Project Governance: Walking the tightrope in Brownfield Environments

Project governance is a structured framework for defining and achieving goals, objectives, and outcomes for all stakeholders involved in a project. Where project management is focused on the delivery of a project and ensuring compliance to its scope, budgets, deadlines, and quality commitments without putting any parties at risk – project governance defines the processes, information models, and people management practices to ensure successful project management.

An added complication to this mix is the governance of brownfield projects, where the deadlines are more challenging, but project requirements are more fluid; and many liberties are taken by the excessive number of stakeholders involved. This article explores these additional factors and how they affect the governance of brownfield projects.

Stakeholder Management

Brownfield projects are typically tied to a facility shutdown schedule, which narrows the window for working and collaboration between all stakeholders. But what makes this situation worse is the addition of many on-site stakeholders tied to the running operations of a facility. These stakeholders include daytime and nighttime shift operations teams, daytime and nighttime maintenance teams, hired support teams for third party systems, system specialists for advanced systems and applications like VMS, LDS, Analytics etc. All these stakeholders need to be taken onboard for an upgrade that will affect them all.

Tools that help stakeholders with easy communication and show clearly defined responsibility charts from each team become a necessity for managing larger projects.

Project Constraints

The addition of multiple stakeholders has a direct bearing on the project scope, which gets input from multiple stakeholders throughout the project. The most common problem that arises from this situation is a never-ending list of functionalities, improvements, and modifications that each department adds to simplify their work processes and enhance their output. Oftentimes, the dreams of one department are nightmares for another, e.g. operations would love to add more instruments along a process to have more process insights, but maintenance would hate the idea of looking after that many more instruments.

As these stakeholders extend to third parties and vendors who look after specialized systems, the list of demands and expectations can grow uncontrollably. Such situations really benefit from project management tools that maintain project scopes and allow for informed scope improvements while ensuring minimal disruptions to the critical path.

Accountability and Oversight

“Too many cooks spoil the broth” is a caveat every project manager finds personally relatable, but it is also an unavoidable reality of brownfield projects. A request from the process team to upgrade assets but not fully discussed with digital monitoring vendors could end up in confusion on integration day.

It doesn’t mean, however, that the involvement of multiple stakeholders cannot be managed effectively. Mechanisms to delegate project oversight and components’ accountability across stakeholder teams are a great way to establish accountability. Change-management processes further assist with tracking and managing project deliverables as well as specifications and schedules.

Contingency and risk management

The unicorn of project management is a project that ends up following all its originally planned milestones and deadlines. Changes and pitfalls in managing projects are as inevitable as getting on the road when you drive a vehicle. This occurrence is an ever-present phenomenon in brownfield projects where, owing to the age and complexity of a facility, things as simple as preexisting cables and conduits falling apart can offset an entire installation.

Good project management for brownfield projects thus covers an extensive list of contingency measures and alternatives to ensure projects conclude successfully. These contingencies are allocated in the form of resources like personnel, budget, and time, that can be deployed to work around potential setbacks from typical problems faced at brownfield sites.

A thorough risk identification and assessment process helps gear the project for potential setbacks and allows for efficiently planning contingent resources. A decision support framework further helps managers quickly and effectively decide when and where they need to spend resources to avoid potential setbacks and recover from unplanned deviations.

Monitoring, transparency, communication

Steps like monitoring projects, having full transparency of ongoing activities, and communicating with all stakeholders are very typical parts of any project. Putting them in a brownfield environment, however, changes the entire meaning and effort of what needs to be achieved from these activities.

Monitoring brownfield projects encompasses tracking not just the project itself, but also the multiple stakeholders performing other activities at the site, as well as the facility’s own routine operations. Gearing up for a scheduled shutdown window for and upgrade means there are multiple projects scheduled for execution in the same timeframe. Any delay or incident from even an unrelated project of activity like civil works, generator upgrades, or unexpected plant shutdowns can impact the entire project’s timeline.

Transparency for such projects thus requires not just keeping track of the ongoing project, but also communicating it with relevant stakeholders and letting them know if their schedules conflict or overlap with any activities. In all cases, effective communication tools, which keep all project stakeholders and concerned parties updated, are essential for project success.

This article was originally published here INTECH - Articles & Papers