Multibillion-rand mega projects, executed over many years with multi-disciplines, hundreds of vendors and thousands of people working across the globe, depend on unrivalled successful outcomes. They require a well-structured integration of many efforts. This is according to local enterprise project management (EPM) solution provider UMT Consulting SA.
UMT Consulting CEO Pieter Meyer says companies must maintain the necessary collaboration and interfacing between the project's People, product, process and technology (PPPT) elements at all business management system (BMS) levels to enable the project's unrivalled outcome.
“Most corporate organisations run a relatively stable operation with a relatively known value chain in limited locations to achieve predictable outcomes for their permanent stakeholders. Mega projects, however, require a temporary additional set of millions of transactions involving thousands of temporary workers from a variety of backgrounds that need to be integrated across ad hoc new international boundaries and locations to harmoniously work towards a common set of high level objectives,” he explains.
He says these different business paradigms bring along a cultural challenge and stress the corporate stakeholders to enable or allow different technologies and temporary project related processes and management information systems. “Moving too fast can lose the corporate stakeholders, while moving too slow and controlling too centrally can hurt the project's throughput and ultimate outcomes.”
Successful integration requires not only technical expertise, but soft skills and loads of patience, facilitation, lateral thinking and bringing together old and new ways of collaboration, engineering and contract management.
The integration of a mega project should incorporate the views of all stakeholders and also best practices advocated by the relevant statutory bodies, including PMBoK, the System Engineering (SE) handbook of INCOSE, the Integrated Logistic Support (ILS) standards and practices of the Society of Logistic Engineers (SOLE) and the International Standards Organisation (ISO).
Through appropriate leadership, the project team and related stakeholders must continually strive for teamwork and synergy to enable all workers to perform with unrivalled success despite the traditional silos between disciplines or cultural diversities and the interactions between technology, society and business.
Simultaneously, integration must assure that one maintains adequate governance; clear communication between all stakeholders; a cost-effective balance between all processes and objects; and efficient management of diverse artefacts and of large quantities of data and documentation.
Meyer stresses that any well-integrated system is self-regulating to assure data integrity and enable successful outcomes, like the homeostasis of a biological organism. “Therefore, we continually strive for practical automation of data flow from transaction to data in a register to performance results and forecasts on a dashboard and in a report.”
“Fortunately, modern information technology enables self-regulation of project data flow to a large degree. Like a thermostat is used to switch on a cooling system to regulate the temperature in a vehicle's engine or internal air, we can now automatically calculate the level of real performance, report on trends and potential hot spots of risks in running late, over budget or under performance.”
A practical example is the Earned Value Management (EVM) as promulgated in ANSI. Among the many changing priorities and new insights into business needs, integration risks need proactive treatment to keep the project out of real trouble.
More importantly, most systems display some kind of randomness, probabilistic operation, behaviour or physical characteristics. These probabilistic characteristics should be designed to proactively reduce downstream risks to functional and physical interfacing of deliverable products, rework, more cost and time.
Meyer points to some of the fundamental questions plaguing the serious integration engineer. “Which BMS prerequisites, business needs and technologies are necessary? Which would be useful and which would cause distractions? Which values, trends and forces can create the fertile soil for growth and unrivalled outcomes and new potential? Where all these forces might lead during the life span of the project over four to eight years over different major milestones, and ultimately of the decades of productive life expected of the mega project delivered operational system like a mine or a power station.”
Every project needs to integrate its people, product, process and technology (PPPT) into an effective and efficient business management system to enable and facilitate informed project management (PM) and governance from all knowledge areas and project life cycle points of view.
In conclusion, a hierarchy of levels of integration and support enable the top-level vision, mission, objectives and continuous improvement, from an operational plan to the dashboards and reports required for informed decision-making.
Proactively define, develop, integrate and test BMS and engineering solutions to all aspects of the project and its deliverables, including product interfaces and downstream feasibility.
For more information, contact UMT Consulting SA on (012) 345 3518 or visit http://www.umtsa.co.za.
Share