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The Lifecycle
02

Delivery & Controls

The stage with the most reporting and the least clarity.

Projects Advisors. Reuse: https://projects-advisors.com/licenceReported progress against information producedReported progress climbs smoothly toward completion while the information needed to operate the asset lags far behind. The widening gap between them is unmeasured, and surfaces only after handover.Start on siteCompletionReported progressInformation producedThe gap nobody measures
Reported progress and the information needed to operate the asset are not the same curve.
01Inception02Delivery03Handover04Operations

Delivery is the most heavily instrumented part of the lifecycle. There are schedules, cost reports, risk registers, change logs, dashboards and steering committees. There is more information here than at any other stage, and it is frequently the stage where organisations are most surprised.

The reason is that project reporting measures conformance to a plan, not the health of the thing being produced. A programme can be green on every metric and still be accumulating problems that will not surface until it is operated.

Flyvbjerg’s dataset is the uncomfortable backdrop: nine in ten megaprojects exceed budget, the pattern holds across 104 countries and six continents, and it has not improved over the ninety years for which comparable records exist. Whatever is failing is structural, not local.

What typically goes wrong

  1. 01

    Progress is reported against a baseline that everyone privately knows is obsolete.

  2. 02

    Change is managed as a commercial event rather than as information about the design.

  3. 03

    Entitlement is accumulated rather than resolved, so a dispute is quietly manufactured during delivery and argued about years later.

  4. 04

    Risk registers list risks without anybody owning the decision each risk implies.

  5. 05

    Assurance is scheduled to arrive after the decisions it should have informed.

Questions worth asking

  • ?

    What would have to be true for this report to be wrong?

  • ?

    Which changes have altered how the asset will be operated, not just what it costs?

  • ?

    Are we tracking the production of information, or only the production of works?

  • ?

    What do the people doing the work believe that the reports do not say?

The seam that follows

Between delivery and handover, accountability transfers, and the party holding the knowledge stops being obliged to share it.

Writing on 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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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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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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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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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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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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Every stage, in one index

What to examine at delivery

6 domains from the assurance framework belong to this stage. Each names a question with a checkable answer and the published clause that requires it.

The 6 domains in full, with sources

This stage in the method

  1. Design basis control and design acceptance
  2. Controlled baseline, change, deviation and configuration
  3. Testing and commissioning
  4. Financial recognition and measurement
Asset lifecycle method

Tools for delivery

Each runs in your browser, computes from published rules, and prints a sheet that says which. Nothing you enter leaves the page.

Every tool, by stage

Terms this stage relies on

Every definition, in one index