What is handover information?
Handover information is what a construction project gives the operating team: as-built drawings, the asset register, O&M manuals, warranties and the health and safety file.
It is the moment a building becomes maintainable or does not. An FM team starting with a complete asset register is months ahead of one that has to survey the building it has just been given.
As-built information matters more than design information, and the gap between them is where operational surprises come from.
It needs specifying before the project rather than requesting at the end, which means the operating team has to be in the conversation long before practical completion.
In practice
A building taken over with a USB stick and two lever arch files.
The drawings are superseded, the as-builts are partial, and the commissioning data is missing for two systems.
Handover information is assembled at the end of a project by people under time pressure, and the FM team lives with the result for decades.
The time to influence it is during construction, which requires the operator to be in the room before they have the building.
What goes wrong in practice
- Requirements not specified in the contract, so what arrives is whatever the contractor had.
- Design drawings handed over where the build departed from them.
- Received in a format nobody can search or load into a system.