6 things to consider in a pre-project
Pre-engineering's,
conceptual design, basic design. pre-projects come in many shapes and by many
names, and their popularity seems to increase – with good reason. As pointed out by the famous professor Bent Flyvbjerg, most projects go over time, over budget or under benefit - also known as the iron law. Pre-projects is, along with having experienced people in a project, one of the most efficient counteracts against being a part of this iron law. I once interviewed
a senior project manager who said that his biggest challenge was that "for some
reason we never do our due diligence at the beginning of a project. Either the
project is overestimated and doesn't get approved, or underestimated which gives
a lot of challenges once the project starts".
So if we agree that pre-projects is a good idea, what should they focus on? Well there is the obious thing about process design and getting more details in the scope, but I'd like to bring up 6 often overlooked topics which can take your pre-projects to a new height.
Laser focus on interfaces
One of the main jobs of a pre-project is to minimize risks around budget, time schedule and get more specific on requirements. An important aspect I would like to highlight here is that an often-overlooked risk is interfaces. This is both between people in the project team, but especially between suppliers. While I've seen many contractual documents and checklists descripting who supplies what, they usually only focus on interface between customer and supplier. But I advocate for a more holistic attitude listing all the different main parties, such as consultants, equipment suppliers, and utility suppliers and main building contractors to sit together and go through the interfaces. If you bring the right people together they usually know exactly where they are unsure. "what requirements do you have for peak steam flow" or "are there any equipment which have vibrations". Having a good alignment around interfaces is crucial for a good project.
Work with scenarios
Especially in the early phases of a project, it can be hard to guess even a ball park figure of an investment sum needed. Therefor it is usually a good idea to work with scenarios, and I would even recommend having this attitude throughout the entire project. On of the lawyers I've worked with often used the analogy when negotiating contracts as a battle where we need several fall-back positions or lines of defence. By no means do we want to go all the way to our fall-back position, which increases the likelihood of staying within the desired boundaries. I like to take this approach into project management as well.
What I like to do is to define the bare minimum. The part which is absolutely necessary for the business case. Then add different wises until you get to the best solution. I would go for 5-8 steps between minimum and optimal solution. I would recommend communicating one of the middle or top steps to the upper management as your budget. I know it's tempting to use the minimum case as your business case, but that leaves you in a very vulnerable situation. With the different steps you now have some fall back positions for when trouble arises.
Imbed flexibility
When trying to match the budget one of the things that are tempting to do is to remove buffer tanks and valve matrices. This is naturally a balancing act. Engineers are by nature sceptical and thus tends to build in a lot of safety in a design, and while this needs to be financially justifiable a system that is too inflexible can in the long run be expensive.
One thing which is important to consider here is possible future expansions. It is usually not expensive to prepare for future expansions in the design phase but can be if you need to retrofit something which was not considered at a later stage.
Another thing to bear in mind is break downs. They can be hard to avoid, and it can be a pain if the plant does not have the flexibility to handle breakdown in one of the machines with some intermediate storage possibilities.
Consider maintenance strategy early
A thing I've often wondered is why maintenance is not a bigger deal when designing a new factory. For some reason maintenance people are often not invited until after the project is designed and then they can spot all the challenges. Getting service people in early is crucial to ensure a high efficiency of the equipment, but as well a safe work environment during maintenance, which may be one of the riskiest jobs in a factory.
But even better would be to discuss maintenance strategies early on and imbed it into the business case. Often a small investment could increase service intervals by e.g. implementing monitoring systems or design changes which reduces wear and tear.
Working with sustainability
Reducing the amount of gaskets replaced is one component of imbedding sustainability, another is analysing the heat and cooling streams to optimize the energy usage. Process people have a tendency to just ask for steam and ice water, but if you take a more holistic approach a lot of heat can be recovered by introducing heat sources at different temperatures and designing a proper recovery system.
Another aspect which is especially important for the many biotech companies is looking at water and nutrient flows. It often makes sense to add recovery loops and think in implementing circular loops. The idea here is to consider all waste flows as sources for added value and implement recycling. Naturally this needs to go hand in hand with a cost benefit analysis as the closer and closer you go to fully circular the higher the price tag is, and for some processes other solutions might give the same results in a cheaper way.
Quality management is key to success
A pitfall which is easy to fall in to is to focus soly on budget and time schedule. But an important aspect of reaching success in a project is a strong quality plan. Here the foundations is build in the pre-project. It is important to identify the key success criteria's for the business case, and based on that build up a number of metrics which will ensure that the outcome of the project is the same as what we set out to do. One aspect of this is process guarantees, but if you reach your deadline and the process plant is not delivering as anticipated a momentary compensation rarely covers all the losses of postponed marketing activities which are often timed well in advance, lost revenue, reputation etc.
Therefor a strong quality plan which works with qualification of the suppliers, people in the project, early testing and pre-defined test planes which discovers mistakes early is a crucial part of achieving the desired results.