Element 6: Real-time Project and Facility Management, Coordination and Control

Tactical Plan

Download Tactical Plan in PDF | Working Team | Vision | Problem | Benefits and Opportunities | Barriers & Challenges | Goals | Strategy | Focus Areas & Projects | Timeline | 2007 Executive Summary

Scope

Provides a fully integrated facility planning and management system (i.e. tools and processes for planning, control, and review, including financial controls - of design, construction, and ongoing facility management). While Project and Facility Management are classically treated as separate and distinct sets of processes with a discrete handoff point, this Element treats them as a single set of processes covering the continuum from initial planning to the end of life of the facility.

Founding Team

Arizona State University, Dr. Anil Sawhney
Autodesk, Matt Wheelis (Team Champion)
Bechtel, Frank Matthewson
ConocoPhillips, Alan Tough, Bart Neighbors and Robert Trosper
Consolidated Contractors Company, Zuhair Haddad
DeVry University, Karmin McKay
DuPont, Nancy Bull
Hanyang University Ansan, Saumya Swain
Hatch, Daryl Ofstie and Glenn Sakaki
Intergraph PPM, Franz Kufner
Jacobs Engineering, Jack Yarbrough and Dennis Helliwell
Meridian Systems, John Bodrozic and Phil Greer
Morpheus Technology Group, Randy Nolan
NRX Global, Scott Frazer
OnTrack Engineering, Mike Milinusic
Pennsylvania State University, Vincent Allen
Primavera, Richard Sappe
The Procter & Gamble Company, Gil Torres and Scott Cameron
Saudi Aramco, Louis Archuleta
Skire, Paul Verveniotis
Software Innovation, Ray Simonson, Scott O'Neill and Paul Sunderland
Target, Manuel Robledo
Texas A&M University, Jorge Vanegas
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Dr. Liang Y. Liu
University of Michigan, Vineet Kamat
VTT, Iris Karvonen and Arto Kiviniemi
Karmin McKay

Vision

The Vision statement describes what is wanted in the future.

Future management systems will empower integrated orchestration and control of Project and Facility processes, and will be a tool that provides continuous visibility to all plans and tasks throughout the planning, design, construction and facility lifecycle. The result will be a well-orchestrated series of interrelated tasks and activities optimized for efficiency and results, coordinating resources and plans in an error-free fashion, radically reducing the time and cost required to move from planning to design to construction to operation.

The system will interface with the Asset Lifecycle Information System (see Roadmap Element 9), created at project inception and extended through the project and facility lifecycle. It will link to the pervasive sensor network at the project (see Roadmap Element 4) and facility (see Roadmap Element 5) levels, which will provide accurate, continuous, real-time visibility of progress and status of all activities. Progress and performance of every activity will be monitored and deviations will automatically be flagged for management attention, allowing project and facility managers to fully understand the impacts of problems or changes, assess risks, and manage changes throughout the lifecycle. Thus, productivity and accountability will be improved in real time, and the automated monitoring system will create a historical experience database of plans and outcomes. This can be used to optimize all types of processes for future projects or facilities.

The table below describes several types of sensors or systems that may be used to provide progress and status information at various stages of the lifecycle.

Current Problem

The Current Problem statement describes the existing situation.

Capital projects and facilities today are planned, executed, and managed using a bewildering array of automated tools and manual processes. Different companies use widely differing tools to accomplish similar functions. In fact, a wide range of tools and processes are used within individual companies as mandated for various projects by internal and external constituents and clients. Few of these tools natively interface with each other, and reaching agreement between departments as to the correct processes and interfaces is challenging at best. This forces teams to resort to the lowest common denominator - paper - for developing and sharing requirements, plans, design, development and operational information. Links between the project phases and the operational phases are even more tenuous, since facility operators typically receive only a set of as-built drawings of limited fidelity. Some specific problems include:

• Poor access to accurate data, information, and knowledge in every phase and function.
• Program plans and designs are optimized for a limited set of parameters in a limited domain. The capability to make fully supported "total best value" decisions does not exist.
• Tools for project planning and enterprise management are maturing, but an integrated and scaleable solution that delivers all needed functionality for any kind of project is not available.
• Lifecycle issues are not well understood - so modeling and planning do not effectively take life-cycle value into account. Operation, maintenance and end-of-life needs are given limited consideration in the project planning equation.
• The ability to assess uncertainty, risk, and the impact of failure is immature. This is partly due to lack of knowledge to support evaluations, and partly due to the limitations of available tools.
• The business foundation for addressing increased security concerns does not exist, and the ability to address these issues is limited by a lack of understanding of risks and alternatives.

The missing link is the ability to integrate all functions of a facility planning and management system and all required information in a unified project/facility management environment. This is the challenge addressed by this Element.

Potential Benefits & Opportunities

Modeling and simulation technologies (ranging from modeling facility itself to modeling field construction, facility operation, and business processes) coupled with advanced information technologies will offer tremendous opportunities for the capital project and facility industry. The benefits of this capability will be dramatic. The ability to understand, coordinate, and manage according to plan - throughout the project and the facility lifecycle - will provide a new level of precision for the industry. This will enable faithful execution of projects on time and within budget as planned and designed, and highly efficient facility operation.

Project and facility management will be facilitated by secure, real-time access to any and all data about the project. The facility planning and management system will monitor status against the project and operational baselines (schedule + other lifecycle plans), track risk items, instantly recognize variances, and electronically issue alerts. The system will support analysis and decision-making by project and facility managers and help determine, take, and communicate corrective actions.

Specific benefits to the stakeholders are noted in the table below.

Potential Barriers & Challenges

The potential barriers and challenges faced in the development of a fully integrated facility planning and management system may be divided into two groups as listed below: technology barriers and business/process barriers. As with many technological advancements, the business and process barriers may be more difficult to overcome than the technology barriers. Many of the needed advances must come from outside the capital project and facility community. The project team must develop a strong industry consensus in order to influence the technology community in needed directions.

Goals

The Goal statement describes what is expected to be achieved.

The goal of this Element of the Roadmap is to identify and pursue the data models, business processes and functions required to advance the development of a fully integrated facility planning and management system that can be seen as the real-time system across the design, construction and facility lifecycle. It is critical that this system can be adopted throughout the capital projects and facilities industry.

Specific objectives include:

• Define the business processes involved in the project and facility lifecycle
• Develop requirements for tools necessary to support the business processes
• Evaluate tools identified in the marketplace and develop additional tools as required
• Develop and document best practices (including validation)
• Create open standards as required for the data model and for business processes and best practices

Strategy for Achieving the Goal

The strategy statement describes how we see the goal being achieved.

The strategy includes the following components:

1. Develop a charter and project plan, including a schedule.
2. Identify and define the business processes required for the lifecycle of the capital project and facility management process. These processes integrate between/across organizations, disciplines and stages of the project and facility lifecycle.
3. Assist in the development of open standards related to the identified business processes by creating and maintaining the set of industry-wide shared or common reference data structures for each process that must be exchanged with the Asset Lifecycle Information System.
4. Define requirements for the technical tools (software products etc) required to support the identified business processes
5. Evaluate tools in the marketplace against requirements, including a comprehensive gap analysis comparing the existing tools to the identified requirements.
6. Prioritize and re-evaluate Roadmap projects based on value to the industry
7. Provide economic model to support business case for adopting new processes. (e.g., 3d computer modelling and isometric pipe issue reduces field rework to 5%).
8. Assist and motivate all solution providers, including but not limited to academics, associations, and technology providers to accelerate the process of providing compliant tools and products to the marketplace

Focus Areas and Projects are defined to implement this strategy.

Focus Areas and Projects

The focus area section describes what we are going to focus on, and specific projects are proposed within each focus area. Focus Areas are the broad description of what this Roadmap element is going to do. Each focus area will be addressed through several projects, conducted over time. The project titles are linked to the detailed project descriptions.

Project details can be viewed by downloading the PDF. The project template applied to each project includes: Project Title, Objectives / Deliverables (what result), Purpose / Business Driver(s) (why), Ties / Dependencies / Overlaps (with other projects or Elements) (constraints, boundaries), Urgency / Time line (when), Process / Activities (how), and Resources (who). Each project will be more fully defined as time progresses. At this point the project descriptions should indicate what the project will do in sufficient detail to get potential participants interested and to understand the timing and dependencies between projects. Timing or scheduling of these projects is presented in the section, the Seven-year Timeline.

E6-FA1: Intelligent Project Management System - Provide interactive systems that integrate knowledge-based tools with human decision-making to capture, analyze, document, store, protect, and deliver accurate, real-time information supporting all project management needs.

Projects:

E6-FA1-P1 Standards for Project Information and Knowledge Representation
E6-FA1-P2 Project Data/Information Repositories
E6-FA1-P3 Self-integrating Project Management Systems
E6-FA1-P4 Intelligent Project Analyst
E6-FA1-P5 Secure, Accessible Information
E6-FA1-P6 Real-time Capture of Complex Information
E6-FA1-P7 Business Process Models

E6-FA2: Streamlined, Knowledge-Driven Approval Processes - Develop streamlined regulatory interface processes and automated approval systems that interface directly with the project planning and design knowledge base to enable fast, thorough review of required submittals and rapid resolution of issues.

Projects:

E6-FA2-P1 Improved Regulatory Process Review and Compliance
E6-FA2-P2 Improve Workflow Approval Process

E6-FA3: Optimized Construction Sequence and Schedule - Provide a scenario-based project execution planning environment that enables optimization of the project execution sequence and schedule.

Projects:

E6-FA3-P1 Automated Optimization of Construction Execution Strategies
E6-FA3-P2 Secure, Transparent Sharing of Construction Sequence and Scheduling Data
E6-FA3-P3 Interoperability and Integration of Construction Sequence and Schedule Systems

FA4: Real-Time, Model Based Project and Facilities Control - Provide the capability to model a capital project from start to decommissioning, and monitor and control technical, cost, and schedule progress based on the model.

Projects:

E6-FA4-P1 Modeling Framework
E6-FA4-P2 Project Information Database
E6-FA4-P3 Time and Execution Model
E6-FA4-P4 Integration of Modeling System for Intelligent Project Management
E6-FA4-P5 Performance Tracking and Assessment System

E6-FA5: Automated, Distributed Change Management - Provide systems that automatically inform all stakeholders about changes and associated impacts, facilitate collaborative decisions for problem resolution, and deliver all supporting information in customized packages to the right people and systems.

Projects:

E6-FA5-P1 Global Change Management Protocols
E6-FA5-P2 Decision Support Tools for Change Management
E6-FA5-P3 Change Management Modules

E6-FA6: Automated Quality Assurance and Quality Control - Develop automated QA/QC systems and integrate these systems into the project management system to monitor and track compliance to work plans, specifications, and standards (receive information from Intelligent Jobsite).

Projects:

E6-FA6-P1 Defects Analysis and Understanding
E6-FA6-P2 Quality Metrics and Standards for Capital Projects
E6-FA6-P3 Automated Quality Status and Compliance Reporting

E6-FA7: Integrated Stakeholder Business Systems - Identify the requirements and processes for integrating all project stakeholders' business systems in a secure shared environment with appropriate access and control tailored to business relationships.

Projects:

E6-FA7-P1 Common Financial Vocabulary and Cost Codes
E6-FA7-P2 Automated Business Systems Interface
E6-FA7-P3 Shareable Capital Project Cost Model

E6-FA8: Verification of Financial Performance - Provide the capability to automatically and comprehensively update and report the estimated cost and return on investment for the project on demand, based on real-time performance data and costs, along with any variances.

Project:

E6-FA8-P1 Real Time Performance Capture

Seven-year Timeline

A timeline is proposed for the projects within this tactical plan.

1. Preparation for each project will take about 3 months (1 quarter). Preparation includes identifying funding, resourcing and project set-up. Preparation time is included in the following timelines.
2. Project teams will form and disband for each project (unless the team wishes to continue to do another project).
3. Focus areas with an odd numbered quarter, Q1 or Q3, are independent and can start at any time. Focus areas with even numbered quarters are dependent on other work. The work is arbitrarily spread over the timeline, but only over a four year period because the team feels that this work is needed urgently and has significant payback. If resources are available this time line can be compressed further.

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