Project Controls Infrastructure

PROJECT CONTROLS INFRASTRUCTURE

Project Summary

Our client, a well-established organization needed to develop and integrate project planning and project controls best practices, customized to the needs of its business. The best practices needed to support long-established engineering, finance and operations procedures and systems, but allow data to be standardized and automated. Most importantly, the fundamental changes inside this well established organization had to be embraced and championed by their most important assets of all - their people.

Our Solution

Modus provided experienced resources to our client to assess and integrate five different project delivery organizations to improve the quality of project planning processes. Each group had varying degrees of quality and completeness for their established project precedures and toolsets but an integrated approach was needed to facilitate standardization, scalability and centralization of project data for the enterprise. This needed to be completed quickly with top quality to meet firm and aggressive deadlines for regulatory approvals and funding release that required substantive basis documentation to be submitted. Detailed and quality information were required for the approval of this multi-billion-dollar investment.

In order to ensure a complete and comprehensive solution, the organizations were subject to a baselining assessment and high quality products and practices were retained as part of the long term solution and implemented globally. The Modus Pyramid was used as guideline for building the scope of the solution to ensure the changes and implementation plans designed were properly structured to avoid rework and false starts.

Modus’ support included:

Analyzed Enterprise and Project Controls governance - performed process mapping across project delivery organizations to identify conflicts and gaps.

Generated manuals, procedures, and guides to reinforce and standardize the governance requirements.

Generated standards and structures to align project cost estimates with cost and schedule data to facilitate accurate project reporting via commodity-driven Earned Value Management System.

Developed a Phase Gate Strategy and related processes, to manage project funding releases throughout the Project Planning and lifecycle.

Established set of standards and documents requirement for each phase of the project that needed to be produced at each Gate to evaluate the benefit and overall cost of the project. Included generating the management plans, defining the Scope Basis and Description, Basis of Estimate, Basis of Schedule, and Quantitative Risk Analysis.

Evaluated Project Management tools and their configuration and integration, including overall IT Architecture to support Project and Enterprise Reporting requirements.

Established alignment plan for the five project delivery organizations within the Enterprise, to facilitate apples-to-apples management approach during the transition phase.

Provided advice on an Integrated Change Control Process, aligned with the project phases, integrating Cost and Schedule baseline updates, and comparing them against original estimates.

Integrated Project Schedules with Enterprise Strategic Execution Plan (Master Schedule) and the Investment Management process.

Established KPIs and measures for Performance and Productivity reporting for individual Project and overall Portfolio.

Provided standard set of requirements for collection project updates from the vendors, including Schedule updates, Earned Value reporting, forecasting, and collecting actuals.

Established Risk Register and risk identification process for key projects within the Portfolio.