Abstract
1. Introduction
2. Theoretical background on value and value management
3. Method
4. Findings
5. Overall discussion
6. Limitations and future research
7. Conclusion
Acknowledgments
References
Abstract
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-of-life 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 to deliver decommissioning projects with better performance.
Introduction
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 and Larsen, 2016; Tripathi and 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 end-of-life of infrastructure and to the process of withdrawing it from service, “clean” it and deconstructing it. For instance, in the nuclear industry, decommissioning is defined as “all the administrative and technical actions taken to allow the removal of some or all the regulatory controls from a facility […]” (IAEA, 2006, P.31–۳۲). For the sake of synthesis and simplicity, in this paper, the authors will use the word “decommissioning” to embrace all the terms mentioned above.