The Building Areas Preparations Initiative for Abu Dhabi Emirate 2017-Present – The institutional perspective!
In 2017, DPM tasked GPC-GIS via a team of seasoned professionals providing managed operational services while leveraging the e-NOC platform-as-a-service to develop, configure, and rollout the Building Areas Preparations (BAP) initiative. The idea behind the initiative, which builds on the operational findings, knowhow and experience of the e-NOC program, is to coordinate planning approvals updates, site clearance approvals, and services readiness approvals within areas comprising hundreds and thousands of plots, instead of at individual plots levels. This has resulted in streamlining planning and permitting processes at large scale across whole of government in addition to identifying and resolving infrastructure assets conflicts with existing plots.
Throughout the initiative, GPC-GIS has contributed to several institutional capacity building success factors as described below:
- Business process re-engineering across whole of government in areas related to planning & development activities including location as-built data submittals for projects
- The capacity building from scratch of a unit within the client organisation structure to process operationally the Building Areas Preparations (BAP) initiative entities replies reviews in addition to related planning coordination and review activities
- The recommendations of policies, regulations, and decrees that were adopted progressively by government including roles and responsibilities among 20+ stakeholder entities, and several municipal decrees related to the initiative
- Overview and unification of planning conditions and guidelines by the stakeholder entities for design and construction stages
- Aligning between the Buildings Areas Preparations and the Building Permit processes towards streamlining customers and investors journey for capital investment planning
- Support of executive and technical steering committees with participation of 20+ stakeholder entities
- Strong project management and governance support towards full automation of the Building Areas Preparation online solution across whole-of-government
As a result, several building areas were completed and rolled out successfully in collaboration with the municipalities and the stakeholder entities. This comprised 1000s of plots that were reviewed with a projection around 20000s plots to be completed by early 2020. This achievement could not be realized without the innovative and persistent drive by the Municipal Sector in Abu Dhabi Government to continue providing the best services to its citizens and residents as part of a continuous improvement process.