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New Paradigm Engineering, Edmonton, AB, Canada. Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, Canada.
Abstract: In North America, chemical engineering undergraduate curricula do not usually contain compulsory courses dedicated to project management. Yet, early in their careers, chemical engineers are frequently assessed based on their abilities to completely solve an industrial plant problem. The complete solution involves much more than just technical calculations. Issues such as scheduling, scope, quality, safety and costs must always be addressed. In this article, the ingredients of three lecture hours of material dedicated to introducing chemical engineering students to the important area of project management are described. Keywords: project management; planning; costs; performance; quality; safety; contracts; risks.
INTRODUCTION
Chemical engineering curriculum contains large quantities of material that ensure students focus on learning the technical details of our profession. However, problems in industry always involve much more than just nding technical solutions. Industrial problem solving includes issues such as scoping the extent of the problem, establishing timelines, nding technical support and suppliers, nancial issues, safety and reporting. Handling all these issues efciently is the domain of project management. The subject of project management is covered extensively in many books and texts (e.g., Dinsmore, 1993; Watson, 1997; Kerzner, 1998; Lewis, 1998; Melton, 2005). University courses dedicated to project management topics are not uncommon and are often available as elective courses in chemical engineering. However, in North America, due to the rules of accreditation and the very limited ability to incorporate new courses, very few chemical engineering programs include a single compulsory course dedicated to project management. In fact, in a survey of 28 Canadian and American Chemical Engineering Departments (all randomly selected from the AIChE Directory, Qin and Swinnea, 2006), only one had a compulsory project management course. Nevertheless, project management is part of every engineering task, and the understanding of project management principles is often left for new graduates to learn on-the-job. Many chemical engineers
Correspondence to: Dr G. Hill, Department of Chemical Engineering, 57 Campus Drive, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, S7N 5A9, Canada. E-mail: gord.hill@usask.ca
DOI: 10.1205/ece06019 17497728/07/ $30.00 0.00 Education for Chemical Engineers Trans IChemE, Part D, Volume 2, 2007 # 2007 Institution of Chemical Engineers
begin their careers in remote eld ofces, established manufacturing facilities, or plant sites where there may be very little opportunity to learn project management skills from mentors, except through occasional contact with senior engineers in the head ofce. Therefore, most students will benet from having some exposure to basic project management concepts to help them avoid unpleasant experiences in the early days of their careers. In the workplace there are two types of managers. Functional managers take care of a dedicated department and normally have direct authority over a budget and personnel. Project managers, on the other hand, ll temporary positions established to accomplish a specic task, the project. Project managers often have little authority, aside from what they are assigned in the direct project budget, and must rely on their personal powers of communication and persuasion to inuence the members of his or her management team (personnel seconded from company departments) to work diligently on the project goals. At the University of Saskatchewan, project management lectures have been included in the third year compulsory course, ChE 325: Introduction to Process Engineering. This course has a total of 37.5 h of lecture material that introduce students to a wide variety of skills needed in their nal year, capstone design project. In ChE 325, the topic of project management is covered in one week of lectures (two, 1.5 h lecture slots) in which ve
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topics are discussed (A to E): Lecture 1: (A) introduction to the topic of project management and ensuring access to needed support is available before accepting a project; (B) scoping, planning and getting approvals prior to starting physical work; Lecture 2: (C) contracting for engineering and construction activities; (D) project execution with regards to health, safety, environment, cost, quality and schedule; and (E) special features of small projects. Each of these topics is detailed in the paragraphs that follow.
PROJECT ENTRY
The project manager needs to be clear who the clients are (such as a direct supervisor, a senior manager in another department, an external company manager, a government agency ofcial, and so on), what problem needs to be solved and why that problem needs to be solved now. Do the clients really understand and agree on what outcomes they are looking for, and can they communicate that unambiguously? Do they expect the problem to be investigated only with written and/or oral reports; or do they expect the problem to be physically solved? In addition, what assumptions have already been made about this problem and should those assumptions be examined? The project manager must ask many questions in order to feel comfortable that the problem is well dened and within his or her expertise. Answers to these questions will focus the work directly on the task to be solved, help prevent the project manager from straying in the wrong direction, and will help ensure that the clients are happy with the project results. In return, the client will usually be impressed that the project manager is interested in understanding the essence of the problem and determining how urgently the problem needs to be addressed. Details of constraints that must be met, how often the client requires feedback on the progress of the work, and client contact information in order to discuss any problems that may develop during the work must be established. A key issue will be the resources that can be used to solve the problem and these should be decided before the project is accepted. Resources needed to solve most engineering tasks include: money and an account to charge expenses, time to solve the problem, personnel support both within and outside your organization, and authority to make decisions such as spending and contractor selection. At the project entry stage, the project manager must realize project tasks will always include: planning the work; communicating clearly and motivating those who will work with him or her to solve the problem; monitoring the timeline, quality and expenses of the project; ensuring health, safety and environment issues are clearly addressed; and responding quickly to solve deviations from the proposed work plan. There is never a time that problems will not occur during an engineering task and it is wise for the project manager to believe that Murphy was an optimist, whatever can go wrong will go wrong but more than once. The new project manager will have to learn to use several software tools that are commonly used to plan and control company projects. These tools may be company specic or general, such as Microsoftsw Project software. Project can help in the planning of work schedules and monitoring of budgetary issues.
Problems at the project entry level often occur because the problem was not well understood by the client, consider the case where the project manager was asked to solve a problem of unsafe volumes of gas venting from a water tank in a gas plant. The assumption of the client was that a vapour recovery system would be needed to collect and recycle the venting gas. The project was initially scoped and budgeted on that basis. The project manager, however, did some quick calculations and a site visit, which showed that, based on physical properties and ows, the vented volumes were much higher than what should have been expected. A check showed the root cause of the problem was a rock in the seat of a water level control valve on an upstream separator. The project was cancelled, and maintenance was carried out on the valve. A much smaller vapour recovery system was eventually installed many years later for odour control on the tank.
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(preferably in chronological order) as titles of the rows. Each team member is placed in charge of separate tasks, but it is realized that the team will not have all the expertise to carry out all components of each task. In those cases, outside support will be agged, such as consultants or operations staff. Regular team meetings are needed to share progress reports. However, the team is not a democratic committee and if the project manager is convinced that bottlenecks are occurring, he or she may have to make personnel and resource changes to ensure the project is completed efciently and in a timely manner. Problems may have been identied during the initial planning stage, for instance if a structure is needed to be built on or near government parks or historical sites, delays will occur in order to obtain permission to proceed with the work. The project manager will need to study the regulatory issues that will govern the project, the social climate at the location of the work, and the availability of goods and services that will likely be needed to do the work. Many steps of the Project Managers work will likely fall under industrial, legal or professional regulations or guidelines. For instance, in the Province of Saskatchewan, the Engineering and Geoscience Professional Act addresses issues such as contracts and bids for major engineering projects. If the project is large and located far from a populated area containing skilled labour, a temporary labour force may be needed, so that camps and travel issues must be considered. Using historical information for similar projects and information gathered on local issues, estimates of how fast various stages of the project can be completed must be made. In developing the Project Technical Plan, the management team can make good use of Failure Mode Effects Analysis, FMEA, when estimating where to allocate scarce resources. In brief, FMEA requires the team to assign numbers to each of three risk factors: probability of risk actually happening, severity of the risk and nally ability of the team to detect whether the risk will occur. The product of these three numbers is called the risk probability number (RPN). Resources are applied in proportion to the value of RPN, the higher the RPN, the more resources are applied to that risk factor. Examples of common project risk factors include bad weather, loss of personnel and technology failure. The Project Execution plan is the key planning document of this stage. It itemizes responsibilities of each team member, engineering tasks, government and other stakeholders, the work to be done, who will do the work, where work is to be done, schedule of the work stages, approvals and permits to be obtained, contracting strategy, labor requirements, estimated costs, material procurement, construction, health/safety/environment and commissioning/ start-up procedures. Stakeholders outside the company, including government organizations, must be considered at all stages. Regular communications with these partners will help to prevent nasty surprises when some of their concerns are not incorporated into the work. Unions should also be considered as stakeholders and commitments to these organizations by your company must be upheld. Most projects will require various sizes of work forces at different stages of the project, but it may be possible to rearrange work stages to maintain a fairly even contingent of labour at the site at most times. It is clear that to be successful as a project manager, the engineer needs good communication and motivation skills.
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too much for contractors to bear, so payment scheduling and appropriate measurable milestones must be included. When assessing the bids, important issues to consider include the experience of the contractors, the cost, and whether the bidders have fully grasped the scope of the work to be done. When a contract is to be awarded, four different types are possible: (1) Lump Sumis similar to purchasing a car, the price is rm and based on the detailed specications; the contractor is responsible for delivering within that budget, unless the client makes changes from the scope; (2) Cost-Plus-Feeis where the client pays all direct costs for the project, as veried by invoices, and covers the contractors prot by adding a percentage fee; (3) Unit Pricemight be used to contract for insulation, where there is a xed price per unit of length of pipe sizes and insulation thicknesses; and (4) Time Ratewhich might be used to supply equipment such as cranes, where an hourly or daily rate is charged for use or availability of a specialized piece of equipment. It is important that the project management team has regular and direct access to the contract work so that progress can be monitored. If changes need to be made, direct access can help the team decide if they are really necessary and if so, to help decide on what kind of changes are best suited to meet the work objectives, and the impacts of the change on cost, schedule, quality, and safety for the project. The team member in charge of each contract stage must also verify that the contractor is paying bills, since if not, the owner may be held liable for unpaid expenses. There has to be strict control measures placed on each contractor, and any changes in project scope, so that cost overruns do not occur. The value of the work should be already known to the project team from their expertise with similar projects and/or documentation on typical costs for such equipment and installations. The timeliness of the work should be measured by strict metrics that were specied in the written contract, and if deviations occur, the team member in charge should develop strategies to help the contractor get back on track. The cost and time factors for each contract need to be frequently documented and information provided to stakeholders so that all parties are aware of the status of the work. Most projects, and component work tasks, follow a typical S curve in terms of percent completion, with slow starts, steady intermediate progress, and followed by slow nal completion.
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project. There were no contract terms to prevent this, in fact there was a bonus for completing the work by a specied date, but the rapid completion resulted in delays to other contractors on the site due to higher than expected activity, and also an increase in the cost when pipeline routing had to be modied to accommodate the earlier than expected installations. In later contracts this problem was avoided by providing a bonus for contractors exactly meeting the contracted schedule, with penalties if they were too early, or too late.
QUALITY ASSURANCE
This item is the main focus of the project manager. It includes ensuring that all aspects of the project meet expected performance standards, meet all safety criteria, comply with all government regulations and the project work is performed in a balanced, cost effective manner. Performance measures include ensuring equipment meets all the technical specications developed in the design stage and set out in detail in the contracts issued to the contractors. To meet this goal, appropriate manpower with appropriate skill sets must be available to work directly with the project manager. During the design work, issues to be reviewed include schedule, costs, specications, drawings, safety, maintainability, operability and reliability. During construction the quality assurance personnel check the credentials of vendors and contractors, review the materials handling and control procedures, record and verify construction changes and ensure all contractor work is completed to the companys satisfaction, before payments are made. Finally, before operations begin, the quality assurance personnel ensure units have been tested, operating and maintenance manuals are readily available, safety and emergency systems are in place and working and nally that appropriately trained operating personnel are on hand.
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the site in a pristine state so that following work units are not impeded in meeting their scheduled activities. When all construction work is completed, all materials and supplies including spare parts must be on hand and itemized before start-up is commenced. Operators must have been fully trained and oriented to the work site layout. Safe work permits and nal instrument monitoring checks must be on hand and carried out by skilled personnel, probably brought in from similar operating sites. The system should be purged, and then the documented start-up procedures can be carefully followed to bring the new project on-line.
SUMMARY
Professional project management is the key to the safety, quality, cost and schedules of all engineering tasks. Make sure that when you accept these tasks you are clear on what is to be done and are comfortable that the resources needed to accomplish the work will be made available to you. The key to success will be your initial and thorough design plan and your ability to gather a qualied project management team, while maintaining a high motivation level in these members throughout the project lifespan. You must stay on top of things by monitoring the progress and costs of each stage; and be prepared to take action to correct deviations as each stage of the project progresses.
WRAP-UP
The project management team should meet one last time to provide design feedback, vendor and contractor assessments and overall project feedback. This report will be a vital piece of information to project management teams in the future, or if any new problems show up after project completion.
REFERENCES
Dinsmore, P.C. (ed.), 1993, The AMA Handbook of Project Management (American Management Association, New York, USA).
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Kerzner, H., 1998, Project Management: A Systems Approach to Planning, Scheduling, and Controlling (Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York, USA). Lewis, J.P., 1998, Mastering Project Management (Mc-Graw Hill, New York, USA). Melton, T., 2005, Project Management Toolkit: Supporting Success at Every Stage (IChemE, Rugby, UK). Qin, S.J. and Swinnea, J.S. (eds), 2006, Chemical Engineering Faculty Directory (John Wiley & Sons Inc., Hoboken, NJ, USA). Watson, C.S., 1997, Managing Projects for Personal Success (International Thomson Business Press, London, UK).
19 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Saskatchewan is grateful for the ongoing nancial assistance of Dow Chemical Canada. Those funds support the continual improvement of our undergraduate courses.
The manuscript was received 4 August 2006 and accepted for publication after revision 10 December 2006.