Offshore small projects (< $ 20 MM gross) often account for 15-20 percent of Oil and Gas Company's annual capital budget. Poor small project execution increases project costs and adversely affects production. Project management skills and habits developed in small project execution, good or bad, feed large project performance.
Using small projects as a training ground for large projects improves small project efficiency and develops project professionals with skills to save hundreds of millions of dollars on a large capital projects program. The small project arena provides a dependable and renewable source of project management professionals at a time when age demographics threaten long term project performance.
The following paper describes a small project improvement initiative implemented to improve small project performance. The initiative focused on:
evaluating current performance
developing common processes and tools and
establishing a global small project network to share best practices and facilitate global interaction.
The offshore oil and gas industry spends billions of dollars annually on small projects. Small projects are defined here as projects with a total installed cost less than $ 20 MM gross.
Small projects are often completed on operating facilities that can potentially affect large revenue streams. The cost of small projects is disproportionate compared to their potentially large impact to production and revenue.
Taking the time and effort to train small project personnel pays two significant dividends:
Small project performance improves
Future large project leaders are trained and developed
There are strong business and economic drivers to improve small project performance. The main drivers include: cost, schedule, results, operability, and safety. The following five-step program was developed to improve small project performance:
Develop Standard Format for Evaluation
Conduct On-site Interviews
Evaluate Small Project Performance
Develop Action Plan to Improve
Share Learnings and Best Practices
The first step was to develop a standard format to evaluate small project performance on a global basis. A 150-question questionnaire or audit was developed covering the entire project cycle from how the project idea was originated through start-up and project closeout.
The questionnaire covers the following areas:
Project submission and screening process
Decision criteria and selection process
Project team formation
Front end loading and planning
Use of value improving practices
Project execution plan development
Contracting and procurement strategies
Project control systems
Project outcomes and closeout
Lessons learned
Key business units were asked to identify 4-5 small projects for detailed review and to provide summary data on 6-8 other small projects. Ideally, these projects were completed in the last 6-18 months and represented their normal small project workload.
A corporate specialist traveled to the business unit location to complete the detailed reviews. Normally, each detailed interview lasts
