In between preparing for the holiday season and finalizing business plans for next year, you’ve probably spent a few minutes daydreaming about how you’d improve your site project organization if you had unlimited resources and funds at your disposal. Hire more owner project managers? Upgrade your portfolio management software? These are great ideas and the possibilities are limitless…but of course funds are always limited. So in the spirit of giving, I thought I would offer three tips to help your project organization deliver better projects in 2012 that won’t cost a thing.
1. Ensure Each Project Has Clear Objectives
Sounds simple, right? But we’ve all experienced a project in which the customer couldn’t make up its mind or the project started out cost driven and then became schedule driven or the business doesn’t know what it wants, but sure knows what it doesn’t want. These projects require a miracle to succeed because clear objectives are the foundation of project success. So when you are assigned to a project that lacks clear objectives, appeal to your project director or engineering manager to help obtain operations input to ratify the objectives and scope. Remind everyone that if no one can answer whether this project should be cheap or fast, it’s bound to be neither. Clear objectives will help you deliver those priorities.
2. Document Roles and Responsibilities
When you kick off your small project, take a minute to document the roles and responsibilities for each core team member. For small projects, this doesn’t have to be fancy – a brief write-up or a RACI (Responsible, Approve, Consult, Inform) chart will suffice. Why is this important? Projects with documented roles and responsibilities have better outcomes. When everyone knows their tasks, they tend to do their work more efficiently. And, having documented roles and responsibilities helps mitigate the negative impact of any team member turnover. When a key team member like the lead engineer or operations representative turns over, it tends to slow down your project and introduce the risk for changes. Documenting roles and responsibilities helps avoid these problems.
3. Conduct a Field Verification
Conduct a field verification to check existing conditions, including structures, pipe racks, etc. It’s often not time or money that stands in the way of this activity, but rather the assumption that “we know what’s out there.” In fact, about 30 percent of small projects neglect to perform this vital activity. As you can imagine, those projects often face unpleasant surprises once they get into the field and end up costing more than those projects that verify existing conditions before full-funds authorization.
Aside from these three simple things, there are plenty of other resources and work processes that are vital to the success of your small project organization. Contact me to discuss at pkulkarni@ipaglobal.com. I hope everyone has a safe and happy holiday season!
About the Author
As IPA’s Manager of Plant-Based Systems, Phyllis Kulkarni oversees all global small project benchmarking, turnaround benchmarking, and licensing of the FEL Toolbox software. Phyllis joined IPA as a Project Analyst in 2002 and has led numerous site benchmarkings, project evaluations, and onshore and offshore megaproject assessments. She is fluent in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. Phyllis can be reached at pkulkarni@ipaglobal.com.