Digital Transformation for The Enterprise Project Management Office (EPMO) – Project Safety Management

For organizations who are involved in engineering and construction projects, health and safety management becomes of the important project management areas that the EPMO will be interested to extend digital transformation to. The Project Management Institute (PMI) Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBoK) extension for engineering and construction has addressed this requirement. It has stated project safety management as the knowledge area that includes all activities of the project stakeholders which determine safety policies, objectives and responsibilities so the project is planned and executed in a manner that prevents accidents which cause or have the potential to cause personal injury, fatalities or property damages.

Assessing the Project Safety Plans

It is important that before the execution of a project begins, to ensure that the best practices for health, safety and environment (HSE) are in place. The EPMO must ensure that there is a comprehensive checklist that the project team or an independent EPMO team member can use to verify that HSE requirements have been properly planned for the project. PMWeb PMIS custom form builder will be used to create such checklist to the desired level of detail. All supportive documents that shows compliance with the HSE requirements must be uploaded into the document management repository and attached to the checklist. The PMWeb workflow engine will be used to map the steps needed to formally review and approve the plan. The HSE checklist is a sample of a HSE checklist.

Safety Meetings

Safety Meetings is a must on every engineering and construction project. Similar to what was detailed in the Project Communication Management article, the PMWeb Meeting Minutes module will be used to capture all types of safety meetings. The meeting minutes will be used to capture all identified actions with performance responsibility assigned for each.

Safety Incidents

Similar to other types of project risks, accidents and safety incidents, is a risk that has certain likelihood and impact on the project’s success objectives. Again. and part of the digital transformation, PMWeb out-of-the-box safety incident will be used to capture all safety incidents that could happen during the project’s execution. The form captures the details of the project on the incident day including the timing of the incident, weather conditions, description of the work activity in progress at the time of the accident, description of the incident, people involved in the incident, causes and witnesses. Of course, pictures and other details of the incident should be attached to the incident form.

Health, Safety and Environment Compliance Audit

Project owners and in particular in the public sector have interest to ensure that health, safety and environment best practices and standards are always implemented and observed as was planned. Those organizations can create a HSE Compliance Checklist aligned with ISO 18001 standards or any other desired standard. The checklist will include all items that need to be checked on monthly basis for each project. Each item could have a 5-point score to determine the degree of compliance where a score of “1” means no compliance while a score of “5” indicates full compliance. In addition, each item on the checklist could have a weight factor to identify its importance for the compliance audit.

PMWeb custom form builder is used to create such document templates which can be in any desired format as well as language. The sample shown below uses what is known as What-You-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) which means when the auditor opens this form on the smart device like an iPad, the same form layout that will appear can also be printed.

Project Significant Injury Frequency Rate (SIFR)

One of the key performance indicators (KPI) used in assessing the project’s heath performance is the Project Significant Injury Frequency Rate (SIFR). The SIFR is defined as the number of accidents that an accident causing an employee or member of the public to be off work for 3 days, or more or a fatality compared to the number of hours worked normalized by 100,000 for all works under the supervision by the project manager. The objective of this KPI is to improve health and safety in the working environment and continuous reduction is achieved.

The SIFR KPI will become of the other KPIs used to monitor and evaluate the project performance. Other KPIs could include Full Year Budget Vs. Full Year Actual Cost, Predictability Costs (Cost At Completion), Milestone Completion Dates for key Project Phases and Quality Defects At Project Hand Over. Each one of those KPIs could have different weight so when they are all combined they can provide a weight average of the project’s performance.

Of course, for the EPMO, the value of such project’s performance dashboard is that they will enable the EPMO to have an enterprise-wide dashboard for all projects comparing their achieved performance. This will provide senior management with real-time single version of the truth for all projects performance and status that is based on transparent and accountable data that can traced to its source. Something that regretfully the majority of project intensive organizations who continue to use manual or semi-manual with MS Excel being the technology will never be able to have.

The Digital Transformation of the project management processes will enforce having a single document template to capture the right date for each particular project management process. This will enforce transparency. The completed form will then be transmitted through the pre-defined workflow steps to review and approve the content. This will enforce accountability and governance. Now with the data captured in a single database repository, project team members as well as the EPMO team members can extract the needed data by having pre-fined tabular and graphical reports to display the captured data in any desired format, selection and level of details. For processes that are relevant to specific project management knowledge, for example communication, a dashboard can be created to capture the particulars of the different project management processes within this specific knowledge area. For example, those could be meeting minutes, RFIs, correspondence, transmittals, etc. The same project captured data can also be presented at project level to display the overall real-time project performance. Since there is a single database for all the organization’s projects, regardless of their status, location, type, size among others, an enterprise or projects portfolio dashboard can be created. The most important fact of all the above is that there a single source for all the data used by all these reports and dashboards. It is just how the organization, EPMO, Stakeholders, Project Managers and others want to visualize it.