Major Challenge(s)
Size of the project, many external stake-holders, many interfaces leading to surprises, fire-fighting and lack of forward-looking visibility
Projects in this category involve over 30 big contractors and vendors for individual packages of work. On top of that, there are over 10,000 drawing approvals and thousands of major and minor orders involved in such projects. Combining these individual schedules can generate a plan that has 100,000+ tasks with thousands of intra and inter package dependencies. All of the above, essentially means that plans were never used in execution.
This project was being executed in an EPC model and the vendor had submitted a high-level 3000 task plan to ensure better visibility. However, due to the level of the plan it was neither possible to communicate information to the frontline and nor was it possible to analyse progress data and keep the management plan relevant.
Senior management feared that they might be getting blindsided to issues that are truly critical to the project and last minute surprises could cause significant delays to the project. The ‘Hydrotest’ milestone had already suffered delays and senior management did not want the same to happen to the subsequent milestones
Solution Implemented
Creation of plan that can drive execution, Concerto to leverage plan – Synchronize day-to-day execution and generate Forward-looking alerts for control
The methodology and software was implemented in the project within 3 weeks. The key differences that prior systems did not provide were:
3-tier (Focus-&-Finish) planning methodology
The contractor L2 schedule was converted to a 800+ task plan that was approved by all stake-holders
Automated Roll-down/ Roll-up
Concerto kept frontline schedules aligned to the high-level priorities, at the same time, utilizing progress data from the frontline the automatically keep the high-level plan always relevant
Forward-looking alerts
Using the Tier-1 plan, Concerto not only started highlighting the current areas requiring attention, but also upcoming bottlenecks that allowed senior management to start taking pro-active actions to control the project
After 7 months of implementation, this is what the management had to say:
Power Plant projects are large and complex in nature with many external stake holders. NTPC has over 40 years of experience in executing such projects. Our project management teams are amongst the best in the country and the world.
Yet, because of the dynamic nature of projects, synchronization (of various internal and external partners) and having meaningful signals to facilitate management control are practical challenges that we have recognized and been trying to address and improve for a long time. Realization's TOC based methodology and Concerto system have helped us in addressing these aspects of project management
In NTPC Khargone, within a month of starting the implementations of Project Analytics , our project management team had complete visibility of the bottleneck areas. Even when new bottlenecks are emerging, we are not taken by surprise. This enabled Team Khargone to take a lot of actions pro-actively and now our entire management team has full control on the due dates. We are going to complete major milestones on time. Some welcome changes that are helping us in pro-active decisions and actions are:
- Priorities are aligned for project level of management - decisions and subsequent actions are faster
- Each level of management have reliable, unbiased and meaningful visibility of their respective areas
- Warning signals from the system are definitely forward-looking
We are confident that we are going to achieve all the remaining milestones on time and we are implementing the Project Analytics system in a second Thermal Power plant project in Patratu
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