Data Centre Essentials

6Building a Data Centre: Stakeholders, Design, Construction, and Commissioning

Stakeholders and Project Stages

Data centres are a complex ecosystem with many stakeholders from different disciplines interacting at different phases of the facility lifetime. How successfully these stakeholders communicate and share information is essential to the performance of the facility.

The data centre’s lifecycle comprises different stages. In the United Kingdom, the RIBA Plan of Work¹ indicated in Figure 6.1 is commonly used to define building project stages.

There are several key interface points between project stages and stakeholders, where information and knowledge are transferred²:

Figure 6.1 Project stages extracted from RIBA’s plan of work.

Item	Interface	Purpose
Design brief	Client/designer	Outline requirements/objectives
Specifications	Designer/contractor	Define requirements for installation and operation
Handover record information including Operating and maintenance (O&M) manuals, record drawings, commissioning records, training	Contractor/operator	Reference material for what is installed and how to operate it
Post‐handover review	Operator/project team	Feedback on how the facility operates in reality and how this might be improved from an operability perspective. Lessons learned for future designs.

The O&Ms often do not contain information about the design philosophy ...