Readiness is not a final-weeks activity
By webmaster · · 6 min read
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The National Audit Office put it in one sentence in 2020, and it has
not needed revising. Bodies “often underestimate the complexity of
bringing a programme into use and may not begin planning for operations
until the programme is nearing completion.”
That is from Lessons learned from Major Programmes, HC 960,
published on 20 November 2020. The lesson it sits under is headed
“Consider operational planning from the start”. The NAO was not
proposing a reform. It was describing what it kept finding.
The
plan of work you already work to disagrees with you
Before treating early readiness as a counsel of perfection, look at
what the standard model actually says.
The RIBA Plan of Work 2020 puts commissioning of the building in
Stage 5, among the construction core tasks, not after it. Its template
carries a line across the handover columns: “Building handover tasks
bridge Stages 5 and 6 as set out in the Plan for Use Strategy.” Stage 7,
use, “starts concurrently with Stage 6”.
Plan for Use is one of the Project Strategies, and its listed Stage 1
tasks include setting out “the requirements for Post Occupancy
Evaluation, handover and Aftercare, maintenance and Facilities
Management within the Project Brief”. Stage 1 is preparation and
briefing. That is before there is a design, let alone a building.
RIBA also names the failure directly. Under Stage 6 it records a
common misapplication: “As a project nears completion, there is a
tendency for the construction team to be focused on finishing the
physical aspects of the building, and on certifying Practical Completion
in order to conclude Stage 5, possibly at the expense of handover
activities to ensure that the client can use the building
optimally.”
So the late-readiness habit is not a pragmatic departure from an
idealistic standard. The standard anticipated it, named it and marked it
wrong. Anyone arguing that readiness planning at Stage 1 is premature is
arguing against the plan of work their own consultants are appointed
under.
The squeeze is a
diagnostic, not a recovery
Here is the part worth taking personally.
The NAO lists behaviours “indicating that a programme’s schedule and
deadline are becoming increasingly unrealistic”. One of them is
“shortening the time allotted for operations and systems testing at the
end of the programme schedule”. Elsewhere it names “the temptation to
squeeze the time allotted for operational and systems testing to make up
for delays that have occurred earlier in the programme”.
Read the framing rather than the content. The compression is not
filed as a regrettable but sensible response to delay. It is filed
alongside persistent re-planning to meet the same deadline and
last-minute attempts to bring a programme into use in stages, as a sign
that the date is going.
Most of what is on that list is a decision rather than a drift, and a
decision needs someone senior to approve it. A schedule does not
compress itself, and on your programme that signature is probably
yours.
What the
compression actually bought on Crossrail
The NAO’s own worked example is the one to put in front of a board,
because it closes the loop from haste to cost.
Reporting its findings from Completing Crossrail, the NAO
records that “decision-making in the latter stages of the project was
dominated by achieving a fixed completion date, and some of these
decisions drove unnecessary cost into the programme”. Two of those
decisions are worth naming. There was “an attempt to meet the schedule
by carrying out construction and systems testing in parallel when few
meaningful test results could be acquired, taking time and space from
construction workers on site”. And “Crossrail Ltd reduced the number of
people in its risk management team in anticipation of completing the
programme and then had to re-hire personnel when it became clear that
significant work remained”.
Look at what the time bought. Testing ran early and produced few
meaningful results, so it was not testing. It took time and space from
the trades, so it slowed the construction it was meant to overlap. The
risk team was cut on the strength of a completion that had not happened,
then rebuilt. None of that is a trade of quality for speed. It is
expenditure with nothing on the other side of it.
What starting early
looks like in practice
The strongest current answer is the Department for Education’s Soft
Landings Guide, published in January 2026. It applies to DfE-delivered
schemes using the DfE Construction Framework 2025, so it is not your
regime unless you are a school or a college. Read it anyway, for what it
puts at the front.
The process runs from RIBA Stage 0. The Stage 0 key activities
include appointment of the Employer’s Representative and “the
compilation of lessons learned from other DfE centrally delivered
projects and/or Responsible Body self-delivered projects to inform this
project”. An Employer’s Soft Landings Champion, the DfE project director
or project manager, is “identified at the outset of a project”.
That is the whole of the beginning. Name someone accountable, and
read what went wrong last time. It requires no design and no budget
certainty, which removes the usual objection that it is too early to
think about operations. The Government Soft Landings guidance published
by the Centre for Digital Built Britain in 2019 makes the commercial
case in one line, at principle 7: planned and timely training “reduces
the cost of protracted handover”. Its principles 9 and 10 give the shape
of the other end, initial aftercare “typically six to eight weeks
following handover” and extended aftercare “typically three years”.
What this does not give you
Three limits, and the first one governs the rest.
There is no number. No published UK figure exists
for what late operational readiness costs. The NAO establishes the
behaviour and the mechanism, and Crossrail shows cost being driven in,
but nobody has priced the habit across the sector. Anyone who quotes you
a percentage is estimating and should be asked whose study it is.
The evidence base is central government. HC 960 is
about major programmes. The DfE guide is England, schools and colleges,
and one framework. If you run an NHS trust, a university or a council
estate, you are not in these populations, and nothing here evidences a
position in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland. The argument
generalises because the mechanism is about schedule pressure rather than
sector, but that is reasoning, not evidence.
And it does not create the time. If the programme is
late, it is late, and readiness planning at Stage 1 does not retrieve a
date that construction has already lost. What it changes is which weeks
are available to give up at the end, and whether the decision to give
them up reaches you as a recommendation or as a surprise.
