A Practical Framework to Facilitate the Presence of Operation and Maintenance Contractors in the PreOccupancy Phases: A Case Study

Abstract

Infrastructure projects -as the vital lifeline of countries for their economic development and public welfare- are increasing rapidly. With population growth, the demand for constructing these projects has also increased. In addition, volumes of investment, early destruction, and duplications in these projects have increased their significance. Previous surveys show that costs of Operation and Maintenance (O&M) stages in projects are more than other stages, so this phase needs more attention. There are a lot of reasons for such increases in costs, most of which is due to weakness of O&M in projects. One of the effective measures in this regard, is the presence of contractors in the initial stages of the project, in order to benefit from their experience to reduce problems. The aim of this project is presenting a framework to facilitate the presence of O&M experience and knowledge in the early stages of design and implementation of road infrastructure projects. In this qualitative study, data has been collected through a case study method. In the existing literature, the researcher has identified barriers and solutions to the presence of O&M contractors, through using meta-synthesis approach. In this study, semi-structured interviews have been used for matching the data obtained from literature with the conditions governing projects in Iran. In order conduct interviews, because of the domain of subject, on one hand, the need to gain a comprehensive view about the subject, on the other hand, its diversity encouraged the researchers to conduct interviews with people involved in the project from the beginning stages to the end. According to the above explanations, a population composed of ten people participated in the interviews of this study. These participants were selected from employers, consultants, contractors and O&M contractors of inter-urban road infrastructure projects in Iran. This study elaborates some processes that O&M contractors can apply to share their experiences and knowledge with other participants in the project. Through that, by taking advantage from the knowledge of people involved in the beginning to the end stages of the project and their integration, many duplications due to lack of knowledge are reduced, and chance of success in projects will be increased. The results provide a better foundation to reduce extra O&M costs through earlier decision making