Hospital project front-end planning: current practice and discovered challenges

Abstract Development of healthcare services is a societal responsibility often appearing as major public projects. These types of projects often have a long lifetime expectancy and represent large investments and changes to established welfare systems with a considerable societal impact. This makes strategic project success depending on front-end planning performance crucial. Motivated by literature claiming that the hospital projects’ front-end phase has a potential for improvements, this paper presents findings from a study investigating front-end planning practice in five Norwegian hospital projects. Discovered challenges mainly relate to the planning process or exploration of the opportunity space and concept elaboration. A main conclusion is that implementing theoretical recommendations both in guidelines and in practice should be a desired and possible development to further improve hospital projects’ front-end planning, thereby strengthening the odds for project success both on a tactical and strategical level.