Mega projects often wait until after initial launch and project site selection to engage facilitation and organization design services. However, experience indicates early use of such services to support project leadership and key staff.
In another essay on Mega Projects Initiative for the Texas Center for Innovative Organizations at the Rawls School of Business, Texas, the writers (Ralls and Khaja), highlighted planning optimization and orchestration in the successful execution and eventual completion of mega projects.
Owing to complications of mega projects due to their sheer size, the competitive advantages of
leveraging early facilitation and organization design are all the more given recognition.
Optimizing planning and orchestration with thorough business analytics and enrollment of stakeholders — the community, customers, value chain partners, product/functional/regional units, corporate and regulators — would facilitate the implementation of a mega project, they said.
The plan also involves establishing norms for conduct and schedule — “keeping with prompts, cues and the facilitation of interaction … thus founding the project and continuing a positive momentum for the life of the project,” they said.
It also entails avoiding unnecessary cost with smarter logistics, less effort to enable work, and a means for resolving differences and restoring harmony at any level aside from eliminating “adverse lag effects to the latter stages of engineering design, construction and the start-up of the new operating unit.” It provides continuity and understanding important to the facilitation and organization design efforts in the latter stages, they added.
Plan optimization, they said, evolved from engaging organization development advisers with a track record of successful mega project start-up’s around the world. These advisers provide facilitation for the most important meetings or conflicts, and organization design to adapt the project and the new organization it creates into the best response to market possible. They provide experience, a third party facilitation essential for inviting diverse opinion and shaping a shared direction, and an outsider’s view of what is possible in technology, commerce, government affairs at all levels and challenging talent to outperformance of competition.
The writers underscored that as the project grows or becomes more involved, the structures may reach their peak and brings about transformation. Like any large, complex organizations, facilitation and organization design can increase. Given the relative short-term nature of the project organization, the more important is to have full returns on the investment.
“An important contribution to smooth operation of the project by the organization development adviser is to facilitate role expectations for contractor contribution as well as clarify contractor needs from the project. This effort alone will prevent problems and obstacles, and provide a basis for restoring harmony and collaboration.”
As project organization becomes the living body of managing a large number of contracts, facilitation can provide the necessary organization memory and action to manage the complexity of so many overlapping expectations. The organization development adviser contributes to early detection and resolution of conflicts or handling major breakdowns.
Critical in all this will be the understanding and realization of the expectations of owners. This requires optimization work in which people early on assume multiple roles and effectively transfer relationships and practices to newcomers.
Design in project organizations is often seen as turbulent by outsiders as change is frequent and sudden, Ralls and Khaja said. Training and executive development is essential to ensuring not just good orientation to the needs and identity of the project but also to flexibility to accept and move forward with change. The design options in projects focus on collaborative shareware, team building and action, and consulting skills development to foster a client-centric view of owners and operators. Such investments often stem unnecessary engineering change orders and rework. There are similar dynamics to enterprise teams in stable state organizations in that teams and collaboration involves parties with different owners and having different skill sets. Again, the third- party trusted agent role of the organization development adviser adds value to acceptance and the move to action.
Facilitation is extremely important as it surfaces issues, resolves disputes and helps deal with the complexities of all the interfaces, they said.
In early orchestration, they pointed out, design and planning help promote the examination of essential project risk elements — such as construction risk, technology risk, sales risk, supply risk, equity risk, political risk and country risk — that are typically represented by contracts and pursued by people with overlapping interests and not always fully-aligned to the project mission.
This planning focus, they said, must be aligned to each situation as many maybe worked by corporate bodies. “In this case, stewardship supplants insuring and some variables are ignored at the project level. The closer the project manages these variables, the higher the probability that the project is treated as an enterprise and the touch of the market influences for market responsive actions.”
The organization development adviser provides a scalable “command center” solution. The command center helps visualize the project’s landscape in the early days when there is much uncertainty. Direction can be deduced from the command center’s displays, they said. Early use of the command center in projects permits the accumulation of data useful to appreciate project trends, emerging issues and options for project progress. The command center solutions provide what is needed by creating and sustaining the project knowledge base. It is a virtual planning tool that invites broad participation but narrows quickly to the priority at hand and the appropriate team of decision-makers and observers. The command center can orchestrate “war rooms” for decision makers at critical milestones or to manage a crisis. Participation can be virtual, real-time in person or on-line. At any point in time, a project decision-maker or contributor can access the data pertinent to their work and appropriate to their role.
The writers further said in the essay that technology management services are included in the command center services or can be selectively applied to a project. The goal is technology use optimization and outperformance in industry. “The latter stems from a philosophy that new projects are an opportunity for leveraging the purchasing power to get more than just new equipment but what is next that fosters outperformance of competition.”
Given lead times in the early days of project and current rapid movement of innovation when there is “demand pull” such as a project can create, it is possible to innovate, especially in areas such as logistics, mobile computing, process control – in situ and remote sensing based, and share ware tailored to a value chain in a local or regional market, they said.
Technology management functions at three levels — awareness of what is possible, application opportunities and constraints.
Ralls and Khaja explained that awareness entails collating a complete picture of legacy solutions and what is next. The tendency for projects is to deploy legacy. The attraction of legacy is known uses and availability of tools from training to understanding support software. These dynamics often lull projects into a status quo mentality in technology and business process.
Projects needs differ from time to time and issue to issue. Sometimes a low profile is best; others there are a need to sparkle and draw people’s attention to win their support, hence, daily multimedia on community relations can be established to lessen the burden on project leadership and staff time. “While face-to-face investment of time will still be important, it can be leveraged with media more and more once trust is established and routine use of media emerges,” they said.
(The writers are managing directors of TTech LLC, a technology-transfer engine with offices in the US)
