Working with an oil and gas company, we identified a severe deficiency in their approach to project execution. Projects oscillated between stop and go states and changes were constantly being introduced after kickoff. While the client had made numerous attempts to ensure a solid project basis before execution to prevent such oscillations, rapidly changing industry and market conditions hindered their efforts.
We identified the source of the problem as the complex combination of the need for a water-fall model for construction project execution with a parallel need for an iterative model for alternative evaluation. These needs collided with the skill sets and mentalities of the project execution team as well as schedule and costs resulting in sub-optimal designs and escalated costs.
Our plan included a structural change in the projects group to separate iterative from sequential activities and emphasize a risk-based design approach versus traditional specification based design. In 2015, a Project Definition team was formed on a trial basis with the mandate to respond to industry and market risks and uncertainties, provide risk-based decision support to the executive team and offer a solid design basis for the execution team. The team have successfully finalized the first project definition as per the envisioned approach, and the structural changes proposed have been made executed.
We identified the source of the problem as the complex combination of the need for a water-fall model for construction project execution with a parallel need for an iterative model for alternative evaluation. These needs collided with the skill sets and mentalities of the project execution team as well as schedule and costs resulting in sub-optimal designs and escalated costs.
Our plan included a structural change in the projects group to separate iterative from sequential activities and emphasize a risk-based design approach versus traditional specification based design. In 2015, a Project Definition team was formed on a trial basis with the mandate to respond to industry and market risks and uncertainties, provide risk-based decision support to the executive team and offer a solid design basis for the execution team. The team have successfully finalized the first project definition as per the envisioned approach, and the structural changes proposed have been made executed.