On 3 March 2021, the Government issued Decree 15 detailing a number of provisions on management of construction investment projects (Decree 15/2021) to replace Decree 59 of the Government on dated 18 June 2015 on the same subject (Decree 59/2015).

Some new key points of Decree 15/2021 are as follows:

• Encouraging BIM and digital technology solutions: Decree 15/2021 encourages to impose building information modeling (BIM) and digital technology solutions in construction and work operation management activities. BIM file constitutes a component of construction design documents or as-built documents for construction projects or works imposing BIM. Contents and details of BIM would be agreed upon in construction contracts by parties involved in application of BIM.

• Applying international standards, regional standards or foreign standards: International standards, regional standards or foreign standards can be applied for construction activity in Vietnam, subject to certain conditions. For instance, there must be assessment on the compatibility, synchrony and conformity of foreign standards with relevant national technical regulations in the construction design commentaries or technical instructions (if any). Foreign standards already recognized and widely applied would be prioritised.

• Detailed regulations on prefeasibility study: a preliminary design plan of a project’s construction investment prefeasibility study report must contain some main contents, including (i) preliminary design drawings, (ii) commentaries about scale and characteristics of the projects and (iii) drawings and preliminary commentaries about technological lines and equipment (if any).

• Construction survey: Decree 59/2015 does not contain any detailed provisions on some content related to construction survey, while several provisions on construction survey (e.g. order of construction survey, construction survey tasks, technical plans on construction survey, management of construction survey, contents of a report on construction survey results, approval of reports on construction survey results) are firstly specified in Decree 15/2021.

This post is written by Tran Kim Chi and edited by Hoang Thi Thanh Thuy