Stream-based Capital Project Management

Plimso Software Limited was approached by a multinational client which was seeking a solution to support effective and lean project management. In particular, they needed software for a new greenfield capital management project in Europe which had a wide variety of parallel development streams.

The scope of the capital project was broadly organised in to the following streams:

• Design
• Construction
• Equipment
• Process
• Procurement

The client faced significant challenges in managing the wide variety of actions across the project, especially in regards to managing issues which required escalation or cooperation across streams.

A solution was required which would provide straightforward and focused management of the tasks within a stream while also allowing the project manager to handle the complex interactions between multiple teams across different streams.

The ActionR Suite allowed each stream to be treated as a separate project for each localized project team, allowing actions to be easily managed internally. Issues which required escalation and inter-stream cooperation could instead be pushed by their team leads up from their stream-specific action register in to a higher level register which the project managers of each stream could access.

 

Project

Capital Project Management For A Green Field Processing Plant

Client

Confidential Multinational Client, Europe

What We Did

Stream-based Project Management Solution

The client project manager/consultant had to manage the overall project Tasks/Actions with the following challenges: (refer to fig 2 for pictorial representation)

• Managing the actions/tasks per stream with interactions between the teams
• Project Manager to have overall visibility and control on different streams on the project
• Team based Action Register that support collating tasks

All the tasks/actions on the project was managed and maintained on different Project Leads on different trackers stored in different location. While maintaining individual trackers was quite simple, it poses the following challenges:

1. No access to the relevant team members on status of open actions until the discussions during the meeting
2. Only access to the files is through minutes shared
3. The trackers needs to be managed and updated only by the Project Manager, more time is lost in meetings to update the tracker. No access to the team members to provide updates ahead of the meeting
4. Attachments cannot be made
5. No selective access when there are multiple teams within the same stream
6. More updates provided for a single open task becomes cumbersome in the excel sheet
7. The system could not be accessed 24 X 7 and not using a mobile device

Each of the individual streams/sub projects was managed separately in the localised project team. Actions were generated within the individual streams to keep all discussions with that team.

Escalation issues were brought to the management team.

 

 

 

• ActionR provided the capability to manage the different Streams as individual sub-projects, each with its own dedicated team members
• The main Project Manager has complete visibility and status of all the individual streams in a centralised location
• Each team member received their own custom view of all assigned actions to in both a list and a calendar view
• This focused viewpoint helped the execution team to plan and close actions on time to keep the project execution efficient and low cost
• The package provided the capability for the execution team to provide instant or periodic updates until the task/action was satisfactorily closed
• Immediate availability of updates meant the tracker was effective for micro-scheduling(i.e, handling a task from initiation to closure in less than a week)
• Specific access controls within each Stream allowed the team members to efficiently manage team tasks while maintaining the required secrecy and confidentiality between vendors
• Access to the software 24 X 7 across the globe allowed geographically diverse teams to stay in close contact