Capital Project Management

 Cutover projects entail planning over a typically long timeline:

• Project Justifications, Approvals
• Conceptual Design
• Basic Design
• Detailed Design
• Construction/Implementation
• Commissioning
• Validation (if regulatory component to project)
• Startup

FlowWright PM uses an interactive approach to project management that brings complexity and risk under control.   

Capital projects typically include:

1. Design activities that are comprehensive and include risk assessments,
2. Coordinating diverse disciplines - both internal and contract resources
3. Managing complex parallel and serial work streams 
4. Testing to verify quality and compliance

Capital projects entail significant risk and cost.  FlowWright PM brings superior planning capabilities to the projects - and during execution FlowWright PM delivers real-time visibility and control with an interactive approach.   FlowWright PM ensures project success and project efficiency and effectiveness.

What makes Capital Projects Challenging?

Capital projects are complex, involve many constituencies, have technical, budgetary, and financial risk, and  often require satisfying regulatory requirements.  Many disciplines directly and indirectly impact one another (architectural, civil, structural, electrical, piping, mechanical, process, instrumentation, automation, IT, quality, operations, maintenance, security, facilities, and more) - FlowWright PM makes planning and coordinating work streams and disciplines straightforward and effective.  Your plans are able to show relationships between tasks and work streams so that everyone understands at a glance the implications and importance of their activities.  FlowWright PM ensures that, during execution, tasks get executed in the right order, by the right people, in the right work stream and location.  The planning, execution, and reporting phases of capital projects are made manageable and efficient when the process  uses FlowWright PM.

Project plans are often difficult to reduce to Microsoft Project, Primavera P6, or Excel.  The reason for this is that projects with more than a few dozen tasks become very difficult to document dependencies, timing, instructions, verification, documentation, etc. associated with a task.  FlowWright PM's interactive graphical interface addresses these issues.  If you already have a Microsoft Project schedule, simply import it into FlowWright PM and modify the resulting workflows to take advantage of the additional capabilities.

De-Risking Capital Projects: Ensuring Success

Understanding the plan, following the plan, and understanding project progress and status in real-time are all critical to ensuring success.  The latter is particularly important during project execution because, in the case of projects where many interdependent activities are happening at a rapid pace, understanding progress and status after hours of analysis and reporting means that it is often too late to avoid or solve a problem quickly before unpleasant real-world consequences and costs manifest.

There are several kinds of costs that result from project problems:

• Functional: tasks that depend on other tasks become costly when timing becomes an issue (precursors are not complete, resources are not acting - and visibility is insufficient to reveal this before costs are incurred)
• Delayed Opportunity: capital project slippage can result in company unable to take advantage of revenue opportunities if a project runs over schedule
• Technical failure: poor execution results in unacceptably low quality systems

Companies usually try to manage risk by organizing projects with Microsoft Project, Oracle's Primavera P6, and/or Microsoft Excel.  They list all their tasks and assign resources and assign dates/time and, ultimately, emerge with a plan. This approach has significant flaws:

1. Plans do not adequately capture relationships between tasks
2. Plans are hard for all team members to understand the same way
3. Plans are not bound to the actual execution
4. Reconciling progress and status with the plan is time consuming and inaccurate

The result is that risks identified early on in cutover projects often manifest and negatively impact enterprise system projects and the people who are responsible for them.

The way to address these issues is by using FlowWright PM; the application captures all project relationships clearly in the planning stage, and allows for simulating execution and discovering planning flaws.  FlowWright PM also binds all project team members to the plan and during execution it assigns tasks and gives visibility to managers and team members so they know what is coming and what their priorities are.  In addition, this powerful data gives managers real-time progress and status information:

• Is the project trending ahead of schedule or behind schedule?
• What is current critical path?
• What are current outstanding tasks?
• And more…

Using FlowWright PM not only saves substantial time during planning and execution, but it burns down risk and gives managers the ability to understand issues that arise immediately so they can mitigate them.  In general, FlowWright PM vastly increases project likelihood of success and allows project managers to decrease the impact of unforeseen issues to ensure their companies maximize their opportunities and realize minimal risk.