Your Capital Projects Are Not Late Because of Your Project Team’s Procrastination

It is human nature to defer tasks to later – why do today what you can do tomorrow. However, this is not the reason that your capital projects are always late.

The reason your capital projects are late is because you probably have not provided a completions & commissioning strategy to your team. You may have provided them the framework to initiate projects (budget approvals, schedule approvals, weekly and monthly reporting), but you likely have not defined the process they need to follow to complete capital projects (subsystem definition, construction completions, and commissioning workflows managed in software).

Consider this - when you have a long list of tasks on your to-do list, which items do you work on? It's natural to work on the easier, more immediate tasks that you can knock off the list - this seems like progress. But the harder tasks that are not immediatley required get pushed down the list. Only when tasks become urgent do you start to look at them.

The problem is, when it seems like commissioning is getting more urgent, it's already too late to start thinking about it. Critical decision points earlier in projects have been missed, impacting your ability for commissioning to be successful.

It is not your project team’s procrastination that causes delays, it is that you have not provided them the systems and process to follow during earlier stages of projects that they need to get to the end. They don’t know the steps to follow to achieve your project objectives during design, procurement, and construction phases. Your project team needs a structured process and decision-making framework to keep all activities aligned earlier in projects so they understand the path to get to the end.

The Integrated Completions Methodology is the framework that is missing to complete capital projects. Your project team requires guidance on the processes to follow to navigate the complexity of capital projects. And since you have not provided this to them, delays appear to be procrastination, when really delays are because they don’t have clear direction on how to complete capital projects.

The Integrated Completions Methodology provides project teams with the clear steps to take to stay focused on the end of projects and achieve your project objectives on-time and on-budget. The Integrated Completions Methodology consists of:

• Completions in Contracts – to start with the end in mind and set your project up to be finished on-time, right from the start
• Completions in FEED – to ensure that early engineering groups are aligned with later commissioning groups for successful project integration
• Completions in Off-Site Testing – to ensure the first physical tests on equipment identify issues early so they do not delay on-site testing, especially for control systems
• Construction Completions – the last 10% of any task is always the hardest, and you need robust processes to get installation activities 100% complete while ensuring the small details that cause big delays do not get missed
• CSU Completion Workflows – commissioning is fast-paced, and you need industry-best processes to ensure the work gets completed smoothly, and that you can achieve your operational objectives

Integrated Completions must be embedded into all phases of projects to be successful - to ensure commissioning does not get pushed to the bottom of your project team's to-do list, and make sure that project management completion frameworks are included in earlier stages of projects. When one or more of the Integrated Completion frameworks are missing, your projects are destined to be late and over-budget before you even know it, just like 9 out of 10 projects are.

Join our next live webinar to learn more about Commissioning Project Management. Get the Zoom link here.