Project Management

Executive Project Oversight

Executive Project Oversight helps the client in optimizing resources, achieving highest project performance and maximizing returns from capital investments.

Program Overview
The Executive Project Oversight Program is designed to provide the project sponsors and executives validated and unbiased information about a project’s true status, performance trends and forecast at completion. It objectively measures management effectiveness of all participants in light of actual project status, baselines and goals.

The program utilizes modern management and analytical techniques to forewarn adverse situations, encourage innovation, and recommend productive solutions that ensure a project’s ultimate success.

Principal Objectives and Benefits

• Protect client interests and maximize project performance.
• Provide client management the added confidence about a project’s current status and final outcome.
• Ensure the highest returns for the company’s capital investment on a project.

Major Benefits

• Accomplish cost-effectively company’s business goals and project objectives
• Receive unbiased and objective assessment of overall project performance
• Achieve highest performance from project contractors and vendors
• Ensure project success through improved quality, shortened schedules and cost savings
• Eliminate management surprises and suspense about project’s final results

Strategic Planning and Project Execution Plan

Strategic Project Planning is the essential front-end loading step to clearly establish project basis, common goals and focused work environment to facilitate world-class Shutdowns and Turnarounds.

Project Assurance facilitates strategic planning in alliance with your project management to achieve following key benefits:

• Ensure that participants are focused to meet company’s business goals, project objectives and overcome critical/risk issues.
• Create plant-wide support, synergistic effort and shared responsibility among all departments / participants.
• Achieve 10-25% schedule and cost enforcements, and savings of millions of dollars.

Productivity Improvement Program

Improve Company Profits Through Resource Optimization and Dramatic Productivity Gains.
Productivity Improvement Program is designed to take the mystery out of “the productivity function” and share knowledge about causes of poor productivity, the latest industry trends, factors in establishing labor estimates and performance baseline, measurement and forecasting techniques.

This breakthrough program offers pragmatic solutions to eliminate productivity roadblocks and helps in the development of a company-specific Productivity Improvement Plan.

This plan will provide a step-by-step implementation roadmap and performance tracking techniques to achieve 20-50% productivity gains on most management, construction and support functions.

Key Objectives
Productivity Improvement program accomplishes the following principal objectives:

• Take the mystery out of “productivity Function” by sharing knowledge about all aspects of productivity from establishing baseline estimates to measuring actual performance, forecasting cost trends and resource requirements.
• Identify and devise initiatives to systematically eliminate chronic and company-specific causes of poor productivity.
• Institutionalise the best planning techniques and execution processes that ensure highest productivity on all execution functions e.g. management staff, design teams, support services, field crafts, etc.
• Reduce staff and labor requirements and shorten schedules by 10-25% resulting in bottom-line savings of millions of dollars.

Contracting Strategy and Plan

Project Assurance specializes in developing and implementing innovative contracting strategies and plans that are designed to select the most qualified contractors and maximize returns on company’s contracted dollars.

The success of a capital projects and/or plant turnaround depends to a large extent on the qualifications and capabilities of selected contractors, subcontractors and vendors. In addition, the owner companies should ensure that synergistic and cooperative work environment is created for optimizing the contractor’s performance.

Some of our performance-driven services include:

• Facilitate development of Contracting Strategy and Contracting Plan.
• Develop an optimised Contract Breakdown Structure.
• Define the ideal contracting options and arrangements
• Assist clients in the selection of the most qualified contractors, and vendors.
• Development of contracting documents

Contractor Selection
Project Assurance assists clients in the implementation of Contracting, plans, and helping in the selection of the most qualified contractors, subcontractors and vendors.

Our services include:

• Evaluation of the current market environment
• Identification of capable contractors willing to bid the work
• Evaluation and preliminary screening to develop a bidder’s short list
• Assist in bid development, evaluation and selection of the most qualified contractors
• Final contract negotiations

Contractor Management and Surveillance
The real contracting challenges begin after the award of contract. Project Assurance plays a pivotal role in assisting our clients to ensure that all parties stay in compliance with the contract documents and its spirit.

All contracted parties should ensure that synergistic work environment is created to get highest project and turnaround results.

Some of Project Assurance’s services in this area include:

• Provide the owner’s team with validated and unbiased progress status and forecast
• Early identification of potential conflicts and problems
• Periodic peer reviews to ensure all parties are in compliance with the contract
• Implement Contract Claims Avoidance Program

Independent and Peer Project Reviews

In the current market, most capital and revamp projects are planned for fast track execution. The project urgency coupled with the current resource-starved market makes these projects prone to high risks as it relates to cost escalation and schedule slippage.

Project Assurance’s Independent Project Reviews are designed to thoroughly evaluate a project current progress status, evaluate it against project goals, plans and our proven project metrics to provide the company management an overall project assessment. Most importantly, the review identifies planning and execution adjustments that need to be made to get the project on track and meet its established goals.

Need

• Less than 20% capital projects are meeting business goals and fail to meet their cost and schedule objectives.
• Most of the projects’ performances are being impacted by lack of qualified project management staff and in-house capabilities to continually analyse project status and effectively monitor contractors’ work.

Major Benefits

• Expertly identify any performance gaps between project goals and current progress status and execution plans.
• Recognise key causes that are impeding project progress and project issues that need to be urgently addressed.
• Develop Project Success / Recovery Pan to energize project teams and ensure synergistic approach in streamlining execution and achieving project objectives.
• Recommend practical solutions and management initiatives that need to taken to enhance project results and ensure project success.

Contractor Alignment and Team Building

Breakthrough Program to Create Synergistic Work Environment Between Owner and Contractors’ Teams.
Contractor Alignment and Team Building is a breakthrough program designed to ensure success on capital projects and turnarounds by creating a synergistic focus among the owner and contractors’ teams as it relates to performance goals, work scope, potential risks, success initiatives and organizational accountabilities.

Contractor Alignment and Team Building program is developed based on proven best practices that have demonstrated that pacesetter results can only be achieved when all the participants and organizations work together as a team, proactively mitigate risks, seek innovative solutions and play leadership roles in all phases of project planning and execution.

Key Objectives
This Contractor Alignment and Team Building program is designed to achieve the following key objectives:

• Establish a common understanding among all participants about the company’s business goals, project performance expectations, and then develop execution strategies to achieve these.
• Jointly identify and eliminate problems and weak areas that may impede productivity, hinder progress, escalate costs and adversely impact achievement of desired results.
• Focus owner and contractor teams’ collective efforts on high performance initiatives and solution rather than getting distracted by contractual conflicts, competing plans, contradictory progress reporting and inconclusive forecasts.
• Create synergistic work environment and implement innovative management approaches to shorten schedules, reduce project costs by 10-25% and dramatically improve company’s bottom-line profits.

Project Management Benchmarking Reviews and Gap Analysis

The Project Management Benchmarking Reviews and Gap Analysis is designed to compare a company’s existing project management capabilities with those of the industry leaders, and facilitate the implementation of best management processes and practices that will ensure World-Class Performance on capital and revamp projects.

Principal Objectives
The Project Management Benchmarking Review provides a sophisticated and logical approach to learn about the most effective project management processes practiced by industry leaders.

Major review objectives are:

• Ascertain company’s current project management capabilities and compare with those of the industry leaders.
• Ensure World-Class Performance by implementing best project management processes and practices.
• Strengthen company’s project management capabilities and a performance-driven work environment.
• Achieve highest project results through improved operational reliability, shortened schedules and cost savings of 10-20%.

Project Management Processes and Procedures

Capital Project Management Process
Project Assurance has developed CAPMAP in order to provide a systematic and result-driven approach to plan, manage and execute capital projects. CAPMAP breaks down the project management process in logical six phases, where each phase has distinct objectives, activities, and deliverables leading to decision milestones.

Principal Objectives
To consistently Achieve World-Class Performance on All Company’s Capital Projects Irrespective of their Size, Location and Complexity.

Why CAPMAP ?

• Addresses the fundamental root causes of inconsistent and lacklustre project performance.
• Provides a high performance solution to an inherently troublesome company function.
• Offers the fastest approach to transform your company staff to smart, innovative and result-driven teams.

CAPMAP Benefits

• Dramatically Improves company’s Project Management Capabilities
• Eliminates experimentation and lengthy learning curves
• Creates a synergistic and high performance work environment
• Transforms “hard working” to “smart working” teams
• Cost and schedule improvements of 10-25%
• Bottom Line financial savings of millions of dollars

Project Management Procedures
Project Assurance specializes in the development and implementation of Customized Project Management Procedures. These procedures provide a highly effective vehicle to train project staff in company’s systematic approach to plan, manage, and execute capital projects.

Project Assurance’s staff ensure that the best practices, processes and modern planning techniques are incorporated in the Company’s Project Management Procedures.

Cost Containment and Resource Optimization

Typical capital projects and turnarounds are chronically prone to cost escalation and budget overruns. More than 80% projects fail to meet cost and budgetary targets. The project costs are now being further challenged by price escalations, labor shortages and poor productivity. Here are some of the reasons for project cost escalations:

• Companies have marginalized the Cost Management by substituting it with accounting and finance functions.
• Turnaround staff continually strive for schedule performance at the expense of cost function.
• Field staff has always been driven by field execution and have lacked accountability related to cost impact or efficiency
• Different departmental agendas may not support the cost efficient execution goals.

Solution
Institute a Cost Containment and Optimization Program form the earliest project planning phases so that all the project work scope and support services are properly scrutinized and their costs optimized.

Major Benefits

• Create a project environment based on cost accountability and ownership where project staff is fully committed to cost savings
• All support services are continually reviewed to ensure their functions are value-added and cost optimized
• Project success rate increases significantly through optimized use of resources and elimination of redundancies and waste

Project Management Seminars

Project Management for Capital and Revamp Projects
Strategic Approaches and Modern Techniques for Maximizing Project Performance.

The Innovative In-House Seminar With Pragmatic Management Strategies and Modern Techniques, will Energize Project Teams and Dramatically Enhance Project Performance.

Seminar Overview
To consistently achieve project success it is essential that project teams are knowledgeable and experienced in latest project management approaches and techniques. To specifically respond to the industry need, Project Assurance has developed this unique seminar Project Management: Strategic Approaches and Modern Techniques for Maximizing Project Performance.

The Seminar identifies management initiatives to systematically eliminate disruptive and chronic problems in order to achieve highest project performance. In developing this seminar, we blended hands-on planning experience, input from project teams, and emerging industry trends to establish strategic approaches and modern management techniques that will ensure consistent project success.

Analysis of numerous recently completed projects and case studies are illustrated to emphasize major strategic planning and management issues. Guided by the seminar director, participants gain insights to emerging industry trends and management styles, and then decide what to emulate and what to avoid.

The seminar provides an open forum for problem solving and developing strategies to create a synergistic and performance-driven work environment. The seminar identifies management strategies to channel the experience, knowledge and energies of all participants in achieving company goals and project objectives.

Types of Projects
The seminar is designed to dramatically improve performance in the planning and managing of:

• Large Capital Programs
• Capital Projects
• Grass-Root Projects
• Revamp and Debottleneck Projects
• Modernization and Expansion Projects

Seminar Objectives

• Provide awareness and knowledge of modern project management techniques and their systematic application
• Create result-driven work environment with synergistic project effort among company departments and contractors.
• Incorporate strategic planning and integrated organizational approaches that result in focused planning and efficient execution.
• Institute project controls that forewarn deviations and ensure highest contractor performance.

Seminar Contents

• Overview of Project Management
• Project Development
• Project Strategic Planning
• Project Execution Plan (PEP)
• Project Organization
• Contract Management
• Engineering Management and Controls
• Procurement Management and Tracking
• Construction Management and Controls
• Progress Measurement and Reporting
• Resource Planning and Optimization
• Cost Control and Forecasting
• Contractor Coordination and Controls
• Productivity Tracking and Improvements
• Approaches for Enhanced Project Performance
• Implementing Successful Project Management

Recommended Participants
This seminar is specifically designed for both owners’ and contractors’ project management skills, e.g.:

• Project Managers
• Project Engineers
• Discipline Engineers
• Cost/Scheduling Staff
• Construction Managers
• Field Engineers
• Contract Administrators
• Procurement Staff
• Quality Control

In-Plant Customized Seminars
This on-site program can be customized to a company’s specific work environment and projects needs. The emphasis of both the presentations and the workshops exercises are tailored to address company-specific issues and plant management’s concerns. Also, the consultative sessions are focused on developing solutions and management strategies for resolving pre-defined weak/problem areas. The 3-5 day program duration and daily schedules can be adjusted to meet your company’s work priorities and the availability of participating executive staff.

Project Management Advancement

This program is designed as a comprehensive approach to enhance a company’s Project Management capabilities in order to consistently ensure successful projects and get highest return on capital investments.

Principal Objectives

• Strengthen the company’s project management and controls capabilities.
• Ensure synergistic effort of all participants to achieve company’s business goals and project objectives.
• Achieve the highest project performance resulting in improved quality, shortened schedules and significant cost savings.

Program Purpose
To ensure consistent project success, it is imperative that the company staff has the knowledge of emerging industry trends and expertise in the latest project management methodologies. Major program objectives are:

• Transform the company’s staff into knowledgeable and effective project management teams
• Eliminate lengthy learning curve and experimentation on each project
• Institute strategic planning approaches and modern project management techniques

Major Benefits

• Cost effective achievement of company’s business goals and project objectives
• Assignment of project teams who are knowledgeable in modern management and control techniques
• Ensures highest quality, operational reliability, shortened project schedules and potential cost savings of 10% or more
• Added management confidence of project’s final outcome and improved performance

Project Team Coaching and Staffing Support

The success of a project is largely dependant on the experience, knowledge and leadership skill of the owners Project Management Team. In the world of downsizing and outsourcing, unfortunately many owners are challenged by declining project management resources. The project staff has to go through a long learning curve and in many cases on the job training. This approach is not only agonizing for the staff and can be a very costly for both the company and project.

Project Assurance’s Team Coaching Program is specially designed to make your project teams productive through accelerated knowledge transfer.

In addition, during the coaching process we expose the team to years of past experience through case studies and examples. The project teams also benefit through role model playing by using the current project as a case study.