The British Standards Institution has issued a draft of PAS 1192-3:2014 for consultation. The PAS (publicly available specification) is a specification for information management for the operational phase (rather than the construction phase) of buildings and infrastructure using BIM.
The PAS is sponsored by the Construction Industry Council on behalf of the BIM Task Group and is intended to have all the uses of a British Standard to allow the standardised creation of systems of management, benchmarks, and codes of practice.
After two years from final publication, a PAS is reviewed and a decision on whether it should be taken forward to become a formal British Standard. We therefore might have a British Standard in 2016.
Key to the PAS are standards of organising and managing data and information through a mix of planned and unplanned events that may occur at any time, from taking over to disposing of a built asset. The general scheme of information management is:
- an asset management strategy that clearly sets out the intended policy and strategy for efficiently managing the asset;
- an asset management plan that defines the triggers (whether they be a planned timeline or unplanned events) for inputs into the asset information model (AIM);
- a detailed information management process (IMP) to ensure that the general organisational information requirements (OIR) and the specific asset information requirements (AIR) are fed into the asset information model.
From a contractual point of view the PAS looks to standardise no matter that there are a number of different structures of responsibilities for buildings. For example:
- develop, own, operate: the trick will be to ensure that the separate contracts the owner enters into with third parties to construct and then to operate the building ensure a consistent and continuous information management process;
- develop, own, let: this will need to ensure that the landlord’s responsibility to manage common parts marries with the tenants’ responsibilities and that tenants are obliged to continue to input to or maintain the landlord’s AIM;
- develop, own, sell: will a buyer attach a value in the sale price commensurate to the costs that the seller might expend in properly establishing an asset information model?
The relationships needed to establish an information management process will be dictated by which of these scenarios applies in relation to the intended ownership and responsibility for buildings. Those differing relationships will require differing contractual obligations and may stretch the standardisation that the PAS seeks.
By Assad Maqbool, a partner at Trowers & Hamlins specialising in projects and construction
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