Traditionally, the most common way to manage projects has been to chunk the project into distinct phases, each having its own inputs, activities, deliverables, and milestones. At a very high level, the entire project is often planned out in detail and the resulting Gantt chart guides the management of the execution phase of the project. This traditional approach to project management puts a premium on gathering a complete set of planning data to try and accurately forecast future behavior.
While this has been widely considered best practice, for many projects six months long and over, accurate predictions become difficult. For a megaproject that spans years, it can be near impossible. Taking a leaf out of the IT and software industries, who have developed an appreciation for effective management over the past decade, there are new approaches emerging with more agile methodologies.
An increasing body of evidence from organisations such as the Construction Industry Institute (CII), point to the most critical decisions, the ones that are most likely to make a project successful or to fail, are made by the business decision-makers long before the design and construction stages start. With this in mind, this front-end development (FED) approach to stage gating projects should begin long before the engineering design/EPC phases begin.
One of the first organisations to adopt an FED approach seriously was Royal Dutch Shell around the year 2000. In 2001 they revised their project management guide to take into account the change in emphasis from a pure execution-oriented approach to a heavier emphasis on the early stages of the project.
Current traditional planning approaches focus on the details of the project itself, defining the activities needed to do the work and predicting how long the project “should” take and how much it “should” cost. When it comes to megaprojects, there are simply too many external influences over a long period of time that impact our ability to accurately predict the future, making it an inherently flawed approach.
To increase project success rates, it’s important to set up an integrated project team (IPT), that serves as the core management team to oversee each stage of the project. Newer approaches can be likened to setting up a new business — because the future is so unpredictable and subject to outside influences, this requires a more entrepreneurial approach by all involved. The leadership of the IPT must be with operations and maintenance teams as the owners, with members evolving as the project moves through the different stages. The ‘business’ should be involved throughout the project from beginning to end.
The research clearly shows that to make projects successful the emphasis must be placed on the pre-engineering stages. Competent decisions made at this inflection point will improve the success rate so there must be heavy involvement from the business users. A business “owner” should be identified at the very beginning stages and remain with the project into operations.
This shift to what can be described as an entrepreneurial approach, would be a major cultural change for many organisations. Business people tend to move around more and get promotions faster than engineers do, but by keeping them on the project through completion, it ensures they learn from their business decisions instead of not seeing the long-term impacts. Even with competent business decisions however, there is no guarantee of success, only an increased probability. Errors in the engineering stage and construction problems can still have an impact.
From decades of industry examples, it’s clear that two factors play a critical role in determining whether an organisation will meet with success or failure: replicable modularity in design and the speed at which they iterate. If a project can be delivered fast and in a modular manner, enabling experimentation and learning along the way, it is more likely to succeed.
To test the waters with new approaches, choosing technologies that lend themselves to modularity and replicability is preferable. Failing that, applying regular, tested technologies in innovative, modular ways with a learn as you go method, is great for driving down costs and increasing speed with each iteration. If this approach can be effective with something as difficult and necessarily bespoke as digging an resourcing megaproject, it can work for most any project.
16 Dec 2024