Series of sustaining projects
Fort McMurray, Alberta
$300 Million
40-day shutdown with pre-shutdown scope.
Key Outcome: Completed one day early with a perfect safety record.
Project -E was the construction Contractor’s first application of Workface Planning. This document captures the lessons that were learned around the application of Workface Planning.
The project consisted of an outage and then a 40-day turnaround where the train 1 crusher and conveyor where dismantled, moved to the north side of the surge pile and then reassembled. The work scope for the Construction Contractor was primarily steel and mechanical with oversight of the electrical scope executed by a 3rd party.
Workface Planners were appointed by the Construction Contractor (1) to develop steel FIWPs (Field Installation Work Packages) and the 3rd party (1) to develop electrical FIWPs.
5 FIWPs for the Outage and 41 FIWPs for the Turnaround.
A typical FIWP encompasses 5 to 10 schedule activities that were grouped based upon the Workface Planner’s best guess of the execution plan. Schedule activities were generally at a level 6 or7 (day/ hour).
Deviations from the Workface Planning model:
Due to time and resource constraints, the following deviations were tolerated:
Positives:
Improvements:
9 FIWPs were constructed for the Outage and then 115 for the Turnaround. Most activities in the electrical schedule were detailed at level 7 (hourly), FIWPs were constructed as a daily group of schedule activities that were logically associated.
Deviations from the Workface Planning model:
Due to time and resource constraints the following deviations were tolerated:
The project management team placed a major obstacle in the path of the Electricians by hard linking electrical activities to steel activities in the project schedule. Electrical contractor developed a schedule that would support the steel schedule and be productive for them but the schedule links were too complex to change so the schedule was realigned the day prior to the start day and the electrical schedule was thrown into disarray.
QC did not interact with the FIWPs and as a result there were several days added to the schedule for the clean up of a large punchlist. (The project was still completed ahead of schedule).
Positives:
Improvements:
The project was well planned with a detailed schedule developed by the project management team. However the late interaction of the contractors did not allow them to vet the activity dependencies. This would have further enhanced the schedule.
The last minute applilast-minuteorkface Planning did not allow the contractors to accurately record or report progress. The scope was divided into good quality FIWPs but the logic was not synchronized with the application in the field so the field supervisors utilized their traditional methods for execution.