How Do Infrastructure Owners Build Capabilities to Reduce Operational Failure?

There are limited studies that have focused on understanding the causes of operational quality failure, which is recognised to be a significant and costly problem for owners. This paper investigates why assets handed over to owners have failed during operations, and proposes new ways that capabilities can be distributed to reduce potential operational problems from arising. This study identifies and measures quality cost failure in five projects within a single client organisation. This is achieved by means of preliminary Delphi reviews on operational problems and 19 indepth interviews with an expert sample from five specific infrastructure projects. The interviews included those involved with project delivery and operational use of the asset. Empirical data was gathered using card sorting and semi-structured interviews. The preliminary findings indicate the importance of quality cost failure and the
fragmentation of capabilities in addressing operational failure. By identifying and measuring quality cost failure, owners will learn and be able to procure more integrated failure-mitigating capabilities for reducing failures.