A Methodology Based on Benchmarking to Learn Across Megaprojects: The Case of Nuclear Decommissioning

2021

IEEE Eng. Manag. Rev.

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The vast majority of projects deals with their "front-end", i.e. the planning and delivery of new assets, goods and services, including building infrastructure, developing new drugs, and coding software. However, more and more projects need to deal with their "back-ends", such as decommissioning infrastructure, withdrawing dangerous drugs from the market and eliminating malign software. While the "front-end" of projects, and organizations involved in projects, have been empirically investigated for millennia (and academically for decades), the "back-ends" of projects is a novel field with extremely limited practical and academic knowledge. The management of "back-end" projects are peculiar since it lacks traditional project motivations (e.g. usually there is not cash flow at the end of a "back-end" project), the stakeholders are different (e.g. drug addicts and not patients), and the organizations involved might have very different agendas (e.g. criminal organizations). This paper discusses the relevance and peculiarities of "back-end" projects, providing key insights to manage them.

Section: For Instance Within the Construction Industry Benchmarking Interests Have Risen Because Bymentioning

confidence: 99%

Is Your Organization Ready for Managing “Back-End” Projects?

2021

IEEE Eng. Manag. Rev.

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“…NDPs due to their complexity and variety of their design, the legal requirements to decommissioning them, the stakeholders involved, etc. However, lessons from benchmarking NDPs can still be learned, but benchmarking needs to firstly be adapted to the context of NDPs (Invernizzi et al 2018a).…”

Section: Decommissioningmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Then, these statistical tests are applied on European NDPs; results are presented in section 3 and discussed in section 4; section 5 highlights the limitations of this analysis, while section 6 concludes the paper, paving the way for future research. Invernizzi et al (2018a; presented a selection of benchmarking studies both in the nuclear and nonin the last decades, and that a number of different benchmarking processes are presented in the literature (e.g. see (Anand & Kodali 2008)).…”

Section: Decommissioningmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

An exploration of the relationship between nuclear decommissioning projects characteristics and cost performance

Invernizzi

Progress in Nuclear Energy

Brookes

2019

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“…The majority of project management research has investigated the planning, design and delivery of construction projects and megaprojects (Pitsis et al 2018;Locatelli et al 2017;Lindhart & Larsen 2016;Tripathi & Jha 2018), and only limited and recent attention has been given to the end-of-life of infrastructure (Invernizzi et al 2018a). Decommissioning, dismantling and removal refer to the endof-life of infrastructure and to the process of withdrawing it from service, "clean" it and deconstructing it.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Applying value management when it seems that there is no value to be managed: the case of nuclear decommissioning

Invernizzi

International Journal of Project Management

Gronqvist

et al. 2019

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The vast majority of project management literature relating to infrastructure focuses on the project lifecycle up to commissioning and handover. Conversely, little attention has been paid to the end-oflife of infrastructure, i.e. when decommissioning begins. Infrastructure decommissioning projects are long and complex projects, involving an extensive network of stakeholders. Moreover, their budgets can reach hundreds of billions of Euros and, for many of these projects, keep increasing. Since decommissioning projects do not generate direct revenues, they are often considered an expensive nuisance with limited value linked to their delivery. This paper explores the use of Value Management (VM), examining the constraints of decommissioning projects and the requirements for successful implementation of VM, focusing on the nuclear industry due to its techno-socio-economic relevance.Findings derived from the application of content analysis on semi-structured interviews with experienced decommissioning practitioners include suggestions on how to implement VM, ultimately contributing to increase the knowledge on how deliver decommissioning projects with better performance.