A review of project management and maintenance management-related discussions on the web indicates a consistent trend: experienced users avoid mentioning specific tool vendors or specific controls software solutions and tools. The following is a typical statement:
“It doesn’t matter what solution or software you use—what is important is the process and that you follow.”

The implication is that the the solutions and software that people are using are all basically the same, and the process is more important because the solutions can’t get the job done in and of themselves. (Note that I, too, am declining to mention any of the solutions and tools that are common in our industry! But I am not doing so because any names that I mention would not constitute a complete list.)

Current scheduling tools are just that—scheduling engines that take your activity lists, your logic, and your resources and crunch the numbers using the critical path method, (CPM)  and produce diagrams and lists of those activities with calculated dates. However, the scheduling function is but a fraction of the entire scope of issues associated with managing a project. The same limited function applies to estimating, procurement, accounting, and cost control tools.

So, project management and maintenance management teams typically use each of these tools as required to accomplish the work that they need to complete. Where a solution is not available, or the skilled personnel required are not available, they can always use their trusty Excel spreadsheet! Simply put, none of these tools are integrated work management tools. 

With such an approach, you never have all of your project data in a location where all use of that data is made possible within the same tool. Use of isolated tools promotes the creation of data islands—one island for scheduling data, one for estimating data, one for commitment data, etc. It’s no wonder that a common concern among PMs and MMs is the need for an integrated work management solution.

Current practitioners have grown adept at navigating between and linking these islands, and this expertise now defines and delineates who they are and the skills that they have. They train the new crop of project managers to continue this with this non-integrated paradigm.

By continuing to use this 30-year-old paradigm and ignoring newer technologies, our industry now runs the risk of falling way behind the capability curve. We risk having another generation of project managers tied to aging tools and concepts.

The amazing simplicity of use of the Apple-inspired suite of products has ushered in a new mindset that where users expect to get the information that they need when they need it. They do this without:

• Finding the source data (on some island?)
• Merging it (in Excel?)
• Formatting it (in Excel?)
• Sending it for approval or reviewing it (in Outlook?)
• Receiving it and tracking comments and approvals (in Outlook?)

In order to keep up with the technology that is available today, 20 or 30 years after the introduction of the tools we currently use, we really should consider using a newer, more effective set of solutions and tools! A well-designed solution integrates the functions of each of the tools and maintains integrity by adhering to company business rules across the board, regardless of specific processes.

New technologies are enabling these new solutions to take shape

In 2012, the technological foundations that the new tool can—and should—leverage in order to perform in a way that meets user and customer expectations include:

• Web: The web has been around long enough to become so well used that many people do not even think that they are working on the web. People now bank online, buy online, socialize online, etc. We should ensure that they can work online as well.
• Mobile: The availability of laptops, tablets, and smartphones allows people to access their data wherever they have access to a cellular signal or a Wifi hub. This means that they can be completely untethered from their desks.
• Cloud: With your data in the cloud, you now have your organization in all locations (cities, states, countries) accessing the same data set. This enables economies of scale that could only be imagined (someone did imagine the cloud!) a few years ago.
• Improved User Experience: Apple and Android-based web app products amply illustrate what I mean by “improved user experience.” With these products, it is nearly impossible for you to enter bad data or have a user experience that results in you feeling that you have just wasted your time due to not having the results that you expected. Traditional (Windows-based) systems have many opportunities for you to enter potentially incorrect data—without complaint from the  system. This data may then remain in your system for a long time, cluttering the view of future analysts and costing unimaginably more in wasted analysis and questionable conclusions.
• Improved Team Collaboration: By integrating the required reporting and data management for your project or program, each team member is kept in the loop and can contribute to the preparation of and approval of the deliverables on a predictable and trackable basis. This feature reduces dramatically the need for face-to-face meetings and ensures more productivity in those meetings that do occur.
• Integration with Legacy Systems: All businesses have legacy systems that contain data and use processes that are integral to the operation of the business. The Internet provides a means to ensure that this data is securely moved to your cloud-based solution and made available to all of your team members. So, your investments in systems can continue to be leveraged despite the use of new technologies.

What are you waiting for?

Clearly, the time is right for a change to a less risky, less confused, less expensive, less disjointed model with fewer training requirements than what is currently in place in the majority of departments and work places in industry today. Are your budgets tighter? Are you happy with the current situation? Your SaaS (software as a service) vendor’s cost and implementation costs should be low enough to make you think twice before continuing on the path of the current experts.

• What work management is
• How TeamWork Group manages different types of work environments
• How TeamWork Group’s solutions address the needs of different work environments
• How you get started using a TeamWork solution and its apps—and how long it takes.
• What you stand to lose by using these apps

Introduction: What is Work Management?

We all spend some part of our day doing work. The work might depend on walk-in customers, so you can’t predict the number you’ll have in a day. You work as required. A park ranger, for example, measures the work by the traffic through the park, and requirements that may arise if one of the visitors needs help. So, work, and work volume, that is not cleanly defined or planned, is what project controls people refer to as "indirect work."

Supervisory and routine tasks, such as management and security duties, are also examples of indirect work. This work is very necessary—it is not as quantifiable as direct work, i.e. work that is planned. For example, people, who are members of a project, a construction or a maintenance crew, have their work planned in advance. The term "direct work" effectively describes planned (estimated and scheduled) work, as this type of work is defined prior to being done. Consumable materials and equipment that are required for direct work have to be procured in advance so that the crew can execute and complete it efficiently.

This distinction between direct and indirect work helps us to focus on how we manage the work as we move through the work management process. The major aspects of work management help us to focus on the tools that are needed to perform the tasks that need to be done.

Work Management tools are designed to enable people to do the following work-related tasks easily:

• Define the scope of the work to be done to a new or existing asset
• Estimate and budget the costs of the labor, equipment, and materials required to complete the work
• Plan and schedule the work
• Execute the work per the plan and schedule
• Report progress of the plan
• Track changes that affect the budget and the plan
• Commission or start-up the completed asset
• Review actual performance of project versus planned performance and record lessons learned

While performing each of these tasks, other elements help ensure that the work being done is compliant with regulatory standards such as health, environmental, and safety requirements. Financial regulations associated with spending controls, risk assessment, and mitigation are factored in. Lessons learned are recorded to enable the development of best practices for the the execution of future projects.

How does TeamWork Group manage different types of work environments?

Work environments define the type of work we do, and, therefore, the type of work that is to be managed. Examples of different work environments include construction sites, fabrication shops, software development teams, Project Management Offices (PMOs), shutdowns, turnarounds or outages (STO), movie sets, maintenance shop floors, process plants, college and school campuses, hotels and building management, website development, etc. Each environment requires a focused and consistent methodology to manage the type of work that predominates in that environment. Additionally, the organization responsible for doing the work is often a contractor, vendor, or other service provider company; we’ll call them a CSV company. In order to manage all the project or maintenance work, the CSV company has to have a set of tools similar to those of the owner of the assets—the company that benefits from the completed project.

How TeamWork Group’s solutions address the needs of different work environments

TeamWork Group configures a solution that fits each work environment. Typically, this is done in consultation and in conjunction with the Owner’s or CSV’s Project or Maintenance team. To speed this process along, TeamWork Group has predefined solutions for a few environments that are made available in the Evergreen Company Demo available on the website. Please contact TeamWork group via the business website at www.teamworkgroup.com in order to register your interest in reviewing, exploring, and test-driving these solutions. Let us know if you want to work on a solution not listed.

Solutions that support specific work environments and management modes are included in the table:

Each solution may be combined with components from other solutions to meet the needs of a specific work environment. For example, a city or county has a portfolio of capital projects involving streets, water and treatment facilities, etc. Additionally, they need to maintain city or county buildings or utility plants. TeamWork for City Project and Maintenance Management (City PMM) is a solution that would combine project, portfolio, and program management to manage all of these classes of work.

Note that all of TeamWork Group’s solutions have been designed with the awareness that they will not operate in a TeamWork bubble—they include the data hooks and flanges required to easily import data from and export data to current and future external systems such as Financials, Condition Monitoring (CM) systems, Real-time Process Control systems, etc.

What is in a TeamWork Solution?

A TeamWork solution is an assembly of TeamWork apps. A TeamWork app is a functional (job-focused) set of processes and procedures that ensures the person using the app automatically adheres to all of the company business rules—without the need to be intimately familiar with those business rules. Each app is designed to be simple and effective and have a minimal training curve. All apps are available on secure web pages via the Internet.

Below is a matrix of apps included with each of four selected solutions. The apps you have for your solution are determined by your business rules for your work place.

Please note that a solution evolves to contain only the apps that your company needs to support your project and work management model. The combinations shown merely serve to illustrate the possibilities of mixing and matching TeamWork apps. We can also easily create a special app for a job function that is specific to your work management environment.

How do we get started using a TeamWork solution and its apps?

Establish contact with the TeamWork Group via www.teamworkgroup.com. Let us know what your work management concerns are. We find it is best to review your company’s situation starting at the point of greatest current concern. It’s easier to focus on the most serious symptoms of the problem first. As we progress, we review the underlying causes of  problems in the process, which may lead to analysis and development of more useful process for your company or department. As TeamWork 2k is an end-to-end system that covers all aspects of the project and work management space, be assured that it remains easily molded to your needs as they evolve in the spirit of continuous improvement.

How long will it take to start using the system?

Depending on the urgency, you can get started in less than a week. The broad steps are as follows:

• TeamWork Group sets up your data instance on the web on the TeamWork host.
• You get your login credentials and security.
• You have a short orientation (1 hour or so) to understand the navigation of the system.
• You enter data and run reports as needed.
• Contact us if you need help. We are also available on a consulting basis to help direct and review your proposed actions.

The more you put into the system, the more it helps you and your company manage your work in an efficient, collaborative, non-redundant, cost-effective, and holistic way.

We look forward to working with you and your team to improve your work experience.

What can a company lose by using these apps?

The biggest thing that you will likely lose is the need to manage hundreds of spreadsheets with different iterations on each team member’s system. 

TeamWork 2k’s built-in, object-oriented, document management will help you also lose the need for directory-based storage of related documents. This ensures faster recovery of related documents without the penalty of knowing where to file them.

You will certainly lose the tension that currently accompanies the production of weekly, monthly, and quarterly reports, because all of your data is readily available in one place and not ferreted away in innumerable ‘shadow’ systems.

You will lose the need to justify huge start-up costs that are typically associated with the deployment of enterprise systems. This system grows with you—at your pace—and accommodates all of the disparate work classes and teams that exist in your organization.

Good luck in your adventure!

Simplify. Sounds easy, doesn’t it?

The challenge? Make our user tools simpler. Examples of these simple tools abound. Steve Job’s design-oriented approach has led to innumerable simple apps that even children can use with no training.

And yet, our industry (involving project, cost, asset, maintenance, people, materials, reliability, earned value management) continues to be plagued with applications that:

• Cost millions of dollars to implement
• Take months or years to roll out
• Require large numbers of people in implementation teams
• Grossly under-deliver following long delivery cycles—as is evidenced by the spike in use of spreadsheet and other data tools
• Burden end-users with mind-numbing processes that clearly are not logical in their particular work environments

These are just some of the challenges that accompany the installation of ERP (enterprise resource planning), EAM (enterprise asset management), CMMS (computerized maintenance management), and PMO (project management office) systems.

Alan Cooper, in his book The Inmates are Running the Asylum, pinpoints the root cause of clunky apps—the lack of a design approach to solution development. So how does that complicate the "simplicity" we're all aiming for?

IT’s View of Simplify

Simplification is one of the primary reasons that IT departments, and the corporate officers that they influence, love ERP, EAM, CMMS, and PMO systems. They hold the promise that other ad hoc systems and spreadsheets currently in use will be swept away and replaced by the shiny new, one-size-fits-all system that allows the entire enterprise to snuggle into a single system. It is a compelling vision! Which manager could not like the image of all of the worker-bees doing their work in their pre-defined slots while the big enterprise database is humming away, happily delivering exactly the data you want, when you want it and how you want it?

So, the company jumps into the ERP world with both feet, no holds barred. An employee that protests that the new ERP does not do what he or she needs done is sidelined as an obstructionist, his or her career adversely impacted. A request for a review of business rules is viewed through the lens of the new system—can the ERP support this? If yes, then it’s OK; if no, then we need to re-visit the business rule. Never mind that it is a business practice that has been one of the key factors leading to our years of success, until now. IT needs trump business needs.

The User’s View of Simplify

OK—we now have the ERP in place, let’s make the best of the situation. I cannot do what I want to do, but I can get most of the data that I need in the ERP. I can export this data to a couple or three spreadsheets, combine the data, and do the math in the spreadsheet and, voila, I can still do what I was doing! Days and weeks and months go by and my time is now pretty much settled into a routine of exporting data, combining it, and reporting it.

This is just one, all too common, user scenario. Spreadsheets now fill up the hard disk or the file-storage system. The results of all of this spreadsheet-based analysis is nowhere that enables historical trends to be viewed. User job satisfaction plummets. Users that used to spend time in the field working with equipment and people are now tied to their workstations. The apparently simple solution of using a spreadsheet has now morphed into a convoluted, tangled mess that the user is hard-pressed to even train another user in.

Consultant’s (Our) View of Simplify

Corporate IT and business users have now both landed in a messy relationship—not part of the original plan—that was based on the promise of simplicity.

Big forces (Corporate IT) have caused the ERP to be deployed. The money has been spent. Our solution needs to include the ERP, not ignore it.

Spreadsheets (and other user productivity tools) are so intuitive to use, that people with initiative use them to simply get their work done. They need to be commended. These spreadsheets need to be analyzed and, if they contain business processes that are mission-critical to the department or corporation or project, their functionality needs to be included in a simple, function-focused app.

This simple app, while being easy for the user to use, does amazing things under the hood. It uses data from the ERP, puts data into the ERP, and utilizes whatever legacy tools and repositories and other systems that it needs—all the while maintaining its simplified user interaction. In other words, the user does not have to be burdened with following that data maze that was created by poor decisions and poor design.

Sound simple enough?

The Problem

Ever since the immortal promise of "information at your fingertips" that Microsoft made in the 1990s, people have been able to truly manage their own data and have their information at their fingertips. The MS Office suite of software tools has performed a huge supporting role in this arena. MS Word lets you compose anything you wish.

However, a review of your maintenance, project, STO (Shutdown, Turnaround or Outage), or MS Sharepoint folders shows you just how many DOC and DOCX files are in existence in your department. Many of these files are simply forms that hold valuable data that could, and should, be stored in an easily retrievable mode.

The effective storage of data would cause a huge reduction in document-based forms, which in turn would reduce the number of files that need to be reviewed by analysts and auditors when studying your project’s history.

MS Excel, like MS Word, has played its part in the creation of untold millions of spreadsheets that hold data that should rightly be stored in more appropriate and well-designed databases. Microsoft did ride to the rescue—they provided us with MS Access, a database tool that, like Excel, allows the masses to tie ourselves up in knots developing ad hoc databases to hold data in small amounts while allowing us to continue being smug that we still have information at our fingertips. No one else can access this data—but I can, and that’s all that matters. 

Imagine the huge cost to corporations, governments, and institutions that these ad hoc MS documents, spreadsheets, and databases represents! They are costly to maintain, they are out-of date as soon as they are saved. They are redundant because there are so many copies of each. They take up huge amounts of space. The list of bad effects goes on and on. These issues and drawbacks are well known to IT departments, yet they often continue to actively encourage users to keep their information at their fingertips—implying that it is less costly to do so. And so the chaotic situation grows more chaotic every day!

So what is a logical alternative to this unsustainable situation? I see three options:

• BIG Box Solutions from Solution vendors
• Solutions Developed In-House
• Web-based Solutions, also known as Web 2.0 solutions

BIG Box

As you would expect, many companies have provided a huge array of potential solutions. Mostly, these are focused on vertical markets. In the work management space, where I have my exposure and experience, companies such as SAP, Indus, IBM, Oracle, and countless others (these are just the big boys) have database products focused on areas such as Accounting, Project Management, Maintenance Management, Asset management, etc. These are typically LARGE systems that require LARGE budgets and HUGE amounts of time and people to configure and deploy.

Many companies have already been down this path and the industry has a huge store of anecdotes about the successes and failures of these BIG systems. ROI does not manifest itself for years and a huge upfront cost is the norm. Due to the large cost, failures are spectacular. If you can afford it, this might be right for you. In a time of slimmer budgets though, it seems to me, these solutions are not the obvious best option.

Home-grown - In-house Development

So, what about simply getting what I need from a local software shop or contractor? Maybe our IT department has a few computer geeks that could easily throw a database solution together and we would be good to go. It would cost less, plus we get just what we want. Training would be easy too as we have the people on staff.

Another word for this approach is customized solution.

Here, too, there is a huge anecdotal record of successes and plenty of failures with this approach. In-house developers typically do not have the passion for the subject and are not necessarily experts in the specific business requirements or the state-of-the-art development tools. The resulting product is often under-whelming, late, and a disappointment to all but the initial users and designers—assuming there were any.

Problems are compounded when the primary developer leaves or is moved on to another project. While inexpensive initially, maintenance costs will add up as user requests for changes come in. ROI is pretty quick and having dedicated support is pretty nice—until the provider gets focused on other, newer, and more exciting development projects.

To me, this option seems like a good way to go to prototype your ideas—if you have a good support team. However, sooner or later you will need to face the music; maintenance and keeping it functional in newer environments will be tough to do and get tougher due to the non-scalability of such applications.

Web 2.0

With the advent of Web 2.0 (applications on the web) a new solution option has appeared that provides a great opportunity for companies to finally solve these problems of huge numbers of ad hoc files created in ad hoc tools and the associated data loss. The incredible speed of improvements in the mobile space also helps these Web 2.0 apps to flourish on ubiquitous handheld devices such as pads and phones.

In addition to the ease with which these apps can be used, the web has ushered in a new pricing model: It is possible to get the the benefit of these apps for a small per user cost for the use of each app. Imagine that! No licence fees as you are not running the software on your system. The system is hosted in the secure, easily accessible cloud. Also, you pay no maintenance fees as these are built in to the user rates. You may have to pay a fee for the size of your database if it exceeds a threshold amount. And there may be a fee for bandwidth usage. These should all be fairly insignificant compared to costs incurred with the traditional BIG Box solutions and also the home-grown solutions.

Web 2.0 allows the solution to feel like a traditional (non-web) app. A well-designed solution allows for configuration to meet your specific needs. You should have virtually no costs associated with additional development.

Conclusion

You guessed it. I think that the time has come to make the switch to the Web. Find your ideal vendor and start saving money. The sooner you do this, the sooner you will realize the benefits of that promise in the 90s. You really can now have useful, actionable, timely, accurate, secure information at your fingertips. Finally!

Sound too good to be true? Get in touch for a workout of the TeamWork 2k system.

Note: All product and company names referenced in this article are the property of their respective owners.

A turnaround (or shutdown or outage, depending on your industry) is a complex project that must be executed in a short period of time with a large number of people and equipment resources. Many people and short duration translates into a high cost in a short time. Significant cost savings are obtained by reducing time, number of resources and uncertainty (risk), and improving clarity, work scope, communication, change management. A successful turnaround has quality work delivered safely, ahead of schedule and under budget.

As complex as this type of project sounds, it is possible to be successful by following a few basic steps that ensure the right work is available to be done by the right people at the right time. Carefully managing the work process delivers the desired outcomes in the key aspects of the turnaround, like completing quality work safely at a reasonable cost and on schedule.

What follows is a simple, succinct process that you can use to manage your turnaround, shutdown or outage (TSO) project. As each plant, mill, refinery or facility has its own jargon and business practices, this process will be configured as required to suit the needs on the ground. This is simply a good foundation from which to build your standard process for your facility. The goal is to keep it simple and succinct (KISS).

Phases of a Turnaround, Shutdown or Outage (TSO) Project

In a future blog, I’ll discuss how this standard turnaround process gets turned into a list of requirements, which then forms the basis for the configuration of the work-related data management tools from The TeamWork Group.

Cloud-based computing has ushered in a new period of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt—FUD—in the halls of corporate IT (Big IT).

Fear that our company data is not secure in the cloud. Despite the undeniable fact that my PayPal, Amazon and bank accounts are safe.

Uncertainty that the cloud can possibly be more reliable in delivering up-time than in-house, on-premise, systems can—yet you have to admit that the Internet has proven to be more resilient and available than the best run in-house systems in your company. 

Doubt that the disaster recovery that is available on the web and the cloud could possibly be better and faster than that of an in-house hosted system. Though an automated cloud-based failover can kick in within minutes of a triggering failure, while an in-house failover system requires a huge amount of expensive setup and testing time with experts that may not be available or even on the company payroll when the failure occurs.

Let’s be honest, it sounds like absolute commonsense to have your data and systems on your system. That way, you KNOW that you have the data and the system—no matter what happens. But let’s drill down a little further into this seemingly logical and self-evident statement.

In the early days of personal computers (1980s) the volume of data generated and the hard disks available were pretty small. A 10-megabyte hard disk was a big deal. A lot of data were stored on 5.25” floppy disks that held no more than 1 Mb of data. Beginning in this era, IT departments evolved sophisticated backup systems. Twenty five years later Big IT is still thinking the same way: Get more and more storage and servers to meet the needs of data recovery and backup. In fact, Big IT just keeps getting bigger. Data volumes have sky-rocketed and will continue to do so. Continuing along this path of in-house management of data will continue to cause a growth in Big IT and its expensive assets. So, what is the alternative?

Around 2006, I started using Gmail from Google to support my communication needs. Overnight, my email communications and attachments were no longer stored on my system or the company’s corporate systems in MS Outlook, MS Exchange or Lotus Notes. Yet, every single email that I have saved since then is available to me. Google’s vaunted search engine is my email search tool! I have upgraded my personal laptop, which is also my desktop, each time that Microsoft launched a new operating system—five or six times since then—and prior to using Gmail, I would’ve had to consolidate my MS Outlook appointments, contacts and emails on to each new machine before I could stop lugging two laptops on my road trips. Now, every single email and contact that I have saved since 2006 is available to me, from any workstation—not just on my laptop. And, to make this even more convenient, all of this data is also available to me on my phone device.

By simply moving my data to the cloud (inadvertently, I’ll admit), I have made it work for me far more effectively and hassle-free than having it stored on the ‘company’ system. So, what was the cost for all of this great convenience? Zip. Nada. Zilch. Google provides this service at no cost—other than sliding a few relevant advertisers’ links past me while I review my email. (On a side note, I have lost count of the number of times that I actually did learn quite a bit from these links—so it really is a win-win scenario.) At a nominal cost, Google would suppress these links.

This is a simple example of the allure of the cloud versus in-house Big IT. Inexpensive versus expensive. The cloud is awash in reputable companies (such as Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon, IBM, Google) that provide low-cost storage and even virtual machines—all accessible via the web. This is a compelling business model for companies that are trying to reduce costs and be more efficient with their data. Sure, it means less work, which means that Big IT’s empire shrinks a bit—but it costs a lot to run that empire. So a savings would be a good thing.

So what are the potential down-sides of living in the cloud? A glitch in the Internet could cause problems. The Internet is a huge entity and it seems to be running well enough for many businesses to have already made the leap into the cloud. Recently, Amazon’s EC2 system hiccupped and many businesses were seriously impacted, some for as long as a day or so. But this could have been avoided had these businesses designed their systems as recommended by Amazon—mirrored their systems on two different domains—so that one would have acted as a backup to the other. Disaster recovery requires a failover system. In a cloud context, this could be as simple as having your primary host and your failover host be provided by different cloud vendors.

Thus far this discussion has focused on data. How about applications delivery?

Until 2006 or so, applications were primarily written to run as thin or thick clients on people’s desktops or laptops. Big IT installed applications on their servers and applied update patches from the vendor as required. Again, this requires more resources and helps Big IT to stay big. More applications and solutions require more servers and hardware and more people to manage them.

The cloud provides a significant new opportunity. Let the vendor bear the cost of managing the updates. This means less cost to the company while obtaining a higher quality of focused attention—vendors know their product and its behavior much better than Big IT could ever hope to understand. Consistent, contract-based, change management procedures ensure that the vendor complies with reasonable and logical processes that, in turn, ensure that the company gets a consistent and reliable product from the vendor. Another huge advantage is cost. The web-based assess model for applications is typically based on the number of users and the applications that they use. Per-User costs are in the range of $100 to $1,000 per user per month depending on the application and the volume of data. Compare this with the millions of dollars required to even contemplate the deployment of an ERP system onto an in-house system.

To me, it seems obvious that getting your head into the cloud is a smart and savvy thing to do. The sooner, the better. All that you have to lose are your overhead costs.

Note: All trademarks and trade names used in this article are the property of their respective owners.

Consider a typical project process today:

You start by listing your requirements in an e-mail or Word, and then you send them to your engineering contractor or department. This is the project’s Scope of Work, also known as the Requirements.

The design work, if needed, is done in a digital environment that is appropriate for the project. For example, steel structure design, landscape design, software design, or railroad design are each done in software packages that are dedicated to those processes. The result of the design process is a product (such as a building, garden, or software solution) that needs to be built using people’s time (resources), together with equipment (such as cranes, welding machines, ditching machines, computers) and materials (such as steel, mulch). The Project Estimate is the result of determining the amount of resources, equipment and materials that will be required to complete the project. The most common and intuitive way for performing the estimate is by using a spreadsheet tool such as Excel.

If the estimated cost of the project is acceptable, the project proceeds and funding is allocated to ensure that it can progress. A Project Budget is developed based on the work breakdown structure (WBS). The WBS ensures that the project has a consistent baseline for budgeting costs for specific WBS accounts and provides a tracking tool as the work progresses through the contracting, execution and start-up processes. Again, as with Estimating, the Budgeting process is often done in a spreadsheet.

The scope of work is now ready to be parceled into work packages that are designed for bidding by contractors that will complete the building or construction. These packages may be functional (electrical, HVAC), discipline (civil, structural, mechanical), or physical (pipeline spreads, terminals, pump-stations).  They must be logical for the project being managed. Most projects are split into work packages by adding a tab for each work package to a spreadsheet. The process for work package creation is Project Planning. As details are added to each work package, the tabs begin to be different from each other. The project planner consolidates the plan on to a summary tab using a set of pretty complex tab-straddling formulas.

One or more work package plans are configured into contract packages. These contract packages include specification and terms and conditions for executing the contract. Contracting companies that are interested in doing the work are vetted and placed on an Approved Bidders List. Approved Bidders are issued contract packages along with a deadline for their bids to be received. The bids that are returned are reviewed and analyzed and a winning bidder is selected for each contract. Some bid clarification takes place, following which, the contractor and the owner (your company) sign a contract that awards the work to the contractor. The contract becomes the guiding baseline for tracking the execution of the work to completion. Much of the contract execution work is modeled in Excel spreadsheets today. These complex spreadsheets are used for daily tracking of progress, recording of time spent (incurred costs), reporting to field management, reporting to project management and tracking changes.

During the execution of the work, the contractor provides (daily, weekly, bi-weekly or monthly) a pro-forma invoice that includes incurred costs for the period. The owner (you) validates this invoice and pays the contractor in a timely manner as specified by the contract’s terms. This is a manual process. The invoices are entered into an accounts payable system. Typically this resides within a larger ERP or Accounting system.

Projects today are typically scheduled using a scheduling tool such as Primavera or MS Project. This means that WBS-related data and work packages must be exported or re-entered into these tools from their source in spreadsheets.

When the project’s contracts are complete, the project team, in collaboration with the customer’s staff, performs a process that is called, predictably, different things in different industries; Commissioning, Hand-over, Go Live are some of the terms in various industries.

Smart companies then perform another vital step––they conduct an audit of the project in order to determine how the project team performed against how they had expected to perform. Did they do better or worse? More importantly, they examine the root causes of the successes or failures. This process can use the contractors, contract packages, the work packages, WBS or assets as a basis for their comparisons and analyses. As all of the data thus far has been in Excel, it is not unusual for this process to link of those existing spreadsheets.

As you can see a project’s scope evolves quickly from a relatively simple set of requirements into  complex and interwoven data sets that are required in order to ensure that the project completes safely on time and under budget with no surprises. You can see that the process is currently an intricate one that requires significant spreadsheeting, scheduling, and communication skills in order to keep things on track.

Experience has shown that the use of an integrated project management solution, that can handle a variety of different project types and complexities, is an effective way to ensure that projects will not be left with a need for armies of staff to maintain complex spreadsheets and schedules. Instead the integrated system would enable fewer people to leverage their data non-redundantly and faster than is possible with the prevailing approach today.

This is the basis for the integrated project solutions that TeamWork Group (TWG) provides for managing projects in a number of different contexts and industries. Future posts will discuss how TWG handles each of the business needs required in a project management process.

Note: All referenced products and product names are the property of their respective owners. These names are used here for clarity of the discussion.

Five Big General Requirements for Plant-wide Asset and Work Management

• Integrate with condition monitoring (CM) systems
• Manage the entire work cycle and associated data
• Manage all asset history and provide reliability calculations
• Manage general and specific plant information
• System support and configuration of the MMS to suit evolving needs

We now discuss each of these requirements in more detail. First we state why these are crucial to the operations of the plant, and then we perform a comparative gap analysis to point out the issues that may exist in your operations and maintenance environment.

Integration Links to Condition Monitoring (CM) Systems

A process plant's assets are the core entities that must be kept in top working condition in order to ensure that the returns on the investment (ROI) of the company, and its investors, are maximized. This means that maintenance work, which ensures the long term viability of each asset, is a core function that must be managed. For this reason, each plant has a number of systems that monitor the operating conditions of assets. Vibration monitoring is used to monitor the performance of rotating equipment such as compressors and pumps. Leak measurement systems are used to measure leaks of hydrocarbon gases from valves and fittings. Corrosion measurement systems help the engineering department to ensure that the piping and vessels maintain a thickness that allows them to operate safely and efficiently. Inspection systems provide a means for recording salient operating factors associated with each asset. An effective work management system links with each of these (CM) systems and provides a means to readily initiate the work cycle by creating work requests for review and approval by management.

Work Cycle Management

The work cycle that starts with a work request and finishes with a satisfied customer (in Operations, Safety or Inspection) is seamlessly managed in a single, user-friendly system. This means that proposed work is:

• Reviewed by supervision - if it is approved, then it is
• Planned by planners, after which it may be
• Scheduled to be worked, unless it is waiting for
• Materials procurement based on plans and estimates, after which it is
• Executed by the field, then
• QA'd (Quality-Assurance) by Inspectors, and if OK then
• Accepted by Operations or Inspection. During this entire process,
• Costs are tracked, including the estimated, budgeted, committed, expended, incurred, planned, earned and forecasted costs.

Each of these critical facets of the work cycle, including change management, must be managed. This management should occur naturally within a single continuous work flow system. Documents, communications and approvals associated with the work should, likewise, be monitored and tracked.

Asset Reliability and History Management

The work management process ensures that work is defined, tracked and accomplished in an efficient manner. The data collected during the work cycle must be analyzed constantly using statistics-based analytics. The results of these real-time analyses provide management with a believable and sustainable basis upon which they can make their decisions. Such as: Should a heat exchanger be replaced during the next turnaround, or should it undergo repairs? Is a pump that routinely suffers from cavitation incorrectly designed for its task? Should it be replaced?

Plant Information Management

The engineering data that is necessary for maintenance and operations analysts to make quick, informed decisions should be available quickly to all people who make decisions in the plant. This includes the most recent design calculations, specifications, documentation and drawings for each asset and process system in the plant. A complete plant management system provides an object-oriented documentation management system. This system ensures that asset-related data is always available to the planners, the field personnel, the inspectors, operations, etc.

System Maintenance and Support

The computer system (in this age of the web, this sounds like an archaic term, does it not?) that you use must be responsive to your needs. This is an often-overlooked, yet extremely critical, aspect of managing your plant. The long-term impact and cost of not paying due attention to the capability and capacity of your MMS tool as well as your solution vendor to meet your needs is measured in the millions of dollars. Study a few of the root causes of unexpected plant equipment breakdowns. They can often be traced to the fact that inadequate attention was paid to the warning signs that were being collected in the work cycle. Many CMMS vendors are companies with thousands of disparate customers in different industries. They maintain a wish list of improvements. Your foreman's great idea has to percolate through many internal levels of corporate bureaucracy, in your company, to the IT team that has access to the wish list. The IT folks dutifully add the requests to the list, but do not have the passion to explain the reasoning behind or the need for the wish list item. Sadly, the people that should have input into the improvements in an MMS are often the ones that are ignored and told to 'just use the system'. If they complain, they are branded as non-team players and troublemakers. Our experience is that these are the people that we should be listening to. These are the folks that are on the front-line and that are intimately familiar with the processes, good and bad. These are the people that we ignore, and then wonder why we need to replace yet another system.

In order to enable users and system designers to interact with each other, your software supplier must have people ready to work with your users. This often means having someone on-site with your people on a daily basis to better 'feel their pain'. This is a, seemingly costly, process that pays great dividends in user satisfaction, as well as more complete usage of your system. A quick review of the number of spreadsheets in use at your site is a good indicator of the sheer volume of data that is NOT being managed in your system. Too often, corporate system managers simply ignore these compelling facts on the ground and take cover behind the products and services of big-name companies like IBM, SAP, Oracle and others. Not only is the product and service package from these companies expensive, they simply serve the needs of the system managers. Business users get the short end of the deal. Try to avoid this when selecting your vendor. Ensure that they have a proven track record of customer support - in your 'trenches'. They should be familiar with your business processes. That should be the over-riding issue––as opposed to their claim to being a CMMS or an ERP.

How does your process get managed today? What are the gaps that must be bridged to a more efficient process?

The main issues, that we have discussed: Integration of CM Systems, Work Cycle, Asset and Reliability, Plant Information Management and System Maintenance and Support, are all so core to an operating plant that they are all being done today in your plant––using a variety of tools. We now briefly review the typical scenarios that we have encountered and suggest a better way to streamline each of these processes.

Smart Linking to Condition Monitoring (CM) Systems

Many specialty system vendors specialize in the supply of a variety of CM tools. You probably have vibration analysis systems, leak measurement systems, inspection system in your plant already. These systems are supplied by companies that also provide the hardware that generates the actionable data. However, look a little closer. Is the data from these systems processed automatically? Will the results of a leak detection process, for instance, automatically trigger the creation of a work request to fix a valve? Typically, this process is heavily manual. The results of the leak detection are sent to the Planners. Planners create a spreadsheet that is then reviewed. Then the planner creates a work plan in the planning system. These are three steps that require three human interventions in what could be a simple and streamlined, business-rule driven process.

Your MMS could be configured to poll the CM systems and, based on actionable thresholds, be able to produce work requests that are the start of your work management cycle. In addition, your MMS should alert your engineering and reliability people if any work request has been created for an asset on a frequency that is greater than the PM frequency. This gives them a heads-up and an opportunity to review and analyze the issue.

What is the cost of manually bridging this gap in information flow? What are the consequences or errors due to re-entry of asset information?

We'll leave that analysis to your business processes. What we can say is that The TeamWork Group's TeamWork 2k system has been designed with a strong awareness that the systems operating in your plant should work together, like a team. TeamWork 2k's Integration Manager provides many tools that help to integrate data flows between these systems and your primary work and asset management system. Your business rules for managing the flow between systems are also easily integrated into these processes. Imagine the convenience of having your major data islands all connected with each other. Of course the security concerns associated with regulatory programs such as SOX and TSX are addressed. In addition, we ensure that a security framework ensures that each member of you team has access to data that is appropriate to their (business-rule based) position.

Teamwork 2k is a great addition to the tools that you already use, and will help you to replace scores of spreadsheets and ad hoc databases by consolidating their data into a single, user friendly database that is accessible by a web-based interface.

Cradle to Grave Work Cycle Management

Current MMS systems come in similar flavors. They have data stored in a database. The Work orders (or notifications) are the typical mode for tracking work. As work progresses through its various phases, it is left to the user to manually change these phases. Scope change management is not an automatic process - rather, it relies on users to state that a change is occurring.

A business rule-based system that automatically changes the status of work orders should be implemented. This would ensure that arbitrary changes in status based on the data entry person's limited perspective will not skew the data in the system. Likewise, business rule based change management system is a huge benefit, as it enables automated tracking of changes, without imposing an additional burden of data entry on your users. This data is collected, and analyzed, automatically.

The typical work cycle weaves its way from initiator to supervisors to department leads to planning to field execution to QA and customer acceptance. Each of these points should have opportunities for the recording and storing of pertinent comments as well as attached site photos, equipment drawings, sketches, faxes, videos, etc. An audit trail of the decisions made during any aspect of the work cycle should be readily available to your team for review and analysis.

Intuitively, we know that scheduling of work is a critical component of the work cycle. However, systems currently in use are woefully lacking in this area. Typically, the solution is an add-on scheduling system that is not an integrated component of the work management system. While these are scheduling tools are admirable in their own right, badly designed 'bridges' and data transfers to and from these systems from current MMS's result in poor models of the maintenance backlog. In addition, the use of these scheduling tools means using schedulers, which means more cost to the maintenance budget. This is a very expensive way to go. Especially when one understands that scheduling is heavily rule-based. If these rules are built into your system, this results in a streamlined component of your work flow process. Your planner's plans simply flow into the schedule when they are completed, approved and materials and resources, human and equipment, are ready to perform the work. Your work execution staff will now get the work done as scheduled!

A huge asset in your project management team is your Execution staff. These people are your best source of excellent and timely field data. The three things you want to know each day are:

• Are there any problems, especially safety issues? This includes reasons for delayed work.
• Who did what and for how long? Another word for this is timekeeping. They can dramatically improve the accuracy of this process.
• What progress was made? This should be reported as a remaining duration for the task at hand. This leads directly to an evaluation of earned value.

Too often, during the execution phase, all of the details that the field provides are lost because there simply is no workstation or process available to foremen and craftspeople to report their knowledge back to the system. We see this as a major disconnect. So many decisions are based on the situation at the 'work face' that collecting information directly from it should be a major priority. We seem to be afraid of involving field personnel in the data gathering process, while we completely depend on them to do the work efficiently. The prevailing approach seems to be: Give them just the information that they need to do the work. Our experience has shown that involving the field simply helps you to improve the opportunities for more successful outcomes.

TeamWork 2k is a work management system. You can estimate, then budget, plan and schedule your work––starting from drawings or from issues encountered in the plant. Once the work is being executed, many tools within TeamWork 2k enable your workforce to provide timely feedback. When this feedback is processed and presented to, or accessed by, the management team, it becomes a solid basis for decisions that affect the project, maintenance plan or turnaround.

TeamWork 2k provides a real, cost-saving, opportunity to bring all of the work management cycle into one, efficient and focused, process.

Reliably run your Assets

Your inspection department collects information about the rotating and fixed equipment in the plant. This information should constantly be processed to ensure that there no hidden patterns that are leading to nasty surprises. Currently, you depend on the re-entry of this information into Excel spreadsheets in order to produce Reliability data that provide your engineers that data that they need to recommend appropriate solutions.

TeamWork produces Weibull and other asset KPI calculations for each asset based on data that is collected within the work management process. This ensures a timely and more accurate process for managing, computing and reviewing reliability data.

Conclusions: TeamWork 2k could well help to reduce the number of data islands that exist. Reliability calculations can be modeled within this work management system.

Plant Information Manager––your PIM

Where is your plant engineering specification data today? Is the electrical, instrumentation, piping, rotating equipment all in one system? This is likely not the case. Typically, we find this data in different Excel spreadsheets and Access databases. These are disjointed methods for managing this critical data. Line lists may exist in an Excel spreadsheet. Likewise, your electrical line data is also in spreadsheets. A disparate and department-focused system for managing these critical plant data elements is a recipe for ongoing problems.

TeamWork 2k, flexible database and consistent reporting framework can easily be made to replace these disparate systems––or integrate seamlessly with them. In doing so, your data is available to the people doing the work. This ensures a more efficient workplace and a huge cost savings for the plant.

Consider TeamWork 2k your work management system as the repository for all of your plant information––including OEMS, electrical, instrumentation, piping, rotating equipment, etc.

Software System Management

Observe your current ERP and CMMS systems. Are they responsive to your day to day needs? Things that we hear often are that they are simply not responsive at all. It takes years to implement these systems. When the budget for deploying these systems runs out, the expensive consultants are sent packing. The result is that the systems are left with little support. As these systems are not work and asset focused––usually, they pay more attention to accounting issues––they are not appropriate for managing work and assets. Each plant has its own work culture, jargon and other 'hot button' issues. These expensive ERPs and CMMSs are not easily modified to adhere to the plant's needs. Instead, they are deployed in a way that attempts to change the business process of the plant.

TeamWork 2k was developed with the knowledge that each client user has a business process that has kept them in business for a long time and that is generally sound. TeamWork 2k can easily be configured to assimilate the business rules of your plant and to be an asset to the work management process, as well as your tracking of compliance and other maintenance measures. Add to this the fact that all of this functionality resides in a single system and the benefits simply continue to mount.

The TeamWork Group also provides a complete hosting service for the software that you need. This means that you can have complete access to all of these tools and features without the need to install the system on company computers. What does this mean for your users? Here are a few benefits:

• Complete and constant vendor support
• Reduced need for long upgrade and update cycles
• Hugely reduced cost of management of the system
• Web-based access
• More robustness and constant availability than when using in-house resources.

But when field personnel use the schedule to help them deploy their resources and to report progress, the schedule is doing its work for the project. Ideally, field input is incorporated into the plan and the schedule that is derived from the plan. In real terms, this means that the plan and the schedule are owned by all of the people on the project––and not simply by the scheduling group of "expert" schedulers.

The train is leaving the station. Are we on it?

Imagine a world where we can stop things from happening until we are ready for them to happen. Not ready to catch that flight? It can wait. Not ready for dinner? It can wait.

Clearly, these scenarios are non-starters. The rest of the world continues on its preset schedule. Why then, are we so willing to accept the existence of an out-of-date-schedule? Common excuses provided include: "The data is not ready". "We are waiting to hear from the contractor". "The equipment vendor has not got back to us as yet". "We are working on the man-loading". "The logic is not right, yet". Are these familiar? Are people working on the project? Is progress being made? If so, then you should be working to the plan. And this plan should be 'scheduled'. If you are not doing so, you could be held accountable, by your company, for mismanaging company resources.

Does this sound too severe? In the light of recent examples of poor management of funds and associated risks, it would seem that a little more accountability and a little less freedom with company and investor funds is not a bad thing.

In this article we discuss various aspects of managing projects and plant maintenance turnarounds. In particular, we review the barriers that are commonly placed in path of project visibility and address the various tools that can be used to attain the desired level of transparency, accuracy and timeliness in project reporting and analysis.

Time and Money - the twin company resources

The two primary aspects of project management, after safety, are the management of time and money. The discipline of project controls is designed to manage these two critical aspects of projects and turnarounds. If you can reduce the time (i.e. duration) and the money (i.e. cost) of your project, you can save money and this is considered a good thing. The project manager (PM) that consistently brings projects in ahead of schedule and under budget is a hero and a valuable person in the organization. A major tool that the PM needs is a clear view of the planned costs and schedule from the outset of the project. Before corporate managers approve a project, they too need to know the proposed budgeted and the schedule timeline for the project. The budget and schedule may initially take the form of a planned expenditure curve. This is also known as a cash flow curve and when the cumulative cash flow is plotted against time, the shape of the curve approximates the letter 'S' and is often referred to as the S-Curve. This Planned Cost S-curve is a single diagrammatic representation of the cost and schedule of a project. In order to effectively produce such a curve, all components of the project's work must be included in the process. In many construction-related projects, the major phases are Engineering, Procurement and Construction. For this reason, these are also known as EPC projects. A discussion of how to produce a plan and a schedule for EPC projects and Maintenance Turnarounds follows. We discuss ways to overcome the common pitfalls and obstacles to the time production of a live schedule.

Staging a Successful Project

A project evolves through a predictable sequence of stages. The transition from one stage to the next is called a Stage Gate. The project undergoes a metamorphosis when it transitions through the gate between one stage and the next. During the Scope Development and Approval stage, there is very little in the way of project detail. This lack of detailed information makes it difficult to estimate the cost of the project as well as its duration. Scope developers and estimators prepare an estimate that is based on broad parameters. For example, if the project is to build a pipeline for 100 miles, the costs of previously completed pipeline projects may be used as a basis for estimating. If the project is to install a heat exchanger, the estimator can use a table from a reference such as Richardson's or Mean's to estimate the time and relative cost of the project. This type of estimate is known as the 10% estimate. This is because there is 10% or less of the detail that the project will eventually have following the engineering phase. Management approves the project based on the costs and schedule that they see in this stage. The amount approved becomes the Original Budget. The timeline is the original baseline. Any changes that occur in the project that result in changes to the budget must be approved as a change authorization request (CAR). The Revised Budged is the aggregate of the original budget and the changes. Likewise, changes may impact the baseline and result in a revised baseline. Some companies refer to the budget and schedule as the target budget and target schedule.

The Engineering Stage kicks off the process of detailed engineering. During this phase, detailed design work results in the production of detailed drawings and analyses. Halfway through engineering, it may be possible to create what is commonly referred to as the 30% Estimate. This estimate, with its extra detail provides a more accurate view of the projected costs of the project. Management uses this new information to modify the project budget and schedule - usually by changing its scope. These changes result in a changed schedule as well. The Maintenance Turnaround equivalent of the Engineering stage is the Scope Development Phase. This occurs during the year prior to the major turnaround.

Toward the end of the Engineering stage the drawing's are 'Issued for Construction' (IFC). At this time a 100% estimate provides a much more accurate estimate of costs and duration. By this time, management may have already committed to the procurement of some equipment and materials that have a long-lead time for fabrication or manufacturing and delivery.

The Construction stage ushers in the contractors and vendors that are responsible for building the project. The input provided by these organizations further contributes to the fine-tuning of the budget and the schedule. In Maintenance Turnarounds this is known as the Maintenance Period.

While construction proceeds during the Execution stage, and maintenance proceeds through the maintenance period, the progress provided and the field conditions encountered cause a new and accurate schedule to be available virtually every day. This is a live schedule that shows the way that work is unfolding each day and each shift, if needed. A Baseline schedule is maintained for the project. This is the approved budget and schedule. As the project or turnaround progresses, additional scope is discovered and included in the project based on field considerations. These changes are reflected on a 'current' schedule. A comparison between the current schedule and the baseline shows variances that may need further approvals by management. You company's business rules determine the processes for managing the documentation, approval and inclusion of scope changes in the current plan.

During each of the project stages a new schedule emerges. However, we prefer to see all of these schedules as the same schedule - just in different stages - just like the project itself. If we maintain the schedule in the same environment (software, database, etc.) then we can have the baseline to track the evolution of the project though its multiple stages. In the next section, we discuss the components of an integrated scheduling system.

Components of an Integrated Project Scheduling tool

Each project is broken down into component pieces according to a variety of breakdowns. The WBS or work breakdown structure is the most common tool for coding aspects of the project. For estimating and planning purposes, it is common practice to break a project down into work packages. An estimate work package is not the same as a plan work package. An estimate package is focused on materials (commodities), their quantities and unit rate costs for them. Labor costs are included based on standard installation rates. Plan packages, on the other hand are focused on the physical installation at the site. An integrated estimating and scheduling tool allows the costs of an estimate to be spread accurately along the duration of work items in the plan.

While a project progresses, there may be changes in the numbers associated with the project. These include the following:

• Quantity of materials (commodities)
• Unit rate cost of materials (commodities)
• Unit rate cost of labor
• Productivity
• Duration of the work
• Physical Quantity to be completed

Changes to any of these items results in changes to the cost and the schedule. An integrated project scheduling tools provides the means to track changes to these items, document them, get them approved and display their impact graphically as changes to the baseline and current target cost as well as completion dates for the work inclusive of the changes.

Changes - be aware of them and track them

Knowing the source of each change makes tracking the reasons for the changes a much easier and accurate and believable process. This tracking should occur automatically, without the need for onerous data entry and approval cycles. For example, if the client's field manager asks the foreman to work on an out of scope valve in the vicinity of the in scope work that is being done, the foreman may simply deploy his people to do the work (safely!). The system should allow a new work item and work package, if needed, to be added by the foreman or his/her timekeeper. Adding a work item 'on-the-fly' is critical in order to allow the plan to accurately reflect the actual work as it is done in the field - rather than being forced into the pre-built schedule. Think about this for a moment! We are saying here that a schedule should accurately reflect what is going on in the field. This is not a crazy idea. Yet how often do we see a schedule change due to field input? The weekly or monthly report that includes the schedule simply continues to report progress based on the baseline schedule. It pretends that what is happening in the field is not important enough to be reflected on the schedule. No wonder that the field often gets the work done despite, and independently of, the schedule. The foremen resort to Excel spreadsheets to outline the work for their crews and to record their progress. A disconnect grows each day that the field is disconnected from the plan and the schedule.

The main issue is to have a system be a reflection of the work as it is happening. By doing this well, it can also serve as tool for management to see where things are really going. In addition, the field is now co-opted into maintaining a much more accurate plan and schedule. This means that they are more likely to actually use the schedule to help them in their daily what-if analyses. Such as: 'Should we work 4 weeks of 12 hour days to crash the schedule?" or "Should we simply hit the critical path work for the next 4 weeks and 2 12 hour shifts?". Again, a live, and living, schedule is a tool that many projects are simply not using today.

Remove the Obstacles

Why is this? Too often, on the scheduling 'island', schedulers see their mission as to simply produce a schedule on a bi-weekly or monthly basis. They are simply auditors of the project execution. They are not integrated into the actual execution process. This is an expensive way to go. The scheduling function in this scenario is an overhead that the project cannot afford. The cost-effectiveness of a schedule and the scheduling process should be proved every day during the execution phase. When the field personnel use the schedule to help them deploy their resources and to report progress, then the schedule is doing its work for the project. This is a desirable outcome, and the way that it is achieved is by closely incorporating field input into the plan and the schedule that is derived from the plan. In real terms, this means that the plan and the schedule are owned by all of the people on the project - and not simply by the scheduling group of 'expert' schedulers. Once it is clear to field personnel that they are integral to the plan and schedule creation and maintenance, they will provide the best and most accurate and useful input into the schedule. This input results in far more accurate earned and actual data for each of the work items and work packages in the project's scope of work. When this data is rolled up to the project-level summary report, management has believable data that is built on, effectively, real-time input from the field.

It just does not get any better than this! No PM wants to live in a dream world. Not for long, anyway. The timely field will keep the project grounded, every time.

Takeaways for Live Scheduling

We now summarize the salient issues involved with Live Scheduling.

• Always have a schedule - no matter what the phase of the project. As the project evolves into its various stages, the plan and the schedule that is based on the plan should be 'fleshed-out' with detail. Use the 'do not schedule' flag to prevent work items and work packages from being included in the schedule before they are ready to be included (ex. while you are building the detailed schedule), or after you create a more detailed schedule.
• From inception of the project, establish a regimen of a daily schedule. This means you collect progress and actual data daily. It also means that the schedule is computed daily from the plan. This ensures that it is a living entity that the engineering, procurement, maintenance and construction personnel can use each day as they execute the work.
• Ensure that change management is built into the planning process by implementing company business rules. This ensures that the plan and schedule will always reflect what is happening in the field - and not just what was planned to happen. Do not be afraid of changes! They will happen anyway.
• Integrate your timekeeping with the plan. If your actuals are charged to the work in the plan they will, by definition, be accurate. The use of work orders or WBS codes in the timekeeping process is the single biggest area where bad data is collected in an organized way into the system. Using your plan and schedule in this way ensure accuracy in an area of heavy data acquisition - which means that this is an inexpensive way to get great data.
• Provide your field supervision (foreman, superintendents) with tools to let them view the current live plan and schedule as well as enter the latest field conditions into the system. This integrates them more closely with the project process. This results in better information, more quickly and in both directions - to the field and from the field. Amazingly, this also reduces their workload (no timesheets to be filled!) and helps them to 'work smart' by leveraging the information that they have into change management, progress reporting, timekeeping as well as workforce deployment for the next day's or next shift's work.

OK - Now we know what must be done - what tools do we need?

The TeamWork Group has built a suite of tools that are configurable to each client's business rules while ensuring adherence to conventionally accepted project management practices as outlined in various PMI publications.

The TeamWork 2k suite of solutions includes the following:

• myCosts - This is a WBS-based tool for managing the quantity and unit rate based estimating process from take-off from drawings to the approval process to the creation of a budget. Change management is included in the module. In addition, this module proves the means for tracking cost commitments and cost expenditures in order to provide an accurate picture of project status. Links are available to 'move' the budgeted labor, equipment, materials and contracted costs to the plan in order to obtain a time-based spread of the budgeted costs. Progress from the budget can also be sent to the plan and schedule or be sent back from the plan to the budget - based on business rule implementation.
• myPlans - This is a work package-based planning system. It provides the means for the execution team to break the project down into chunks of work (work packages) that can be planned and scheduled as logically integrated sequences of work. These work packages reflect the way that the work will be done. Planners plan each of the work packages. The built-in scheduling engine schedules and, optionally, levels the limited resources to produce a workable schedule based on business rules that govern prioritization, work type, work in progress, etc. Field personnel access their daily work list from the system and use the system to provide daily progress on work done. Built-in Change Management ensures that all changes are assimilated and documented and available for analysis.
• eWorkforce - This tool is focused on managing and tracking work done by the workforce on the work items in the work plans in the project. Links between eWorkforce and the work that is planned in myPlans ensures that time (actual or incurred hours) is accurately charged to real open work items. Each contractor that contributes personnel to the workforce may use the system. In addition, time data may be imported into the system from contractor timekeeping systems.
• myProjects - This tool is designed to be a quick query tool that permits project managers and other corporate and project personnel to gain a quick view of the health of a project. Quick access to project reports is available. Also, drilldowns into the detailed levels of a project are available.

The TeamWork Group has worked hard to ensure that companies that are in need of this technology can easily access it. We have done this by leveraging the internet to help you and your company to easily and securely gain access to the web-based tools that you need to get your work done efficiently and with the least amount of wasted time. You will not need to get approval from your IT group in order to install our software on your system. The only tool that you need is your internet browser.

We are also available to answer your questions––in a number of ways including all of the usual ones: email, phone, IM, SMS texting, etc.

Managing a project or a turnaround involves far more than can be done in Primavera's P6 or MS project alone. They can be a part of the solution; however, it's the management of the rest of the spreadsheet and databases that is the primary problem that TeamWork 2k resolves. The sheer number of people that are used to manage projects and turnarounds today can be reduced, and those that remain can have a significantly better work product by using TeamWork 2k.

Note: All trademarks and trade names used in this discussion are the property of their respective owners.

Introduction

In this post, we discuss the roles that these three systems play in organizations that use them. We review the benefits of each tool and how, together, they provide the user with more options. We also discuss exactly how TeamWork 2k communicates with Primavera and MS Project - including how it sends data to and receives data from Primavera and MS Project. As the discussion proceeds, we pay special attention to potential problem areas in transferring data and also point you to more effective ways of enhancing the TeamWork 2k to Primavera and/or MS relationship in your organization.

What is Primavera?

As there are many new business people entering our business environment, we spend a little time here discussing what, exactly, Primavera is. Primavera is a software package that performs scheduling calculations. It was created by Primavera Systems. In 2008, Oracle acquired the company together with its software tools. The most commonly used tools are called P3, P3e, P5 or P6. You can think of these as different versions with P6 being the newest version. Primavera is, justifiably, considered to be the industry standard tool for scheduling of projects. It has by far the most users of any scheduling system on the market. Microsoft Project is its closest competitor. The primary physical manifestations of a Primavera schedule are the graphical outputs that it provides - both on-screen and in reports. These include the bar charts (also known as Gantt charts), logic diagrams (also known as PERT charts), time-scaled logic diagrams (which combine the bar charts with logic), resource histograms (which plot resource usage against time) and cumulative resource curves (also known as s-curves). The tailor-ability of these graphics in Primavera is powerful and allows end-users to directly affect how they would like their outputs to appear.

How about Microsoft Project?

MS project has steadily evolved over the years into a robust and full-featured scheduling tool. It now provides similar capabilities to P6. The same type of outputs are available from MS Project as are available from P6. Some people prefer the functionality of MS project over P6. It has a more 'Excel-like' feel to it that appeals to the legions of Excel users out there.

Tell me something about TeamWork 2k.

TeamWork 2k is a business tool that has evolved over the last 20 years. It has its roots in interfacing with Primavera and MS Project. Early on, it became obvious to us that businesses such as process plants (refineries, mills, utilities, chemical plants) required a high degree of adherence to a business process while managing their work. This work includes maintenance, inspection and capital projects work. Plants perform their work on assets. It is imperative that the history of all of the work that is done on these assets be available, in a single database, for use as a reference during the life cycle of these assets. TeamWork 2k has developed as an asset-focused tool that enables all of the work, including routine maintenance, turnaround maintenance, preventive maintenance, capital work, to be scoped, estimated, planned, executed and tracked in a single system. This powerful database is a strategic weapon that the plant has against a number of major and problematic issues. These include:

•     Lack of adherence to business rules by temporary personnel hired to help out
•     Lack of a standard process for managing all asset-based work
•     Lack of a system that connects to other condition-monitoring (CM) systems in-house
•     Lack of a uniform system for reporting on the status of assets that are being worked on
•     Lack of a system that improves the quality of data and thus reduces the time that people spend re-entering this data

These may seem relatively inconsequential, but the price to a plant of not paying attention to these simple issues is enormous. Already, we have seen that data relating to projects and turnarounds that were scheduled in P6 are not available in the asset database where the routine maintenance work was tracked. This provides a potential for huge disconnects in the plant managers' view of an asset's reliability. Safety is also a potential problem here.

Simply put, TeamWork 2k provides a single asset-focused data repository for work in a plant, that enables plant personnel to make sound business decisions with a high degree of confidence.

Critical Functions

In addition to simply collecting all of the work-related data, TeamWork 2k includes the ability to do a number of critical functions that are sorely needed by plants today.

Managing a project or a turnaround involves far more than can be done in Primavera's P6 or MS project alone. They can be a part of the solution, however, it's the management of the rest of the spreadsheet and databases that is the primary problem that TeamWork 2k resolves. The sheer number of people that are used to manage projects and turnarounds today can be reduced, and those that remain can have a significantly better work product by using TeamWork 2k.

How does TeamWork send data to P6 or MS project?

TeamWork's Export Manager utility tool allows us to create a map from each of the schedule-related elements of TeamWork's database to either P6's structure or MS Project. This task is something that a TeamWork Associate will typically perform for you. You can then simply export your data to MS Project or to P6. Once the data is in P6 or MS Project, you can use those tools to do whatever you wish. Any changes to data made in these tools will not be automatically sent back to TeamWork 2k.

Bear in mind that in TeamWork, a project or turnaround is broken down into work packages. Each work package has one or more work items. Each work item has Resources, Materials and Contracted costs. The following table is a simplified version of a map that shows how TeamWork data generally maps to P6 or MS Project data. A more detailed map is developed for real-life usage of the TeamWork to P6 or TeamWork to MS Project links.

As you can see, there are many pieces of data that we currently support sending to p6 or MSP. You can have enough data in p6 or MSP to produce your colorful outputs. If additional information needs to be transmitted, this can be arranged quite easily.

How does TeamWork get data from P6 or MS project?

Bringing data in from P6 or MSP is a completely different problem that sending data to them. TeamWork 2k, is, by design a repository of data that meets the business rules of your business. There is a high level of consistency and accuracy in your data in TeamWork. This is due to data integrity constraints that are built into the database. However, this is not the case with projects in p6 or MSP. In these cases, each scheduler has his/her own pet approaches to handling the scheduling and coding problems in p6 and MSP. The result is that when you compare the work of two schedulers in P6, the results are quite different from each other. If a commitment can be made by the P6 schedulers and MSP schedulers that certain standards will be adhered to for coding the activities and tasks respectively, then the Import Manager module in TeamWork 2k may be employed to manage these imports on a routine basis. In any case, a TeamWork associate will be needed to get this process analyzed and started. Typically, it is less than a day's work to configure an import.

Conclusion

TeamWork 2k and scheduling applications such as P6 and MSP are designed to solve completely different problems. As such, they can co-exist synergistically in your organization and can routinely contribute to successful outcomes for your projects and turnarounds.