Source: Wikimedia Common
Most Oil & Gas manufacturing projects start out with good intentions. The main focus at the start of the project is to make the promised delivery date. But what usually happens is things start to go wrong, and the delivery date looks impossible. But the manufacturer starts pouring money, time and resources into making that delivery date. But what good is making that delivery date if the product that’s being manufactured doesn’t perform as designed? Even worse, what if the customer’s expectations for the performance of the product don’t align with the manufacturer’s design?
At some point, there is a ‘discovery’ phase where the manufacturer and the customer figure out that the project wasn’t planned correctly. There is ‘investigative’ work, usually done by the manufacturing project manager, who starts to connect the dots within the organization and then between the organization and the customer. These dots start to form a picture of inadequate project and product planning, along with a list of very bad assumptions. Usually, this discovery is too late to have a large impact on saving the project, but it does help the project manager to make better decisions going forward in an attempt to stop some of the hemorrhaging.
So what happened? Why wasn’t the project planned right to begin with? Why didn’t the product design meet the customer’s expectations? Why didn’t anybody list the assumptions that both the manufacturer and the customer made about the project and the product(s)? The short answer is that many folks don’t see the value of thoroughly planning both the project and product requirements prior to signing a contract. I think this is mostly a result of having a limited awareness about what good planning really looks like. Also, an attitude of ‘well, everybody else does it this way’ permeates the industry top to bottom creating a stasis of sorts. I also think that manufacturers rely too much on manufacturing principles and not enough on project principles. Finally, many manufacturers have consigned themselves to seek out high as-sold profit margins not for the sake of high profits, but to get their customers to cover all of the unpredictable costs and performance issues later in the project. And just like with Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, if all you’ve ever experienced is what I have described above in this post, then you’re likely not aware that there is a better way. The good news is that the ‘better way’ exists, and it leads to predictability, repeatability, happier customers and higher profits.
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