Functional briefing for whole life performance

Briefing, as the earliest stage of a development, is fundamentally important to understand the client’s aims and needs. The skills employed at this stage significantly affect the success of the project in meeting the client’s requirements. It is therefore crucial to ensure clients’ needs are met, yet existing methodologies for capturing client’s requirements are· neither comprehensive nor adequate. Collaborative decision-making and documenting client’s requirements to incorporate in the detailed design are important tasks in this regard. Existing approaches are limited in their ability to fully capture the client’s requirements. In particular, the integration of whole life performance issues into the briefing process is very limited and results in poor client satisfaction. A methodology for capturing client’s requirements during briefing is essential to avoid unnecessary conflict during the development. The development of a methodology for accomplishing this involved reviewing the current briefing practices, as well as various guidelines used to define the client’s needs. There is still a lack of a systematic and flexible methodology that is applicable for different clients with different needs. Appropriately integrating whole life performance issues during functional briefing will ensure client’s needs are tackled and discussed before formulating a detailed design. One of the contributions of this study is the development of a general tool for improving the briefing process. The automated Whole Life Performance Assessment Tool (WLPAT) is specifically designed to facilitate functional briefing. The tool is used to assess the extent to which the brief accurately captures client’s requirements for the expected lifetime performance of the facility. This includes the operation and maintenance of the facility during its life span. The tool was developed using MS Excel and produces a graphical report to indicate the issues that need further attention. The flexibility of the tool in encapsulating varying client requirements for different developments, makes it generic (i.e. not limited to specific construction type or procurement method). This prototype system was evaluated by construction practitioners using three different .approaches by different groups of participants. It was done through presentations and demonstrations of WLPAT. Selected professionals also conducted hands-on practical tests of the system. The system implementation reveals that early capture of client requirements will reduce time spent in making amendments at later stages of the development. Early warning is crucial for the project to be completed within the time frame and subsequently reduces unnecessary conflicts. Whole life performance was selected to assess the quality of brief confirmed that the system does offer many benefits in facilitating the briefing process. In conclusion the tool represents a unique and innovative approach to integrate WLP issues into the briefing stage of a project. The automated assessment tool has good potential in providing a quality brief that considers future performance of the expected development. It not only contributes to the briefing process in construction, but also represents a substantial advance over existing approaches.