From burden to blessing – the future of Defence OMMs
The Insight
Operations and Maintenance Manuals (OMMs) are an integral part of Defence project deliverables for Handover Takeover documentation. The “Guideline for Operations and Maintenance Manuals” was originally published in 2007, updated in 2010 and remained unchanged for the next 10 years.
These guidelines provided instructions for both paper-based and electronic formats of OMMs, with the electronic format essentially a PDF version of the paper-based format. These OMMs were essentially project based, with the internal structure of the OMM broken down by building / asset type internal to the OMM.
From an end-user perspective, navigating and extracting information from a large, complicated, digital version of a manual designed for paper print and based on a project as a whole was difficult and often not fruitful.
During the time of DEMS, projects uploaded electronic copies of OMMs onto the DEMS system. During IBIS and GEMS, it was determined that OMMs would be uploaded to NSIMS. Despite every other Defence process and system relating to project management and the project lifecycle advancing over the last 10 years, OMMs had not.
That is, until June 2020.
The Impact
OMMs will now be asset based, not project based.
Previously, information contained within OMMs included all assets and details that the project had supplied, installed, and constructed. This information would then be uploaded to the DEMS system against the project, meaning the easiest way to find information relating to an asset was through the project that undertook the relevant works. Knowing how to find that information often required knowledge of which project undertook what works.
Now, OMMs contain information based on the specific asset it relates to and is filed on the system against that particular asset. This manual is now a live document; once it is created and uploaded to NSIMS, it can be ‘checked out’ for update throughout the asset’s lifecycle.
OMMs are no longer a single PDF containing a plethora of data. They are structured as a Word document containing hyperlinks to sub-folders rather than PDFs embedded into PDFs. They can be easily updated and navigated.
This new process will save hours of time. For Project Managers, the process of searching for data relating to assets is much easier. For Sub-contractors, the task of compiling an OMM is much simpler.
As the new OMM process is still in its early days, it is unlikely many projects that are currently active have benefitted from the process. It will be interesting to see how project efficacy increases over 2021.