19650 is changing: are we ready for what it’s asking us?
14 April 2026
19650 review: the major project perspective part 1
14 April 2026
The first revision of ISO 19650 since 2018 promises a unified, whole lifecycle information management process. For the teams delivering the UK’s most complex infrastructure – nuclear, rail, highways – the changes bring genuine improvements and significant unresolved risks in equal measure, says Lawrence Chapman in the first of three features.
The 19650 revisions land at a moment of heightened scrutiny for major infrastructure delivery. The Infrastructure and Projects Authority’s (IPA) annual reports have repeatedly identified information management failures as a contributing factor in programme cost overruns and schedule slippage. The Get It Right Initiative’s (GIRI) research puts the direct cost of avoidable errors and rework in UK construction at over £20bn annually – a figure driven significantly by poor information quality, inadequate information exchange, and the misuse of information across complex supply chains.
Against this backdrop, a revision to the foundational information management standard matters far beyond the standards community.
The headline change in Part 2 is the absorption of ISO 19650-3:2020 – the operational guidelines document – into a single unified standard. The result is a nine-step information management process that runs from organisational strategy through project completion, spanning the entire asset lifecycle rather than the delivery phase alone. This is conceptually the right direction. Major programme practitioners have long argued that information management cannot be treated as a project-phase activity: the decisions made during feasibility and early design about how information will be structured, governed and handed over to operations are among the most consequential and the least reversible.
The terminology overhaul is also significant. The BIM Execution Plan is now the information production plan. The Master Information Delivery Plan is the information production schedule. Exchange Information Requirements have become information production requirements. These are not cosmetic changes – they reflect a deliberate attempt to broaden the standard’s applicability beyond the design-and-construction community that originally shaped it, and to anchor every document in the information management process rather than in a specific project phase.
Part 1’s redefinition of the CDE as an ‘operational framework’ rather than a technology system is another meaningful shift. The 2018 edition’s CDE definition had become increasingly difficult to apply as major programmes inevitably deployed multiple, federated technology environments. Recognising the CDE as a framework of principles and workflow states, rather than a single platform, reflects how major programmes actually operate.
Where the changes get it right
The shift to purpose-led information
The most substantive intellectual contribution of the revised Part 1 is the elevation of ‘information purposes’ to the foundation of the entire process. In the 2018 edition, the information requirements served as the starting point. In 2026, for information purposes, the business reasons for which information is needed come first, and requirements flow from them.
This is not merely terminological. It represents a fundamental reorientation from a document-production mindset to a decision-support mindset. This matters enormously for major programmes. The Major Projects Association’s research on the root causes of programme failure consistently identifies a disconnect between the information that programmes produce and the information that decision-makers actually need. When information requirements are specified without reference to the decisions they are meant to inform, the result is the phenomenon GIRI describes as “too much of the wrong information and not enough of the right”: vast volumes of documentation that do not reduce uncertainty or enable better decisions, while critical decision-support information is missing or arrives too late.
Accountability at activity level
The revised Part 2’s position of assigning every information management activity to a named party, rather than to a team, is a significant improvement in accountability architecture. On major programmes, diffuse accountability is a structural risk. When an information management activity belongs to a ‘delivery team’ rather than to a specific party type, it tends to belong to nobody in practice. The new assignment model, reinforced by the requirement to establish an information management assignment matrix using RACI principles, creates clearer lines of responsibility that can be embedded in appointment documents and held to account.
The information production requirements framework
Clause 5.4.2 of the revised Part 2, establishing information production requirements, is the greatest single improvement in the document. The five-part structure requiring the appointing party to define what information is needed, at what level of information need, against what acceptance criteria, with what supporting information and by what dates, creates a discipline that was conspicuously absent from many major programme information strategies.
GIRI’s research identified ambiguous or absent acceptance criteria as one of the most common proximate causes of information rework. This clause, properly implemented, directly addresses that finding. The recommendation that information production requirements be provided in machine-readable format, enabling automated compliance checking, is forward-looking and points toward a near future in which Information Delivery Specification files become the standard vehicle for specifying and validating information requirements on major programmes. For programmes at the scale of Sizewell C or the Lower Thames Crossing, where the volume of information production makes manual compliance checking impractical, this capability is not optional: it is essential.
Positive impacts
- Purpose-led information requirements reduce wasteful over-production.
- Whole lifecycle framing supports IPA Programme Routemap alignment.
- Activity-level accountability closes responsibility gaps in complex supply chains.
- Machine-readable information production requirements recommendation enables automated QA at programme scale.
- Structured capability and capacity assessment improves appointment quality.
- Preliminary review mechanism (Clause 5.8.5) reduces late-stage information rejection.
- Explicit lessons-learned requirement supports continuous improvement.
- CDE-as-framework enables federated multi-platform environments.
Part 2 of Lawrence Chapman’s 19650 feedback will be published on Wednesday 15 April.
The opinions expressed are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the views of his employer.
The deadline for feedback on the 19650 review is 3 May. Read the draft of the revised Part 1. Read the draft of the revised Part 2.
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