Woodside, Adelaide Hills, South Australia, Australia
Established in 1927, Woodside Barracks occupies 170 hectares in the Adelaide Hills, approximately 25 kilometres east of Adelaide. The large-scale refurbishment focused on upgrading six key facilities, including training rooms, a recreation gym, offices, and a sergeant’s mess and required the coordination of multiple trades across the site.
To facilitate a seamless handover, Dewick & Associates was engaged by the Main Contractor to author a comprehensive multi-discipline Building Handover Manuals. Our scope involved the technical authoring of architectural, civil, communications, electrical, fire safety, hydraulic, mechanical, and structural manuals. All documentation and As-Installed drawings were delivered in the specific Defence format, complete with the required metadata to ensure full compliance with Defence standards.
By Louise Gardner
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McMahon Services is a national Australian construction, demolition and industrial services contractor with a long track record on Defence and other public sector projects.
For the Woodside Barracks refurbishment, McMahon Services acted as Main Contractor, coordinating works across six distinct buildings and a wide range of disciplines, and required handover documentation that reflected both the multi-discipline scope of the works and the specific format and metadata expectations that apply to Defence estate projects.
With each building requiring its own complete documentation set, the project demanded a partner experienced in producing handover material in Defence format and able to integrate As-Installed drawings into the wider deliverable.
Defence handover documentation is a specialised discipline. Beyond the standard expectations of accuracy and clarity, O&M Manuals and As-Installed Drawings for the Australian Defence estate must comply with strict Defence formatting requirements and include specific metadata to enable integration with Defence’s asset management systems.
The Woodside refurbishment covered six buildings and included architectural, civil, communications, electrical, fire services (wet and dry), hydraulic, mechanical, landscape, security and structural works. This created a significant volume of documentation, with input required from multiple trades, manufacturers and certification providers.
The project required the delivery of a coordinated, multi-discipline documentation package that met Defence’s technical and compliance requirements while remaining practical and easy to use for the personnel responsible for operating and maintaining the facilities.
Dewick & Associates produced the full multi-discipline suite of Building Handover Manuals in the Defence format, covering architectural, civil, communications, electrical, fire safety (both wet and dry), hydraulic, mechanical, landscape, security and structural disciplines for each of the six buildings within the refurbishment scope.
Alongside the manuals, our in-house drafter produced As-Installed Drawings with the metadata required by Defence, ensuring the records integrate cleanly into the wider Defence estate documentation environment.
Our experience producing Defence services documentation allowed McMahon Services to focus on the construction works while we coordinated, verified and compiled the documentation across all trades and disciplines.
The project resulted in a complete, Defence-format handover package that supports the long-term operation of the refurbished facilities at Woodside Barracks.
The Defence estate team is equipped with multi-discipline manuals and metadata-tagged As-Installed drawings that align with Defence’s documentation expectations, helping the personnel responsible for the buildings optimise facility performance and minimise the risk of disruption across an active barracks site.
For McMahon Services, the deliverable closes out the refurbishment to Defence handover standards across all six buildings.
The content in this case study has been informed by project documentation and client communication provided to Dewick & Associates during and following the completion of the project. Where external sources have contributed to our understanding of relevant standards or industry practice, these are listed below.
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Note: Some content in this case study draws on a combination of sources rather than direct quotation. Where this is the case, contributing sources are acknowledged above rather than cited inline.
Defence – As Constructed Drawings
Provision of Defence standard record drawings produced using AutoCAD and provided with titles and numbers following the requirements of the Spatial Data Management Plan (SDMP).
Defence – Meta Data
Converting standard construction documents into searchable, compliant digital assets specifically formatted for upload to the National Spatial Information Management System (NSIMS), inline with International Standard (ISO 19115).
Skilled drafting team use the Department of Defence Metadata Entry Tool (MET) app to categorise documents based on their content, relevant discipline and information provision;
Authoring of Defence Estate Quality Management Systems (DEQMS) format Building or Site Infrastructure O&M Manuals for the efficient operation, effective maintenance, decommissioning and final demolition of a building or structure. The documents are technically authored to detail each assets as detailed on the project’s GDL, recording the following:
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