Applying value management when it seems that there is no value to be managed: the case of nuclear decommissioning

Abstract

The vast majority of project management literature relating to infrastructure focuses on the project lifecycle up to commissioning and handover. Conversely, little attention has been paid to the end-oflife of infrastructure, i.e. when decommissioning begins. Infrastructure decommissioning projects are long and complex projects, involving an extensive network of stakeholders. Moreover, their budgets can reach hundreds of billions of Euros and, for many of these projects, keep increasing. Since decommissioning projects do not generate direct revenues, they are often considered an expensive nuisance with limited value linked to their delivery. This paper explores the use of Value Management (VM), examining the constraints of decommissioning projects and the requirements for successful implementation of VM, focusing on the nuclear industry due to its techno-socio-economic relevance.Findings derived from the application of content analysis on semi-structured interviews with experienced decommissioning practitioners include suggestions on how to implement VM, ultimately contributing to increase the knowledge on how deliver decommissioning projects with better performance.

The Management of Values in Project Business: Adjusting Beliefs to Transform Project Practices and Outcomes

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Project Transitions—Navigating Across Strategy, Delivery, Use, and Decommissioning

“…In summary, the transition between operational life and end-of-life decommissioning projects is a newly recognized and growing challenge that project managers need to address very soon. Though most end-of-life decommissioning projects impact an organization, nuclear, military, and energy projects are the more complex, lengthy, and expensive with a potentially wide-ranging impact on society (Invernizzi et al, 2019). Nevertheless, there is only a limited understanding of how to improve their performance and only minimal project management research on transitioning from operations to decommissioning.…”

Editorial Image Retrieval Using Handcrafted and CNN Features

“…The ten contributions cover different levels of analysis: project, program, project-oriented organization, and project alliance, indicating the broad application of value creation in project settings. They also cover different project phases: from the front end of a program (Liu et al, 2019) to the execution phase (Fuentes and Smyth, 2019;Pargar et al, 2019;Vuorinen and Martinsuo, 2019) and finally to the solution's end-of-life phase (Invernizzi et al, 2019), showing the relevance of value creation over the project lifecycle. With these contributions, the special issue succeeded in its aim to develop new knowledge about successful ways to negotiate and deliver value in complex and uncertain project-related contexts.…”