How benchmarking can support the selection, planning and delivery of decommissioning projects

Decommissioning projects are characterized by several risks, long schedule and cost estimates that lie in the range of hundreds of billions of dollars. In many countries, decommissioning projects are even more significant than the nuclear new build. Despite this extremely high relevance there is a huge gap in the literature concerning the benchmarking of these projects. The ultimate goal of the research is to understand communalities between successful projects and unsuccessful ones to draft guideline for the project management. The research methodology presented here is based on a structured process to review the cases and to spot "cross-case" patterns. These "patterns" will then be generalized to generate theoretical propositions.