Operational Readiness - Is Your Project Ready?
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Many projects do not achieve their anticipated benefits in terms of cost, technical delivery and time-frame. It has long been recognised that a project has a higher chance of success if the upfront processes are managed carefully and thoroughly. The so-called FEED or Front End Engineering Design deserves close attention to ensure the back end deliverables are achieved to the customer’s satisfaction, within budget and on time.
Another source of new project delivery frustration is when the project team hands over a ‘completed’ project to operational staff and leaves them with little knowledge on how to operate, maintain and possibly integrate the new system into existing processes. In other words, is the project actually ‘ready’ to hand over? Operational Readiness is a systematic approach to build into the project as many elements as possible that ensure the efficient handover and start-up of a new system. This requires input from relevant stakeholders – engineering, operators, maintainers and the project team. It requires consideration of many Asset Management and Risk Management elements to ensure the system has strategies to optimise the total cost of assets over their entire life cycle. Key phases are:
This close interaction between stakeholders and the project team requires supporting documentation to put in place the necessary controls and records associated with project handover and Operational Readiness elements. Asset Management policies and procedures, reliability modelling reports, risk analyses, equipment maintenance strategies, compliance reports, operations and maintenance manuals and training materials are a few examples. |