Adopting A ‘Construction-Driven’ Mindset

A practical guide to understanding and applying a construction-driven approach to modern capital projects planning and execution.

A construction-driven capital project is a project where, while respecting business objectives, all plans and engineering are organized to support the construction strategy and sequence. Practically speaking, this means that engineers, schedulers, procurement teams and everyone else involved in the project must reevaluate their work processes to ensure that they are meeting the well-defined requirements of construction.

For most established capital project organizations, moving to a construction-driven mindset is a significant paradigm shift. While challenging, the reward is a more predictable project in terms of safety, cost and schedule outcomes that is far more likely to be delivered both on-time and on-budget.

Engineering-Driven vs. Construction-Driven

Today, the vast majority of capital projects are engineering-driven. An engineering-driven project is organized around the needs of the engineering process and method. Most engineering-driven projects adopt this approach by default, not design; capital projects necessarily begin with engineering, and so engineering teams exert an outsize influence on project outcomes. This influence is often unwitting, and it extends well beyond simple constructability to scheduling, work packaging, procurement, and construction.

For example, most engineering teams design by system and push drawings to the field on a system-by-system basis. But construction is not completed by system, and so new drawings don’t drive or support construction in a deliberate, purposeful way. In fact, on many projects, there is little correlation between the amount of engineering completed and the progress along the Path of Construction (PoC).

This disconnect has a staggering impact on capital project predictability. Nearly two-thirds of all field rework can be traced back to engineering. According to CII, 33 percent of all field rework originates with design errors, six percent comes from design changes, and 23 percent derives from vendor-related errors. This doesn’t include other issues that undermine predictable project delivery, like scheduling problems and procurement errors — in many cases, these, too, can be traced to engineering.

Don’t blame your engineers for this disconnect, they are only following well-established best practices in their field of expertise. Capital project leaders must take responsibility for the problems, and start working to fix them and doing the proper integration.

What does construction-driven engineering look like?

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