# Projects Advisors

## Where projects become assets

> Independent writing on the project to asset lifecycle: how major infrastructure and built assets are conceived, delivered, handed over and owned. Project assurance and controls during delivery, operational readiness at handover, and asset registers, asset data and ISO 55000 in operation.

Projects Advisors is an independent, unattributed publication on the project to asset lifecycle.
It carries no advertising, sells nothing, and publishes no sponsored
material. Every figure and statistic on the site is attributed to a
checkable published source, and where a claim is contested it is
described as contested.

## Disambiguation

Several established firms use names close to "Projects Advisors",
including Project Advisor, Proj Advisors, Project Advisor Group,
Strategic Project Advisors, Cooper Project Advisors and Project Finance
Advisors. None is connected to this site. The phrase that identifies
this publication is the project to asset lifecycle: the ground between project
assurance, which is independent oversight of delivery, and asset
assurance, which is management of assets across their operating life.
Both disciplines are well established. The join between them is what
this publication covers.

## How this publication is organised

The whole site is built on one argument: a construction project is
temporary, the asset it produces is not, and most value is destroyed in
the seams between the four stages below rather than inside them. Every
article belongs to exactly one stage.

- [Inception & Development](https://projects-advisors.com/lifecycle/inception-and-development): Almost nothing has been built, and almost everything has been decided.
- [Delivery & Controls](https://projects-advisors.com/lifecycle/delivery-and-controls): The stage with the most reporting and the least clarity.
- [Handover & Transition](https://projects-advisors.com/lifecycle/handover-and-transition): The narrowest seam, and the one that determines the next three decades.
- [Operations & Asset Management](https://projects-advisors.com/lifecycle/operations-and-asset-management): The longest stage, and the one nobody planned for.

## Series

Most articles here are standalone arguments. These are not. They are
written to be read in order, and the order is stated because it is
itself the argument.

### Implementing ISO 55001

The 2024 edition of ISO 55001, one clause group at a time, in the order the dependencies require rather than the order the clauses are numbered.

  Introduction. [ISO 55001 tells you what to build. It will not tell you what to build first](https://projects-advisors.com/insights/iso-55001-will-not-tell-you-what-to-build-first)
  Part 1. [ISO 55001 now requires you to write down how you decide](https://projects-advisors.com/insights/iso-55001-now-requires-you-to-write-down-how-you-decide)
  Part 2. [A strategic asset management plan that has never stopped anything is a description](https://projects-advisors.com/insights/a-plan-that-has-never-stopped-anything-is-a-description)
  Part 3. [Every organisation has a risk register. Ask for the other one](https://projects-advisors.com/insights/every-organisation-has-a-risk-register-ask-for-the-other-one)
  Part 4. [The competence you need is not in the asset management function](https://projects-advisors.com/insights/the-competence-you-need-is-not-in-the-asset-management-function)
  Part 5. [Nothing tells you when a record stopped being true](https://projects-advisors.com/insights/nothing-tells-you-when-a-record-stopped-being-true)
  Part 6. [Knowledge has a departure date](https://projects-advisors.com/insights/knowledge-has-a-departure-date)
  Part 7. [Operational control now says life cycle management, which is a larger change than it looks](https://projects-advisors.com/insights/operational-control-now-says-life-cycle-management)
  Part 8. [You can place the activity outside. You cannot place the accountability there](https://projects-advisors.com/insights/you-can-place-the-activity-outside-not-the-accountability)
  Part 9. [Preventive became predictive, and most organisations cannot do the second](https://projects-advisors.com/insights/preventive-became-predictive-and-most-cannot-do-the-second)

## Articles

- [Completion describes the asset. Readiness describes the owner.](https://projects-advisors.com/insights/completion-describes-the-asset-readiness-describes-the-owner): Commissioning is the one handover instrument that tests rather than documents, and it tests the building against the owner's stated requirements. Everything on the other side of the boundary, whether the owner can actually run the thing, is examined by nobody, paid for by nobody, and on nobody's critical path. Lifecycle stage: Handover & Transition.
- [Doing the project right, and doing the right project](https://projects-advisors.com/insights/doing-the-project-right-and-doing-the-right-project): Almost every instrument the industry owns answers the first question. Estimating, cost control, scheduling, gateways, technical assurance, internal audit, all of them examine execution. Whether this should have been the project at all is settled once, early, by fewer people, and becomes progressively harder to ask. Lifecycle stage: Inception & Development.
- [Every appraisal can be right and the portfolio still wrong](https://projects-advisors.com/insights/every-appraisal-can-be-right-and-the-portfolio-still-wrong): The Green Book states plainly that the appraisal of a project does not need to justify its programme, and the appraisal of a programme does not need to justify its portfolio. That is correct, and it is also the reason the most consequential decision an owner makes has no instrument pointed at it. Lifecycle stage: Inception & Development.
- [Every programme performs well against a baseline it can move](https://projects-advisors.com/insights/every-programme-performs-well-against-a-baseline-it-can-move): A government builder completed thirty-six major construction projects and routinely met its cost and schedule goals. It had rebaselined twenty-five of them, and its reports did not say so. When asked why they had moved a baseline, four per cent of project managers gave their own cost or schedule performance as the reason. Lifecycle stage: Delivery & Controls.
- [For a year you operate an asset you have not accepted](https://projects-advisors.com/insights/for-a-year-you-operate-an-asset-you-have-not-accepted): At taking over the owner takes possession and begins operating. Acceptance does not happen until the performance certificate, typically a year later. In that window the contractor's insurance of the works has ended, the risk of loss has transferred, exposure to delay damages has stopped and the bond can release. Every commercial lever reduces at the moment the owner's exposure begins. Lifecycle stage: Handover & Transition.
- [The critical path cannot show a delay nobody scheduled](https://projects-advisors.com/insights/the-critical-path-cannot-show-a-delay-nobody-scheduled): A programme schedule is required to contain the owner's activities as well as the contractor's. Most contain only the contractor's, with the owner's approvals and decisions shown as single milestones or not at all. An incomplete network does not produce an approximate critical path. It produces an invalid one, and it is invalid in a direction that always favours the same party. Lifecycle stage: Delivery & Controls.
- [The largest contributor to optimism bias is the document that starts the project](https://projects-advisors.com/insights/the-largest-cause-of-optimism-bias-is-the-business-case): HM Treasury publishes uplifts by project type, from 24 per cent on a standard building to 200 on equipment and software. The instruction is to start at the upper bound and come down only against verified evidence. The single largest contributory factor it names is not the contractor, the ground or the weather. Lifecycle stage: Inception & Development.
- [Weighting and scoring is the method the guidance warns against](https://projects-advisors.com/insights/weighting-and-scoring-is-the-method-the-guidance-warns-against): The standard option appraisal is a table. Options down the side, criteria across the top, weights, scores, a total, a winner. The Green Book names that technique and recommends against it, on the grounds that it lacks an objective basis and reduces transparency. What it recommends instead does not rank options at all. It builds them. Lifecycle stage: Inception & Development.
- [Whether it was worth doing is the least evaluated question](https://projects-advisors.com/insights/whether-it-was-worth-doing-is-the-least-evaluated-question): The UK government reviewed evaluation across the 227 largest projects it runs, together worth £834 billion. A third have a plan capable of finding out whether they worked. Of the three kinds of evaluation, the one asking whether the benefits justified the cost is the weakest, and the reason is that it has to be designed before the project starts. Lifecycle stage: Inception & Development.
- [Your contingency and their contingency are different money](https://projects-advisors.com/insights/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. Lifecycle stage: Delivery & Controls.
- [A forecast that never moves is not stable, it is unexamined](https://projects-advisors.com/insights/a-forecast-that-never-moves-is-not-stable-it-is-unexamined): Delivery attracts more assurance than the other three stages combined and returns the least for it, because most of that effort measures progress against a baseline nobody has tested. Two numbers reveal more than a quarter of reporting, and both are usually available in an afternoon. Lifecycle stage: Delivery & Controls.
- [A gate that has never been failed is not a control](https://projects-advisors.com/insights/a-gate-that-has-never-been-failed-is-not-a-control): Assurance before anything is built costs less and changes more than assurance anywhere else in the lifecycle. It is also the assurance almost nobody buys, and the reason is not that owners are careless. It is that inception produces very little of the sort of evidence an assurance function knows how to examine. Lifecycle stage: Inception & Development.
- [A strategic asset management plan that has never stopped anything is a description](https://projects-advisors.com/insights/a-plan-that-has-never-stopped-anything-is-a-description): Clause 6.2.1 gave the SAMP its own requirement in the 2024 edition, and ISO strengthened the leadership clause in the same revision. The two changes belong together. A plan only allocates if somebody senior enough is willing to let it decline something, and most asset management plans have never declined anything in their lives. Lifecycle stage: Operations & Asset Management.
- [At handover, every review arrives after the leverage has gone](https://projects-advisors.com/insights/at-handover-every-review-arrives-after-the-leverage-has-gone): Assurance at this stage is triggered by the event that ends the ability to do anything about it. A review three months before taking over can still change what gets produced. The same review afterwards can only describe what is missing, and describing what is missing is not assurance, it is an inventory of the loss. Lifecycle stage: Handover & Transition.
- [Audited on the transactions, unaudited on the basis](https://projects-advisors.com/insights/audited-on-the-transactions-unaudited-on-the-basis): Where an internal audit function covers the asset base at all, it usually covers maintenance spend and procurement compliance, because those resemble the rest of the audit universe. The decision framework, the plan and the data go unexamined. The organisation ends up assured about how it spends and unassured about what it decided to spend on. Lifecycle stage: Operations & Asset Management.
- [Every organisation has a risk register. Ask for the other one](https://projects-advisors.com/insights/every-organisation-has-a-risk-register-ask-for-the-other-one): The 2024 edition separated actions to address risk from actions to address opportunities, which the 2014 edition ran together in a single subclause. That is not a drafting tidy. When one process has to serve both, loss avoidance wins every time, because it is the half with a committee, a template and an auditor. Lifecycle stage: Operations & Asset Management.
- [ISO 55001 now requires you to write down how you decide](https://projects-advisors.com/insights/iso-55001-now-requires-you-to-write-down-how-you-decide): Clause 4.5 is new in the 2024 edition and asks for three things, a decision-making framework, the criteria, and the methods. Most organisations have all three in the sense that people know roughly how things get settled. Very few can produce them, and an option appraisal nobody can audit is not a decision. It is a preference with a spreadsheet attached. Lifecycle stage: Operations & Asset Management.
- [ISO 55001 tells you what to build. It will not tell you what to build first](https://projects-advisors.com/insights/iso-55001-will-not-tell-you-what-to-build-first): The standard states in its own introduction that the order of its requirements implies no order of implementation. That is a defensible position for a standards committee and an expensive one for an organisation standing up an asset management function under compliance pressure, which is what a great many organisations in this region are now doing. Lifecycle stage: Operations & Asset Management.
- [Knowledge has a departure date](https://projects-advisors.com/insights/knowledge-has-a-departure-date): Clause 7.7 is new in the 2024 edition and it is the shortest requirement with the tightest deadline. Knowledge is held by people, people leave, and on a programme moving from delivery to ownership the people holding most of it are employed by somebody else and their contract is ending. Lifecycle stage: Handover & Transition.
- [Nothing tells you when a record stopped being true](https://projects-advisors.com/insights/nothing-tells-you-when-a-record-stopped-being-true): Clause 7.6 was pulled out of documented information in the 2024 edition and given its own requirement, reaching attributes, quality, sources, and the traceability between financial and non-financial data. It is the difference between holding a register and being able to defend one. Lifecycle stage: Operations & Asset Management.
- [Operational control now says life cycle management, which is a larger change than it looks](https://projects-advisors.com/insights/operational-control-now-says-life-cycle-management): ISO listed it among the main differences from the 2014 edition, in the flattest language available, as making clear that operational planning and control includes life cycle management. A committee only clarifies something when it has watched the point being missed, and this one has been missed almost universally. Lifecycle stage: Operations & Asset Management.
- [Preventive became predictive, and most organisations cannot do the second](https://projects-advisors.com/insights/preventive-became-predictive-and-most-cannot-do-the-second): ISO renamed Clause 10.3 and fully technically revised it, which moves the question from whether to intervene to when. That is a different discipline requiring condition data, a view of how things deteriorate, and a funding mechanism that can act before anything has failed. A great many organisations have none of the three and describe running to failure as risk-based. Lifecycle stage: Operations & Asset Management.
- [The competence you need is not in the asset management function](https://projects-advisors.com/insights/the-competence-you-need-is-not-in-the-asset-management-function): Clauses 7.1 to 7.4 read like human resources boilerplate and get skipped on the way to the interesting parts. They are where the system either becomes real or stays a document, because almost none of the decisions that determine asset outcomes are taken by people whose job title contains the words asset management. Lifecycle stage: Handover & Transition.
- [You can place the activity outside. You cannot place the accountability there](https://projects-advisors.com/insights/you-can-place-the-activity-outside-not-the-accountability): Clause 8.3 was renamed in the 2024 edition from Outsourcing to externally provided processes, products, technologies and services. The widening is deliberate and it captures a category of arrangement most organisations have never treated as outsourcing at all, which is why nobody is assuring it. Lifecycle stage: Delivery & Controls.
- [An estimate is a measure of how well the scope is defined](https://projects-advisors.com/insights/an-estimate-is-a-measure-of-scope-definition): Early cost estimates are produced as ranges and quoted as commitments. The classification systems behind them say something narrower and more useful. Accuracy is governed by the maturity of the scope definition, and the published ranges exclude the kind of project they are most often quoted at. Lifecycle stage: Inception & Development.
- [Programme risk is not the sum of its functions](https://projects-advisors.com/insights/auditing-a-capital-programme-while-it-runs): A capital programme does not simply contain larger versions of procurement, payment and resourcing. It creates chains that run through all of them, and a chain belongs to no function. That makes under-coverage a design problem in the audit plan rather than a question of materiality, and it has a method attached. Lifecycle stage: Delivery & Controls.
- [Engaging an engineer satisfies the standard. Deferring to one does not.](https://projects-advisors.com/insights/competence-on-a-capital-programme-audit): The 2024 Standards require an internal audit function to obtain the competencies it does not have, which most functions read as permission to bring in an engineer. That is the easy half. The obligations that decide whether the exercise was worth commissioning all start after the engineer has arrived. Lifecycle stage: Delivery & Controls.
- [You cannot buy an outcome you cannot specify](https://projects-advisors.com/insights/outcome-contracts-and-the-asset-management-system): Performance-based maintenance contracts move an owner from paying for activity to paying for a service level. That only works if the owner can already say what it owns, what condition it is in, and what keeping it there should cost. Where it cannot, the risk is not transferred. It is priced back. Lifecycle stage: Operations & Asset Management.
- [Accrual conversion gave three years. It did not give anyone a register.](https://projects-advisors.com/insights/accrual-conversion-and-the-asset-register): IPSAS lets a first-time adopter defer recognising its assets while it builds a reliable basis for measuring them. The relief is a runway. A programme procured to produce a valuation, rather than to build a function, arrives at the end of it with a number and no way to keep one. Lifecycle stage: Operations & Asset Management.
- [Handover is where the cost lands, and the Gulf is now taking delivery](https://projects-advisors.com/insights/what-handover-costs-the-people-who-inherit-it): The gap between what a contractor delivers and what an owner can operate has been measured properly once, twenty years ago and on another continent. Almost all of it fell on owners, after everyone else had gone. The region now holding the largest handover wave in its history has no equivalent number. Lifecycle stage: Handover & Transition.

## Definitions

Short, sourced definitions of the terms these articles rely on. Each
entry states what the term means and then how it is commonly misused,
which is usually the more useful half.

- [Estimate class](https://projects-advisors.com/reference/estimate-class): A label declaring how mature the scope definition was when an estimate was produced, and therefore how wide its expected accuracy range is.
- [Contingency](https://projects-advisors.com/reference/contingency): An allowance included in an estimate for the cost of risks that are expected to occur but cannot yet be identified individually.
- [TOTEX](https://projects-advisors.com/reference/totex): A regulatory allowance framework that combines capital and operating expenditure into a single allowance, so a regulated company has no financial reason to prefer building something over operating differently.
- [Operational readiness](https://projects-advisors.com/reference/operational-readiness): The process of preparing the organisation that will own an asset, and the people who will run it, to take it over and operate it from the day it is handed across.
- [Three Lines Model](https://projects-advisors.com/reference/three-lines-model): The IIA governance framework describing how management, risk and compliance functions, and internal audit contribute to governance, replacing the older Three Lines of Defence.
- [As-built records](https://projects-advisors.com/reference/as-built-records): The record of what was actually constructed, as distinct from what was designed, handed to the owner as a condition of taking over.
- [Asset management system](https://projects-advisors.com/reference/asset-management-system): The set of interrelated elements an organisation uses to establish its asset management policy, objectives and the processes to achieve them.
- [Strategic asset management plan (SAMP)](https://projects-advisors.com/reference/strategic-asset-management-plan): Documented information specifying how organisational objectives are converted into asset management objectives, and the role of the asset management system in delivering them.
- [Predictive action](https://projects-advisors.com/reference/predictive-action): Action taken to optimise the timing of an intervention on the basis of expected future condition, rather than in response to something that has already gone wrong.
- [Optimism bias](https://projects-advisors.com/reference/optimism-bias): The demonstrated, systematic tendency for project appraisers to be over-optimistic about costs, benefits and duration, corrected by an explicit empirically based adjustment.
- [Business as usual (BAU)](https://projects-advisors.com/reference/business-as-usual): The outcome expected if current arrangements continue and the proposal is not implemented, used as the benchmark against which every option is compared.
- [Do minimum](https://projects-advisors.com/reference/do-minimum): The option that just achieves the objectives and goes no further, carried on the shortlist to test whether more ambitious options are worth their additional cost.
- [Theory of change](https://projects-advisors.com/reference/theory-of-change): An explanation of how a proposal is expected to produce its intended outcomes, setting out the mechanism rather than asserting the result.
- [Baseline](https://projects-advisors.com/reference/baseline): The approved reference point for scope, cost and schedule against which performance is measured, and the thing every progress report implicitly assumes has not moved.
- [Taking over](https://projects-advisors.com/reference/taking-over): The contractual event under FIDIC at which the employer accepts the works, triggering the Defects Notification Period and, in the 2017 edition, requiring specified asset information to have been supplied.
- [Componentisation](https://projects-advisors.com/reference/componentisation): The breaking of an asset into parts that are recognised, valued and depreciated separately, because they have different useful lives.
- [Externally provided processes](https://projects-advisors.com/reference/externally-provided-processes): Processes, products, technologies and services obtained from outside the organisation that affect the achievement of its asset management objectives.
- [Benefits realisation](https://projects-advisors.com/reference/benefits-realisation): Establishing whether the outcomes a business case promised actually occurred, which requires measurement designed before the project starts.
- [Reference class forecasting](https://projects-advisors.com/reference/reference-class-forecasting): Building an estimate from the recorded outcomes of a class of comparable completed projects, rather than from a bottom-up view of the project in front of you.

## The assurance framework

https://projects-advisors.com/framework

What to examine on a capital programme, from the first estimate to the
asset register. 23 domains across the four
stages. Each names the question it settles, what to examine, and the
published clause requiring it. Where a domain rests on this
publication's reasoning rather than on a clause, the page says so in
place of the citation.

- [Inception & Development](https://projects-advisors.com/framework/inception-and-development): Need and outcome; The decision-making framework; Definition maturity and the estimate; Whole-life cost and the operating consequence; Information requirements, set before design; Sanction and the authority to stop.
- [Delivery & Controls](https://projects-advisors.com/framework/delivery-and-controls): Baseline integrity; Change, planned and unplanned; Forecast credibility; Externally provided processes and services; Interfaces between packages and functions; Competence of whoever is assuring.
- [Handover & Transition](https://projects-advisors.com/framework/handover-and-transition): Information transfer against stated requirements; Knowledge, as distinct from information; Taking over, and what was waived to achieve it; Recognition onto the asset register; Operational readiness of the organisation.
- [Operations & Asset Management](https://projects-advisors.com/framework/operations-and-asset-management): An asset management system that is scoped; The SAMP and the line back to organisational objectives; Asset data and its quality; Performance evaluation and internal audit of the system; Predictive action; Alignment of the financial and technical view.

## Reference points

The writing is anchored to published standards rather than private
methodology, and to their current editions. The standards referenced
most often are:

- ISO 55001:2024, asset management systems requirements, second edition,
  July 2024, which cancels and replaces ISO 55001:2014. New subclauses
  cover asset management decision-making (4.5), the strategic asset
  management plan (6.2.1), planning of changes (6.3) and knowledge
  (7.7); data and information (7.6) is substantially revised; and
  preventive action is renamed predictive action (10.3)
- ISO 55000:2024, asset management vocabulary and overview
- ISO/TS 55010, alignment of financial and non-financial functions;
  ISO 55011, public policy to enable asset management; ISO 55012,
  people involvement and competence; ISO 55013, management of asset data
- PMBOK Guide, Eighth Edition, November 2025, six core principles and
  seven performance domains including governance and finance
- ISO 21502:2020, guidance on project management
- Global Internal Audit Standards, Institute of Internal Auditors,
  effective 9 January 2025
- AACE International RP 18R-97 and RP 56R-08, cost estimate classification
- FIDIC 2017 Sub-Clause 10.1, taking over and the Defects Notification Period
- IPSAS 33, first-time adoption of accrual basis IPSAS
- ISO 19650-3, information management during the operational phase

## Citation and licence

Articles are unattributed by design, so the correct citation is to the
publication and the page, not to a person. There is no author to name,
and the absence of a byline is an editorial choice rather than an
absence of rights.

Reading, indexing, summarising and answering questions from this
material are intended uses. What is asked in return is attribution:
name the publication and cite the page. Reproducing an article in full,
in place of it, is not a summary.

Full terms: https://projects-advisors.com/licence

## Contact

Corrections and disagreement are welcome and are published:
https://projects-advisors.com/contact

## Machine-readable indexes

- Sitemap: https://projects-advisors.com/sitemap.xml
- RSS feed: https://projects-advisors.com/feed.xml