If you already do this for a living: Novation. When a designer moves into the contractor’s team, it stops being a lead appointed party, and its plans, requirements and approvals have to move with it.
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ISO 19650 uses a handful of words for people and organisations. They sound abstract, but each one answers a practical question: who asked for this information, who is accountable for delivering it, and who actually produces it?
Parties
- The appointing party is the client, or the organisation managing information for the client.
- A lead appointed party is appointed directly by the client: a designer, a project manager, a contractor.
- An appointed party is appointed by a lead appointed party, and is the one that produces the information: a subcontractor, a supplier, a sub-consultant.
Teams
- A task team is a group doing one task, such as the curtain wall design or the drainage model.
- A delivery team is one lead appointed party plus all the appointed parties under it.
- The project team is everyone: the client and every delivery team.
Roles follow appointments
The same company can hold different roles on different projects, or on the same project at different times. What decides the role is the appointment: who signed with whom.
- └ Interior designer · appointed party
- └ Structural engineer · appointed party
- └ Services engineer · appointed party
- └ Steelwork subcontractor · appointed party
- └ Curtain wall subcontractor · appointed party
Every organisation the client appoints directly is a lead appointed party with its own delivery team, even when that team is one firm. Each one needs its own BEP and delivery plan.
On a traditional project the client appoints the architect, the engineers, the cost consultant and later the contractor directly, so there are several lead appointed parties, each with its own delivery team. Under design and build there is often an early design stage with the client’s own designers, then the designers are novated: they move into the contractor’s team.
The architect is novated to the contractor in month 9. Nobody updates the plans. The architect keeps sharing models straight to the client for approval, as before, while the contractor’s team never sees them in its own review. The contractor builds from the last model it saw, which is two revisions old.
The novation is treated as a change of appointment. The architect’s task information delivery plan moves into the contractor’s master plan, its models go through the contractor’s check before they reach the client, and the BEP’s responsibility matrix is updated the same week.
A delivery team can be one firm
Every lead appointed party has a delivery team, even when that team is just itself. A cost consultant or a project manager appointed by the client produces information (cost plans, programmes, reports) and has the same duties to plan, check and share it. Their information management is simpler, not absent.
Coordinating across delivery teams
Information has to be coordinated within each delivery team (the contractor coordinates its subcontractors) and across delivery teams (the architect’s team and the engineer’s team, both appointed by the client, must agree openings and levels). The second kind is the one that falls between the gaps, because neither lead appointed party is in charge of the other. The client’s information requirements and the project-wide standard are what keep them aligned.
Each arrow that crosses a lane is a handoff: one party finishes, another takes over. Dashed: information sent back for changes.
Key takeaways
- The appointing party is the client (or whoever manages information for it). A lead appointed party is appointed by the client. An appointed party is appointed by a lead appointed party and produces information.
- Every lead appointed party leads a delivery team, even a team of one. The project team is the client plus all delivery teams.
- Roles follow appointments, not company types: the same architect can be a lead appointed party before novation and an appointed party after.
- Information must be coordinated across delivery teams as well as within them.
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