, that is worth more than agreement.

Material errors are corrected on the affected pages. Messages are used to reply, not to build a mailing list.

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