Information flows in highway project delivery

Transport infrastructure projects involve many stakeholders sharing information across organisational and temporal boundaries. The growing use of Building Information Modelling requires closer alignment of processes for the creation, distribution and validation of project information across stakeholders, but this topic has had little scrutiny in the linear infrastructure sector and is poorly understood by clients or major suppliers. The aspiration of this paper is to understand the information flows from project inception to handover and surface some of the challenges in developing common or complementary protocols. This paper presents the results of a qualitative interpretivist study into the delivery of highway projects. Following 11 semi-structured interviews with members of different parts of the supply chain and the collation of published and unpublished project and corporate documentation which have been transcribed and coded, a conceptual IDEF0 model of the information flows associated with projects is presented. The outputs of this research highlight the challenges facing project teams in implementing information management practices and the paper and document based information exchange which pervades through standards, contracts, deliverables and quality management.