ISO 19650 · TIDP and MIDP

The BEP promises. The MIDP puts a date on it.

Q: What is the difference between a TIDP and the MIDP?

Scope and author. A TIDP is one task team’s plan: the information containers that team will produce, written by that team. The MIDP is the delivery team’s plan: every TIDP aggregated by the lead appointed party, with the dependencies between teams and the time for authorization and acceptance added. There are as many TIDPs as there are task teams, and one MIDP per delivery team.

Every BEP says the information will arrive on time. The task information delivery plans and the master information delivery plan are where that sentence becomes a list: each information container, who produces it, what it waits on, and the milestone it lands on. Kept apart from the project programme, that list slips without anybody reporting a slip.

Part of the ISO 19650 toolkit.

How the plan is built What each side owes Questions

The sequence

From a milestone to a master plan, in order

ISO 19650-2 builds the plan from the bottom up, and in a fixed order. The milestones come from the appointing party before the tender; everything after them is established at appointment, in clause 5.4, and each step needs the one before it to exist.

Information delivery milestones

Set by the appointing party at 5.1.3, before anyone is asked to price anything: the points in the project where information has to arrive, and the decision each one serves. Task teams add milestones of their own, but every plan below has to meet these, so a milestone that is not tied to the project programme leaves the plan with nothing to be late against.

The detailed responsibility matrix

At 5.4.2 the high-level matrix from the BEP is refined into the detailed one, which says three things: what information is produced, when it is exchanged and with whom, and which task team is responsible for it. Until it exists a TIDP cannot be written, because no task team has been told what it is planning.

A TIDP per task team

At 5.4.4 each task team lists the information containers it will produce and, for each one, its title, what it depends on, its level of information need, how long it takes, who authors it and the milestone it is due at. Written by the people who will do the work, because a duration estimated on somebody else’s behalf is a guess with a date on it.

One MIDP for the delivery team

At 5.4.5 the lead appointed party aggregates the TIDPs and adds what no single task team can see: the dependencies between teams, and the time for its own authorization and for the appointing party’s acceptance. Then it baselines the plan, tells each task team what changed, and informs the appointing party of any risk to a milestone — a risk that belongs in the risk register (5.3.6), not in a surprise when the date has gone.

Responsibility

The client sets the dates. The delivery team plans to them.

Neither plan is the appointing party’s to write, which is exactly why the EIR has to fix what both are measured against. A TIDP answers to a milestone. A milestone nobody wrote down leaves the MIDP free to invent its own, and it usually invents generous ones.

Appointing party

What the EIR has to fix first

You do not write a TIDP, but you decide whether the MIDP can be checked. The EIR Health Check opens on this: whether purposes and delivery milestones are declared as what, when and to whom.

Clause 5.1.3 · issued with the tender

Information delivery milestones tied to the project programme, as a date or a stage gate rather than “at key stages”
What each milestone is for: the decision it supports, which is what makes a late container matter
What has to arrive at each one, by deliverable family, with its level of information need
How long your own review and acceptance take, as a number of days the MIDP can schedule around
How progress against the MIDP is reported to you, and how often
What happens when a milestone is at risk: who is told, and by when

Score your EIR against this →

Lead appointed party

What the MIDP has to commit to

A MIDP that is really a drawing register with dates on it is the most common version of this going wrong. The BEP Readiness Checklist scores responsibility and planning on their own, and treats the trace from EIR to plan as ISO-critical.

Clauses 5.4.4–5.4.5 · baselined at appointment

A MIDP built down from the contractual milestones, then filled up from the TIDPs
A TIDP per task team, with durations the people doing the work agreed to
Dependencies between task teams made explicit, because that is where the dates actually move
Authorization and acceptance scheduled as time, not assumed to be instant
A trace from every EIR requirement to a container in a plan, or a reason it has none
A baseline, a record of changes and a reporting rhythm, so a slip is reported rather than discovered

Check your BEP against this →

Information delivery milestones sit on a separate list from the project programme, so they slip without anyone reporting a slip. The data that should have accumulated across the stages was never captured.

Questions

What people actually ask

What is the difference between a TIDP and the MIDP?

Scope and author. A TIDP is one task team’s plan: the information containers that team will produce, written by that team. The MIDP is the delivery team’s plan: every TIDP aggregated by the lead appointed party, with the dependencies between teams and the time for authorization and acceptance added. There are as many TIDPs as there are task teams, and one MIDP per delivery team.

Is the MIDP just the project programme?

No. The programme schedules work; the MIDP schedules information — which container is issued, by whom, at what level of information need, for which milestone. The two have to share their milestones, and a MIDP that cannot be laid over the programme is the one that slips quietly. But a design programme with a column headed “BIM” is not a MIDP, however detailed it is.

Who writes the TIDP: the Information Manager or the task team?

The task team. Whoever holds the information management function sets the format, checks that the TIDPs are consistent with each other and aggregates them. The durations and dependencies have to come from the people producing the containers, or the MIDP fails at the first dependency nobody asked about. The who writes the BEP page covers the same division of labour one document up.

Are they part of the pre-appointment BEP?

Not in their final form. The pre-appointment BEP proposes the strategy and a high-level responsibility matrix; the TIDPs and the MIDP are clause 5.4 outputs, established at appointment. A tender can still ask for an outline MIDP, and a bidder who produces a credible one is showing that its capacity claim was checked against real durations, which tells an evaluator more than the rest of the capability section.

Where does level of information need fit?

It is one of the fields every container in a TIDP carries. That is how a requirement written in the EIR reaches the person producing the container, and a TIDP with that field empty is a plan to deliver something undefined on time. The level of information need page covers how to write the requirement, and the ISO 19650 hub shows where clause 5.4 sits in the delivery cycle.