2017 Annual Conference

More information to come

• Learn about Front End Engineering Design (FEED) in the context of large industrial projects.
• Hear about FEED maturity and accuracy in relation to project performance.
• Get acquainted with the FEED Maturity and Accuracy Total Rating System (FEED MATRS), a front end planning tool.
• Understand when and why to use FEED MATRS, based on a demonstration of the methodology for using FEED MATRS during front end planning of large industrial projects.
• Discover how to apply the team’s findings in other sectors.

In many cases, front end engineering design (FEED) is neither mature nor accurate at project authorization, which results in poor project results and severe impact to business performance. Little guidance currently exists on what it takes to provide a mature and accurate FEED. This presentation will provide empirical results demonstrating the impact of FEED maturity and accuracy on project performance, with savings of up to 24 percent in cost. The talk will also introduce a new tool, the FEED Maturity and Accuracy Total Rating System (FEED MATRS), including a basic overview of the tool and an example and testimonials that show how to use it. Both owners and contractors can use FEED MATRS throughout front end planning as a decision-support tool to identify and prevent FEED maturity and accuracy gaps and risks. Although the RT-331 research focused on large industrial projects, this presentation will also describe the tool’s applicability to other sectors.

• Identify and rank the main causes of out-of-sequence construction activities (OOS).
• Highlight the main warning signs that can be used to anticipate OOS.
• Quantify the cumulative impacts of OOS.
• Identify the appropriate preventive actions to minimize OOS.
• Identify the correct responsive actions to mitigate OOS negative impacts.

This presentation will summarize the findings of two studies that were conducted by RT-334: expert-based study and project-based study. Through these findings, the presentation will highlight the highest risk causes of OOS, the OOS warning signs that can be used to anticipate OOS, as well as the cumulative impacts of OOS on project performance. Then, the presentation will discuss the 21 best practices that were developed as a result of these findings that should be used to prevent OOS and minimize its negative impacts. Finally, the tool will be clearly demonstrated while through a case study of a real project.

• Learn about the 10 skills common to foremen and general foremen.
• See how the industry currently assesses the skill levels of foremen and general foremen.
• Learn how foremen and general foremen allocate their time, and how that falls short of the most desirable allocation.
• Discover how foremen and general foremen allocate their time differently in traditional and Advanced Work Packaging environments.
• Hear recommendations for improving foremen and general foremen skills and competencies, including recommendations around recruiting and retention.

Frontline supervisors—foremen and general foremen—are the managers who translate construction execution plans into productive action. Despite their importance, they have been comparatively understudied. Recent productivity research has focused on new techniques, such as Advanced Work Packaging (AWP), or on worker shortages and lessening of craft skills. However, whether to implement productivity improvement initiatives or to address worker skills, it is imperative to focus on the capabilities of foremen and general foremen. The RT-330 research, limited to industrial construction, addresses frontline supervision in two ways:

1. It addresses the 10 core competencies of foremen and general foremen, composed of a host of specific skills that are uniform across productivity regimes (varying only in details). This research validated the importance of these core competencies, but found that their levels in the industry are lower than desired.
2. RT-330 addressed how frontline supervisors allocate their time across common tasks. Both foremen and general foremen were found to, in aggregate, spend time on tasks in ways that offer an enormous opportunity for improvement.

Collectively, RT-330 research finds large opportunities to improve frontline supervisor skills and, with that improvement, improve how foremen and general foremen allocate their time each day. Team recommendations around screening, development, and retention can help attendees to implement improvements.

• Assess and improve operational excellence on your projects.
• Understand how you can evaluate the perception of your corporate safety policies and safety culture.
• Improve the professionalism of your safety management systems.
• Utilize from the RT-317 OE Assessment Tool.
• Assess and improve project safety programs through the RT-317 OE Assessment Tool.

This presentation’s moderator will give a brief overview of the team’s research. Then the panel will introduce the RT-317 OE Assessment Tool and show how it can benefit any organization. Owner panel members will discuss the tool’s value for owners, and contractor panelists will show its distinct value for contractors. Attendees will be encouraged to consider their organizations’ practices and commitment to understanding safety.

More information to come

• Learn the nature of the key project activities that underpin effective transitions between construction, pre-commissioning, commissioning, startup, and closeout (CCSU).
• Understand the assignment and distribution of roles/responsibilities for the CCSU activities (via a RACI matrix), especially for four key roles: project manager, construction manager, commissioning manager, and operations manager.
• Increase awareness of frequently troublesome CCSU “hot spots,” their causal factors, and some mitigating strategies.
• Hear about a highly successful CCSU case study for a deep-water spar project, with an emphasis on planning, alignment, and prior lessons learned.

This presentation will follow a recommended work process to sequentially examine various findings from the RT-333 research, including historically poor commissioning/startup (CSU) performance metrics, planning for startup and CSU critical success factors (building on the prior work of RTs 121 and 312), different CSU contracting strategies, CCSU flow chart of activity and associated RACI matrix, support team organization and CCSU execution plan, Heidelberg Spar case study, CCSU “hot spots,” mitigation planning, and monitoring performance.

• Establish clear expectations for what is in the model and quality of the data in model-based engineering projects.
• Improve transparency and consistency in measuring progress in model-based engineering.
• Identify and eliminate discipline-specific and inter-disciplinary risk in model-based engineering.
• Improve modeling execution planning through a set of standardized model maturity definitions.
• Establish procedures for tracking productivity in model-based engineering.

This presentation offers a new approach for measuring progress and productivity in model-based engineering. A new set of standard Model Maturity Index (MMI) definitions, a Model Maturity Risk Index (M-MRI) toolkit, together with an addendum to model execution plan are presented to standardize measuring progress and productivity in modeling efforts. These definitions, the toolkit, and model execution plan addendum are adoptable and adaptable for different types of projects across key sectors of the construction industry.

• Understand the developed quality pyramid (common language).
• Learn how to calculate the developed quality metric.
• Understand approach to evaluating value added to organizations in supporting the quality metric.
• Review the implementation process and how to leverage existing organizational quality processes and data.
• Discuss implementation by early adopters and the value added to their organizations.

This session will introduce the quality concept and give an overview of RT-313 research. The presenters will discuss the team’s research goals and challenges, show how to calculate the new quality metric, and demonstrate its value to any organization. The remainder of the session will be devoted to outlining “early adopter” organizations’ experiences with obtaining the management buy-in needed to collect data, and the value these data returned by generating the quality metric. Audience participation will be encouraged.