Industrial Megaprojects by Edward W Merrow

Author:Edward W Merrow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2011-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

Special Challenges for Megaproject Teams

Megaproject teams have some challenges that are unusual in smaller projects, among which are geographic dispersion, dealing with joint venture partners, and managing many interfaces.

Geographic Dispersion

Megaproject teams, especially during FEL-3 and engineering, are likely to be spread out around the world. It is not uncommon for two or three contractors to be working on FEED, and part of the sponsor team needs to be in each of those offices. Multiple contractors may do engineering and fabrication and construction, and again the team is dispersed to many locations.

Geographic dispersion makes coherent management much more difficult despite all of the modern tools of rapid communication. The simple fact is that people sitting next to one another can communicate more easily than those separated by 5 to 10 time zones. There is really no solution to the problem because contractor availability and quality do not follow a simple geography. The more time zones and the more nodes, the greater the complexity in managing the team. The desire to minimize these often leads to suboptimal contractor selection by taking one that is local, even if its skills and availability do not fit the situation.

It appears that dividing up engineering into multiple offices, complete with the use of low-cost engineering centers, is a cause of late engineering. I say “appears” because causation is difficult to establish. Did we divide up engineering among more contractors because there was a shortage, which really caused the engineering to be late, or did the added nodes cause the tardiness? Or is it simply a matter of larger numbers of contractors meaning more opportunities for someone to fall behind? Late engineering is one of the primary causes of project failure. We return to this subject in Chapter 12.

Integrating Joint Venture Partner Personnel

Joint venture partners can be a blessing or a curse. Partners who want their people assigned to the project solely for oversight purposes are clearly the latter. When a partner assigns people to the lead sponsor’s team for the purpose of checking up, they are a drain on the resources of the team. The team spends their time answering questions rather than getting useful work done. Some joint venture partners insist that their personnel not be assigned regular team membership tasks. This is one of those issues that should be hammered out as part of the initial discussions between partners, not left to evolve on its own. Joint venture partner secondees should be fully and completely integrated into the project team. Where they have experience, they should be given appropriate leadership positions. Joint venture partner personnel who have regular team positions gain a much deeper understanding of how the project is going. They are much less likely to be negative about the project team’s performance because they have a deeper understanding of the issues than the “drop-in, drop-out” liaisons can.

Some of the most difficult joint venture situations are “equal partner” projects. In these cases, the project director will come from one of the partners and the deputy director from the other.

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