In Depth

Bridging construction to operations: prioritise the asset

Justin Stanton

Editor, DC+

16 June 2025

By focusing on the asset, all parties on a project can bridge the gap between construction and operations.

Abstract image of a smart building — Image: Aliaksandra Salalaika | Dreamstime.com

If clients, their advisers, designers and contractors focus on the lifecycle of an asset to be built, the handover process that bridges the gap between the asset’s construction and its operation will deliver a better outcome. That was the key point made by former Government Property Agency CEO Steven Boyd MBE during a debate at Digital Construction Week (DCW).

Boyd was part of a panel session, ’Bridging the construction to operations gap with digital soft landings’. He was CEO of the Government Property Agency from 2019 to 2023, and prior to that, he was director of estates at HMRC for four years. Before that, he spent a decade procuring and managing both construction projects and existing assets for the British Army.

There were other excellent speakers in the debate, chaired by Lucas Cusack, strategic lead for asset management at Glider Technology, but here DC+ focuses on Boyd’s answers to Cusack’s questions.

Cusack: what is the single biggest information challenge preventing a smooth handover from construction to operations?

Boyd: I’m super frustrated about the failure to hand over from construction to operations, and super frustrated about talking about it again. I think the major challenge is cultural. We tend to think about activities: we talk about construction, we talk about design, we talk about facilities management. I’m less interested in the activities and more interested in the asset. The one thing that’s continuous, from end to end in the lifecycle, is the asset. I’m keen to focus on the asset rather than activity.

“We talk about construction, we talk about design, we talk about FM. I’m less interested in the activities and more interested in the asset.”

Steven Boyd

The second thing I'd say, from a cultural perspective, is that the client needs to buy into what it wants to do. Unfortunately, most clients [procure] new infrastructure rarely, so they need their designers and their tier one contractors to step up and advise them appropriately – and advise them particularly about the form and the function of data. We’re swilling around in data, loads of it. But what’s it for? And therefore, what structure does it need to have?

If you’ve got an understanding of what it’s for and a good structure, and you’re focusing on the asset rather than the activity, those cultural challenges will help to put this [issue] to bed, and hopefully in a very small number of years, we won't be having this conversation.

Who’s responsible for ensuring the operational information isn’t just captured but also usable?

It’s a straightforward answer. It’s the client or asset owner’s responsibility to ensure that the requirement is clearly set out in contracts. But that’s a challenge for many clients to do, so it’s difficult to lay the blame entirely at their door. Designers and strategic advisers have the opportunity to advise how those contracts for subsequent lifecycle stages should be set up – and generally, that advice is too vague.

Designers tend to say, “oh, follow this standard”. Follow 19650, for instance. That’s not clear enough. That only takes you halfway there, you need to be more specific.

Digital soft landings explained

In his intro to the session, Cusack briefly explained his vision for digital soft landings.

“It’s about taking the tasks and responsibilities within the soft landings framework to ensure information is explicitly defined at its point of creation and delivered seamlessly. I’m talking about data to enable the transfer of knowledge. It’s about proactive information management, not just a reactive handover,” he said.

“To bridge the gap we need this seamless data transfer, this knowledge transfer to engage teams from both sides at critical decision points. We need input from design and construction in the design construction phase, from the operational team, and we need to onboard the operational team at various points.

“We want to blur the line of capex and opex and continue to grow this wedge of information and capability in actually managing the asset. My hypothesis is that the integration of digital information capture, verification and delivery practices within a structured, soft landings framework is not just beneficial, but essential for unlocking the full operational potential and value – especially in the context of achieving a truly smart building.”

But I think the real opportunity is for the fit-out contractors and the tier one contractors in that they have historically done their bit to practical completion, and then there’s the runaround [to hand over information at the last minute], and they then run for the hills. They have a real opportunity to offer additional value to the client: “Here's our value-add offer number one, we will hand you over, not just project information, but also a good-to-go asset register that your FM supplier can use from day one.”

Value-add offer two is: “We won't run for the hills at PC. We will stay around, not just for the warranty period, but for the first two years of operation, and we will make sure that what we’ve delivered, from fabric through the BMS, via sensors, delivers what it said it was going to deliver. And we will save you a lot of money by doing that.”

More foresighted contractors can think about giving those value offers, and clients will buy them.

What are the key commercial barriers we need to break down to enable a change?

The cultural barrier is a big element. But there are also commercial and financial barriers. And financial is possibly the biggest one of those two. First, from a commercial perspective, we tend to have very sequential contracts, and we rely on the goodwill of the various players in that sequential chain to interface with the people before and after [in the chain]. That requirement to work together across multiple stages, not just within an individual stage, should be baked into contracts.

The second thing that should be baked into contracts is the data standards to be used. And as I mentioned before, referring to an ISO standard or a British Standard is great, but it doesn’t go far enough. The industry, all of us, have a responsibility to help develop more consistent end-to-end, structured data standards, so the same standards can be used at each stage of the lifecycle. And I’m really encouraged to see some good early work on that – more power to the elbow of the people involved.

If we really want to focus on the client, I’m going to pick out the chief finance officer, because a lot of the decisions that are made in the construction project to operations handover are related to “is this opex or capex?” Capex tends to be seen as good spend because you're getting a new shiny thing. Opex tends to be seen as overhead and “we don't want that”.

I come back to the asset: it's the same asset that's been invested in with capex, and then [operated] with opex down the line. The CFO, if she or he can be brought to the light, can see how they can save a lot of money by taking a whole-life perspective.

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