Rebooting

Project Intelligence

White Paper

Rebooting Project Intelligence: Workflow & Collaboration

Workflow & collaboration challenges faced by capital projects and how new technology can overcome them

White Paper By

Tim Sharpe
CEO & co-founder tim.sharpe@sabisu.co @timjsharpe
2012 Sabisu Ltd

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Contents
1. INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................... 4 2. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ................................................................................................ 5 3. PROJECT PERFORMANCE: ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT? .............................................. 7
3.1. PERFORMANCE OF LARGE CAPITAL PROJECTS ................................................................................................... 7 3.2. MANAGEMENT OF PROJECT PERFORMANCE ....................................................................................................... 8 3.2.1. Decision Making During Early Stages ................................................................. 8 3.2.2. Skills & Project Leadership .................................................................................. 9 3.2.3. Enhancing Project Value ................................................................................... 10 3.3. ORGANISATION OF MEGA-PROJECTS ................................................................................................................ 11

4. WORKFLOW & COLLABORATION CHALLENGES .......................................................... 14

4.1. 4.2. 4.3. 4.4. AD-HOC PROJECT MANAGER COLLABORATION ............................................................................................... 14 EMAIL & EXCEL PROLIFERATION ...................................................................................................................... 15 COLLABORATION THROUGHOUT THE SUPPLY CHAIN .................................................................................... 17 LABOUR INTENSIVE DATA HANDLING .............................................................................................................. 18

5. NEW TECHNOLOGY ................................................................................................... 19

5.1. THE PROJECT INTELLIGENCE CENTRE ............................................................................................................ 19 5.2. TOTAL INTEGRATION ........................................................................................................................................... 20 5.2.1. INTEGRATION = VISIBILITY .............................................................................................................................. 20 5.2.2. KEY DESIGN CRITERIA ...................................................................................................................................... 21 5.3. HYBRID CLOUD ..................................................................................................................................................... 22 5.3.1. WHAT IS A HYBRID-CLOUD ? ........................................................................................................................... 22 5.3.2. WHY CHOOSE A HYBRID-CLOUD ? .................................................................................................................. 23 5.3.3. KEY DESIGN CRITERIA ...................................................................................................................................... 24 5.3.4. GO MOBILE ......................................................................................................................................................... 24 5.4. TRUE COLLABORATION ....................................................................................................................................... 25 5.4.1. TRUE COLLABORATION NEEDS A SHARED EXPERIENCE ............................................................................... 25 5.5. SOCIAL WORKPLACE ............................................................................................................................................ 26 5.5.1. ENTERPRISE 2.0 ................................................................................................................................................ 26 5.5.2. A SOCIAL PERSPECTIVE ..................................................................................................................................... 27

6. MEETING WORKFLOW & COLLABORATION CHALLENGES .......................................... 28

6.1. 6.2. 6.3. 6.4. 6.5. 6.6. 7.1. 7.2. 7.3. 7.4. 7.5. EASY & FOCUSED COLLABORATION .................................................................................................................. 28 USER & COMMUNITY AUTONOMY ..................................................................................................................... 30 USER COMMUNITY FOCUS ................................................................................................................................... 30 CONTENT DISTRIBUTION .................................................................................................................................... 31 FRICTIONLESS BUSINESS PROCESSES ................................................................................................................ 31 EXCEPTIONAL SERVICE DELIVERY ..................................................................................................................... 32 FUNCTIONAL FIT .................................................................................................................................................. 33 ABOUT THE SABISU TEAM ................................................................................................................................... 34 TYPICAL INDUSTRY SECTORS ............................................................................................................................. 35 CASE STUDIES ....................................................................................................................................................... 35 NEXT STEPS ........................................................................................................................................................... 35

7. SABISU ...................................................................................................................... 33

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Figures

Figure 1. Front End Development Influence ........................................................................... 8 Figure 1. Mega-project organisations & responsbilities ................................................. 11 Figure 2. Scaling out a mega-project ........................................................................................ 12 Figure 3. Daisy chaining of Delays ............................................................................................ 15 Figure 4. Same Issue, Different Tools ...................................................................................... 17 Figure 5. Required PIC Integration Capability ..................................................................... 20 Figure 6. The Ideal Architecture ................................................................................................ 22 Figure 7. Two Personalised Views of a Situation ............................................................... 25 Figure 8. A Social, Event Driven View ..................................................................................... 27 Figure 9. In Platform Chat, Showing Community Focus .................................................. 28

Definitions/Glossary
Abbreviation BI CIO DCS EPC ERP FEED Description Business Intelligence Chief Information Officer Distributed Control System Engineering, Procurement and Construction contractor Enterprise Resource Planning Front End Engineering Development; the early, pre-investment decision part of a project where opportunities are identified, plans are created and projects defined. FEL Front End Loading; process for conceptual development of a project, supporting or describing processes within FEED stage. FID Final Investment Decision; decision to proceed with a project, usually made prior to appointing an EPC. hybrid-cloud IT infrastructure that incorporates both On-Premise and Cloud server components IPA Independent Project Analysis, Inc (Project benchmarking and delivery consultancy organisation.) KPIs Key Performance Indicators MES Manufacturing Execution System MIS Management Information System MRP Manufacturing Resource Planning (historically derived from Materials Resource Plannning) PIC Project Intelligence Centre; A new class of software providing real-time situational awareness and collaboration for projects. PMO Project/Programme Management Office TIC Total Install Cost PAR Project Assurance Review PVP Project Value Process Sabisu Sabisu platform, incorporating On-Premise and Cloud components
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1. Introduction

Oil & gas or petrochemicals sector capital projects offer unique management challenges. They are some of the largest projects in the world, ranging in cost from $500m for small locally managed projects up to $30bn for mega-projects involving joint ventures and multiple EPC contractors. These are high risk projects with correspondingly large and complex organisations that support them, including complex supply-chains that often require distributed virtual teams to realize the EPC delivery. Given capital expenditure and financing involved in mega-projects there is a relentless focus on management and mitigation of risk. The consequences of not doing so are significant, including schedule slippage, impact on the total installed cost (TIC), capital cost penalties and revenue penalties as production start-up is delayed. These projects are core to the growth and continued profitability of those that fund them. These projects face major challenges due to the complex interface management of widely distributed virtual teams in differing time zones, the inherent communication difficulties and associated complex business processes, and getting reliable up to date, real time, accurate transparent progress data. This leaves the clients that fund these projects often large enterprises, joint ventures or governments at a disadvantage; the complex and massive nature of the projects, combined with the limitations of historically available project control toolsets, mean clients decision information invariably lags the true project position resulting in late decisions which have schedule impact. This white paper looks at the key challenges related to virtual team collaboration and workflow efficiency, qualitatively assessing the impacts and risks of limited visibility and project control. This white paper also shows how new technology offers a alternative approach to conventional project control tools used by clients, EPCs and vendors, improving management transparency and providing real-time decision support that allows clients and EPCs to mitigate impact and influence a project. In summary this paper will examine: Typical problems faced by Project Directors, Project Managers and Project/Programme Management Offices (PMOs). How new IT architectures can provide unrivalled levels of progress trending, visibility, collaboration and management control of capital projects. The importance of visibility and responsiveness to managing risk. Other white papers in the Project Intelligence series are: Situational Awareness & Project Controls Decision Quality War Rooms: Total Project Visibility 2012 Sabisu Ltd
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2. Executive Summary

Mega projects face complexity challenges not addressed by conventional project controls tools. New web based technology and communication systems can provide real time visibility to effectively manage world-class projects with distributed virtual teams. Independent benchmarking organisations find that 56% of mega-projects fail, have large cost overruns, schedule slippage and or operational start up problems that persist long after hand-over. These complex projects are invariably fragile, with cost and schedule continually at risk. Experienced Project Managers are instinctively aware of the risks their projects face and do much in the way of ad-hoc collaboration to mitigate their probability or impact. Risk reviews of cost and schedule are a major tool in a PMs armory, but the lack of real-time data from their distributed project community makes trending a lagging indicator and consequently results in late decisions. Smarter collaboration via new technology would provide Project Managers with better data and trends to identify and mitigate risks proactively. As client, EPC, vendors and sub-vendors maintain their own internal business processes to manage risk and control their respective project elements, there is inevitably a focus on data gathering, manipulation, trending and transfer, leading to: Discussion of which figures are correct and represent the truth, instead of what the figures or trends mean Dialog and reconciliation between systems to ensure respective parties agrees with the detail to support invoicing Significant amounts of man-hours burned in data manipulation in MS Excel and such like Significant man-hours spent sending, reading and e-mailing data from point-to-point, consumes valuable project management time and leads to duplication of data on a large scale These challenges reflect the limitations of traditional project control legacy technology. Yet new technologies and approaches including hybrid-cloud architecture, personalization, self-service and vendor diagnostics integration can deliver a step-change in project controls business processes. Using new web-based technology, mega-project challenges can be mitigated more quickly and effectively, with real-time processing providing the following advantages:
Project control KPIs built directly, in real-time, from client, EPC, vendor and subvendor data systems, (i.e SAP, Primavera, Oracle, DCS, databases or Excel for example), A single, incontrovertible view of project progress, shared with every user throughout the project supply-chain according to their needs. An end to data gathering, manipulation, trending, emailing spreadsheets, data validation and duplicating data. Consistent and trustworthy KPIs delivered through a collaborative platform, allowing decisions to be reached quickly. 2012 Sabisu Ltd Page 5 of 35 V1.0

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Self-service portals to allow any user to analyse issues and expedite resolutions. Accurate, real-time data to give early influence on project issues and the project lifecycle. Shared client, EPC and vendor KPIs to support collaborative decision making. Improved process compliance, whether through standardized project metrics, KPIs, or through ad-hoc collaboration. Collaborative war room communications technology for specific focus areas of project risk.

This paper describes in detail how these new technologies can solve many of the traditional challenges faced by project communities in managing capital projects today.

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3. Project Performance: Room for improvement?

How do the challenges examined in this paper show in terms of project impact? Is there evidence to prove projects could be more efficiently run?

3.1. Performance of Large Capital Projects

It would be easy to assume that a mega project is more likely to under-perform; that distributed virtual teams add complexity and are more likely to exceed cost and schedule tolerances. Clearly the impact of a small percentage slip is more significant in cost terms. Other business sectors do see vast schedule slippage and cost increases on larger projects. Public sector projects are well known for it, with the 12.6bn NHS National Programme for IT being the obvious example forecast in 2008 to be 4 years late, then largely abandoned, writing off costs of 2.7bn. Examples like this are classified as a failure. In the oil & gas sector a write-off like this would certainly be regarded as such, but a total write-off is unlikely projects tend to complete, so a failure would be an unplanned excursion outside cost or schedule tolerances. Using this definition, the industry benchmarking organisation Independent Project Analysis, Inc (IPA) points to 56% of projects costed at $1bn+ (mega- projects) as failing; Schedules slipped by 25% or more Costs grew by 25% or more Operational problems persisted for 1 year+ after hand-over As Edward W. Merrow, Founder & President of IPA Inc, puts it in his book, Industrial Megaprojects: Large cost overruns, major delays, poor operability, and far too many safety incidents characterize well over half of the industrial projects of $1 billion or more around the world. Clearly this shows that whilst mega-projects are not in the same league as large public sector projects in terms of failure there is statistical evidence that maintaining control of mega-projects is difficult; they are complex, fragile and can go off track easily. Cost and schedule are continually at risk. To understand the challenges these projects face we need first to understand their organisation and scale.

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3.2. Management of Project Performance

3.2.1. Decision Making During Early Stages Effective decision-making and Front End Loading (FEL) of a project during FEED is essential in order to ensure high quality FEED deliverables are available and optimized, thus increasing the likelihood of a high quality execution of the implementation (EPC) phase. Key FEED deliverables including the Project Specification, +/- 10% budget estimate and level II/III integrated schedules that reflect the prevailing market conditions, all of which go to support the Final Investment Decision (FID).

Figure 1. Front End Development Influence As shown in the figure above, it is recognised that decisions made during FEED have the greatest influence on overall project performance, particularly cost, schedule, quality, commissioning and start-up efficiency. Many products inform the project specification and risks, though all ultimately resolve into a 10% estimate and schedule. Often a Project Assurance Review (PAR) will provide safeguards which ensure timely deliverables support consistency in subsequent delivery phases. Given the scale of investment, clients often choose to invest in internal or external benchmarking which compliments the internal PARs, and then further supplement them with peer review programmes to ensure that opportunities to positively impact the cost and schedule are realised. 2012 Sabisu Ltd Page 8 of 35 V1.0

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3.2.2. Skills & Project Leadership Owner/client and FEED/EPC Contractor management teams assembled for major projects in todays market invariably have skills shortages which result in work packages being distributed on a global basis to wherever the required skills can be found. Virtual, distributed teams are common, adding complexity to the project as each team may occupy a different time zone and the interfaces between teams must be managed. It is a proven fact that project performance is linked to the quality and capabilities of the project leadership, supporting teams and project control processes. A highly motivated and high performing team with strong core values and shared objectives is an essential ingredient in achieving successful project delivery. For a project team to be effective each member must trust the other, their processes and their data. Yet trust is fragile; unreliable, infrequent or unavailable project control data is sure to damage it, with immediate and lasting impact on the project as the team can ceases to function. These problems often manifest themselves as late, unexpected surprises by critical path contractors or vendors which the client has little or no time to mitigate or influence. When a project starts to deviate from a predicted plan its dependent on the awareness and experience of the project leadership to recognise the potential impact and/or consequences of the project trends in time to take corrective action. However, sometimes the project controls data lags reality, or is deliberately withheld from the client by third parties due to misreporting or fear of loss of face. This situation often leads to a questioning of the effectiveness of the leadership team at these third parties, followed by a belated attempt to introduce a programme of team building, focused KPIs and war room communities to tackle the problem. A no surprise and no blame culture is essential in high performance teams if they are to achieve the level of performance required to successfully implement complex, widely distributed projects and mega-projects in todays challenging environment. Governance, assurance, organisational leadership and project performance measurement are all key benchmarking project performance and readiness criteria.

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3.2.3. Enhancing Project Value Projects and mega-projects identify value during FEED phase, which is then effectively realised through the application of a programme of Project Value Processes (PVPs). Weak project execution, project measurement or control erodes the best preparation and makes delivery inefficient. In fact, anything other than strong project execution and control poses a problem, as it is almost impossible to add significant value after Front End Development without incurring additional cost and schedule delays. Therefore owners and clients often require independent benchmarking to give project sponsors and shareholders confidence that a project is on track with a good Front End Loading (FEL), i.e., a complete, high-quality FEED stage. Organisations such as IPA Inc provide independent benchmarking based on metrics of collected from many projects and apply statistical analysis to determine the likelihood of project success. The benchmarking requirement is usually specified in a project mandate and embedded into the governance, assurance and financial approvals process. Whilst the benchmarking process produces lagging Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) it nevertheless identifies performance gaps, business and project risks and opportunities. The schedule and effort pressure to bring the project to realization is often a root cause of weak benchmarking performance. Also, fundamental business controls and project delivery steps are often missed in the FEED phase, resulting in poor Front End Loading indices and impacting overall project delivery. In both circumstances effective management, monitoring and mitigation can help.

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3.3. Organisation of Mega-Projects

These mega-projects typically have a complex organisation structure designed to delegate and minimise risk. A relatively simple, single facility construction project may have a single engineering, procurement and construction contractor (EPC), whereas a complex refinery and petrochemical complex with significant financial risk may use multiple EPCs. In these cases, the financial risk needs to be spread across a number of implementation contractors. EPCs then sub-contract their deliverable contractual obligations to various procurement vendors and erection contractors. Vendors and erector contractors will often use sub-vendors to supply components , materials or services. The organisation structure of a mega-project therefore effectively separates concerns so that risk can be delegated:

Figure 2. Mega-project organisations & responsbilities However this quickly scales out to be a complex organisation structure:

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Figure 3. Scaling out a mega-project A mega-project often aggregates multiple collocated individual projects but every element apart from the site itself is globally distributed. Usually the client and EPC will be headquartered in different countries with engineering, construction and commissioning teams who emigrate to site as the engineering progresses. Procurement vendors and sub-vendors normally do not have a presence on site though erection contractors will be normally based on site or adjacent to the site. In addition to the site teams, the project will use off-site project support, procurement, inspection and technical teams from the client, vendors and sub- vendors. These teams could be based anywhere which makes communication and monitoring of progress all the more difficult; the project team made up of virtual, globally distributed teams each with accountability for on-time and on- budget delivery of a different part of project. In terms of monitoring of progress and data gathering and support systems, the client and EPC will each run their respective project controls systems, with the clients systems focusing specifically on financial progress. As the EPC has overall responsibility for progress reporting their systems are focused on hard deliverables as they manage the interface and supply chain. Cost and schedule are still important to the EPC given that they are the end product of compounding individual deliverables. The site is responsible for monitoring construction and commissioning progress and have their own planning team who report back to the EPC head-quarters, where the engineering, procurement construction and commissioning progress is aggregated into one overall project progress chart an S-curve. Often there is a point in the project where EPC planning group responsibility is passed to site, where the consolidation of progress input from the numerous interfaces around the world continues and is reported back to the client normally on a monthly basis. 2012 Sabisu Ltd
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Each project has its own supply-chain, support teams, IT infrastructure and corporate organisation effectively, each project is a separate enterprise. There can be significant data aggregation and scalability challenges across a mega- project. The global distribution and virtual nature of this team makes it much less likely that collaboration will happen. Users will most likely share data only if and when it is mandatory, much reducing the likelihood of receiving informal, early warning of incipient issues.

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4. Workflow & Collaboration Challenges

Some common challenges facing capital projects that project intelligence implementations should be able to address but typically dont.

4.1. Ad-hoc Project Manager Collaboration

Experienced Project Managers are instinctively aware of many of the risks their projects face. They also know the value of collaborating with other Project Managers to ensure that these risks are mitigated or lessons learned are made available elsewhere. Project Managers also know that vendors are motivated by filling their order book. Usually it falls to the Project Managers to work together to ensure that conflicting supply requirements are managed as it must be assumed that the vendor has little interest in this, or has limited management capability to do it. This is why informal networks of Project Managers already exist, formed on the basis of personal relationships and experience. When these networks start to share information about best practice or areas of joint interest such as, for example, supplier loading it can protect critical paths. Given the complex nature of the supply-chain and the reliance on a small number of vendors for long lead-time key components, such as reactors or columns, there is clear benefit in these collaborative, virtual teams. If anything, these communities of shared interests should to be easier to form, including clients, EPCs, vendors and sub-vendors as required. Such collaboration is ad-hoc at present; the networks form based on loose criteria and are not managed as such, which allows them to be agile and responsive. However they might see real benefit in being able to share and collaborate around using current project metrics to illustrate best practice or accelerate resolution of issues. Easier and smarter collaboration can resolve complex global project and mega- project issues more efficiently the challenge is to make it so. Recent advances in collaboration and social technology could meet this challenge.

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4.2. Email & Excel Proliferation

A mega-project with many user groups can result in feedback loops, delayed response and out of date information. The systems architecture that supports a mega-project is unusually complex; users have to be familiar with many different systems in order to get the data they need. Once a user has accessed the required data there is often a significant amount of manipulation needed in order to make the data relevant, as is seen with the large quantity of MS Excel spreadsheet and MS Access database work that typically takes place. Once the data has been manipulated, the user has only email as a method of transfer effectively a non-contemporaneous snapshot has been taken. Not only is the data is already out of date but this process produces a large amount of end-user computing and duplication of data. Its very difficult to find the accurate, current data unless the user who created it can direct others users to it. Wherever an interaction between or within the client, EPC, vendor and sub- vendor is dependent on email, the process is artificially slowed by a cycle of manipulation:
Snapshot extract the data required from the source system Manipulate import into spreadsheet/database, transform content as required Email attach spreadsheet/database to email Wait Process Response discuss, re-snapshot, re-manipulate or otherwise act.

When the impact of this is considered across multiple actors within the project as shown in the figure below its easy to see that making a decision based on current data is unlikely:

Figure 4. Daisy chaining of Delays

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This inefficient workflow produces a large amount of end-user computing and duplication of data. Its very difficult to find the accurate, current data unless the user who created it can direct others users to it.

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4.3. Collaboration Throughout the Supply Chain

Whilst a CIO will often rightly point to their ERP or MRP system as the tool of choice for all business processes, such systems usually do not cover ad hoc processes, local operational processes or project processes. Its no coincidence that these processes often involve collaboration with third parties something that ERP/MRP systems are not architected to address. Of course users have a choice of continually improving simple messaging systems, including telephone, email, SMS and todays instant messaging solutions. These allow a degree of collaboration but none meet the needs of a mega-project as described in the Email & Excel Proliferation section above theyre slow and mainly reactive. Collaboration needs to be more than just a message with attached data changing data highlights a developing situation so when the data changes all collaborators should experience this in real-time. Aging snapshots of data disconnect collaborators from the situation, and manipulating this data in a separate environment disconnects collaborators from the collaboration itself. This makes collaboration unnecessarily difficult. Screen sharing isnt a solution as it means collaborators ceding authority to one other. For a short meeting this is fine but its not an operational solution as it doesnt provide each user with the tools to contribute, e.g., even though theyre dealing with the same incident, a Project Manager may want current production data on his screen whereas the Project Director wants to see historical production data, plus logistics and environmental data. Most existing solutions are designed to have all users experience the same data in the same way, ignoring the fact that users are individuals with differing needs, tools and expertise. As shown in the figure below, its crucial that each user has the user experience and tools they require in order to deal with each situation.

Figure 5. Same Issue, Different Tools

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4.4. Labour Intensive Data Handling

Every organisation is different with different levels of process maturity, expertise, and PMO or Project Controls team capability. PMOs have their work cut out with their core tasks, which may include financial reconciliations, project controls and ensuring compliance. However in our experience one feature is common; labour intensive manipulation and/or re-entry of data. This manipulation is ubiquitous, generally manifesting itself in the form of multitudinous Excel spreadsheets holding complex macros. This is often the only way that progress, planning and financial information can be brought together for reconciliation or reporting. Re-entry is also relatively common, whether re-inputting third party data such as EPC or vendor planning information into the client plan, or manually mapping internal client data between, SAP and Primavera using unique identifiers such as purchase order numbers. Looking at the planning discipline as a unified system, each of the client projects, EPCs, vendors and sub-vendors on a mega-project maintain their own plan and there is inevitable duplication of data across multiple platforms; Primavera, Microsoft Project Server, Microsoft Project Professional and Excel being typical examples. Whilst some organisations have taken steps to reduce duplication and re-entry of data there has, in our experience, been partial uptake of this. For example, some clients allow EPCs to update plans with progress information, but this hasnt been widely adopted. Other organisations offer ways for a vendor to upload a project plan but these are typically held as discrete files, so theres no way to easily aggregate multiple plans from multiple vendors. Reducing manual manipulation and duplication would save time and allow PMO resources to be more effectively utilised on core, value-add activities. Yet its also essential if Project Directors and Managers want increased visibility, early warning of issues and easy identification of best practice.

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5. New Technology

Advances in technology allow an integrated, collaborative, real-time experience for project teams.

5.1. The Project Intelligence Centre

Current project intelligence offerings are either simple reports on the project schedule and resources, or are aggregations of project data for benchmarking purposes. They do not address the challenges laid out in this paper. The challenges examined above could be met by a combination of technologies that provided:
Real-time visibility of data from all parties in the supply-chain, regardless of system location or complexity A single, unified view of the project or mega-project optimized to each users needs Notification of issues Collaborative tools to allow the project to react and deal with issues

These features constitute a new type of platform; the Project Intelligence Centre (PIC). They also describe an improved way of operating a project or mega- project. These features rely on new technologies:
Total integration; flexible, extensible, vendor agnostic Hybrid-cloud architectures True collaboration through shared experience Social workplace

This paper will look briefly at each of these areas, before looking at how they contribute to meeting the challenges described previously.

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5.2. Total Integration

Until now its been difficult to access proprietary format or legacy data sources; new connectivity capabilities can present a consumer standard integrated user experience. 5.2.1. Integration = Visibility In order to deliver the situational awareness and data transparency required, the PIC needs to be able to deliver visibility throughout the supply-chain. Modern integration technologies can connect the systems that power your projects at client, EPC, vendor and sub-vendor levels, bringing all the data needed to manage a project together in one place. As a minimum this needs to cover ERP, planning, document management and existing MIS/BI platforms. However, connectivity to MES, data historians, DCS and other plant systems will ease the handover into production.

Figure 6. Required PIC Integration Capability This connectivity allows the PIC to be a single point of reference for all and eliminates complexity for the user. When allied with the hybrid-cloud architecture discussed in section 5.3, Hybrid Cloud, it allows the client and/or EPC direct visibility of all vendor and sub-vendor progress.

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 5.2.2. Key Design Criteria

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In summary the ideal PIC system should be offering as standard:

Self-service platforms requiring no IT involvement Genuine end-user driven data access built around modern user experience principles Real-time, or as near as makes no difference Simultaneous direct access to source data for all, so as to provide a platform for collaboration Some way to action the intelligence; to curate it for a community, make it actionable, or start collaborating with others Controllable expense - there's no way the enterprise should be penalised with increased expense or complexity for a user wanting to extract or share data

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5.3. Hybrid Cloud

How intelligent use of cloud computing can deliver a value add architecture, rather than just an outsourced infrastructure risk. 5.3.1. What is a hybrid-cloud ? A hybrid-cloud architecture has two key roles in meeting the challenges faced by large capital projects; external collaboration and universal data access. The term cloud is often appropriated to mean a number of different things. For the purposes of this document it will help to define the cloud as server resource which is:
Off-site; centralised application deployment to clients and servers, minimising deployment costs ande delivering a standardised user experience. Scalable on-demand; to permit new collaboration partners and meet data exchange requirements. Virtualised; spread across multiple hardware platforms to minimise risk. Private; limited to enterprise customers with appropriate provisions for data security

This clearly differentiates this usage of cloud from other solutions that may be some or none of the above. The term hybrid-cloud means that both cloud computing and On-Premise resources are used;
An On-Premise component which connects to enterprise systems, authenticates users, aggregates and serves data and manages communications to the cloud servers. A cloud component which permits centralised delivery of client and server updates and manages communications with external users and On-Premise servers.

Figure 7. The Ideal Architecture You can find a more detailed architecture diagram at http://www.sabisu.co/_artifact/sabisu-architecture.pdf . 2012 Sabisu Ltd Page 22 of 35

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5.3.2. Why choose a hybrid-cloud ? As mentioned briefly above, the hybrid-cloud architecture has two key roles in meeting the challenges faced by large capital projects; external collaboration and universal data access. The hybrid-cloud architecture fundamentally redefines project reporting, bringing the real-time reporting and collaboration functionality so far reserved for expensive, hard to implement operational intelligence systems into an agile, quickly deployed project intelligence centre. This new approach allows the project intelligence centre to meet challenges that previously could be solved only with significant investment and risk:
Situational Awareness o When combined with advanced, real-time integration capabilities can deliver genuine situational awareness to any user anywhere. Decision Support o Decision support systems require hybrid-cloud architectures to provide a single, incontrovertible version of the truth and a platform for global collaboration. Workflow Efficiency o Modern project workflows benefit from easy data transfer and instant, datacentred collaboration. Project Controls o Project controls teams benefit from direct access to client, EPC, vendor and sub-vendor data, improving reporting quality and easing reconciliation.

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 5.3.3. Key Design Criteria

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The hybrid-cloud offers some real advantages. As with any new technology care should be taken when looking at system capabilities the following criteria will minimize risk:
1. No line of business data should be persisted outside the corporate network.

2. No corporate data is transmitted outside the corporate network unless external users are specifically authorized to access it.

3. Corporate data should be provided to end-users in real-time on demand, i.e., without caching. 4. Design for the thinnest possible client; smallest footprint, lowest cost ideally through standard browsers without reliance on plug-ins.

The ideal PIC should be proven with a small pilot deployment, which will show how it:
Adapts to your business processes and end-user requirements without requiring significant development work or configuration. Delivers significant business benefit even from a deployment to a niche business function or limited number of users.

5.3.4. Go Mobile The hybrid-cloud also allows the capital project challenges laid down in this paper to be solved for another user type; the mobile user. Indeed, with only minor modifications required to the user interface to adapt to different display requirements and device capabilities any user with a mobile device can be connected to the project. Given the global nature of such projects and the frequency with which management are required to travel this is a benefit which becomes more compelling as mobile devices become smarter and better connected. Indeed, there is a growing tendency for devices such as iPads and iPhones to be used within the enterprise, particularly by senior management. The hybrid-cloud architecture allows these requirements to be met without further expense or complexity.

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5.4. True Collaboration

Collaboration is more than simple messaging; a truly collaborative environment promotes team working and eliminates lots of email. 5.4.1. True Collaboration Needs a Shared Experience

5.5. As discussed above in section 4.3, Collaboration Throughout the Supply Chain
all users must see the same developing situation in real-time. This isnt simply a one size fits all dashboard; this is an individual, yet shared, experience of the situation. There is communal control and responsibility for resolution. Thus all collaborators need access to the data that describes the situation or business process, yet without compromising the personalized environment each user needs to do their job. Each individual has to access to this data on their own terms, i.e., alongside other data, documents and tools they need to contextualize the situation or move the process forward.

Figure 8. Two Personalised Views of a Situation The role of the PIC is therefore one of facilitating the shared experience; creating an environment where data is easily accessible whether collaborators are based with clients, EPCs, vendors or sub-vendors.

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5.6. Social Workplace

Social capability can enhance a projects effectiveness and ability to respond but those that can align users around core data can see an exponential return. 5.6.1. Enterprise 2.0 The PIC as discussed so far has many Enterprise 2.0, or enterprise social software, properties:
As discussed in all the previous sections, personalization is crucial to the success of an PIC solution; the end-users autonomy must be respected. This is also a crucial tenet of Enterprise 2.0, or enterprise social software. The platform as described also has significant communication features which support its unique, genuine collaboration capability. The platform has an appreciation of which users are linked thanks to the community model, which also gives it a method for easy adoption throughout the project. The ease with which users can share data and content makes user links and communities useful and therefore likely to be used, so all the ingredients for a successful enterprise social network are in place. The ease with which new users can be added to communities allows for viral growth, whilst the implementation of a corporate administrator allows this growth to be managed.

Studies are beginning to show the benefits of deploying Enterprise 2.0 technology; the emphasis in social business software is now starting to shift towards business. A McKinsey study found that externally networked organisations were in the top 3% of their sectors. By placing project data at the centre of any collaboration or community activity, the platform actually develops social capability into something new; a social workplace dedicated to finding, sharing and collaborating on project data. This shared purpose is only possible because the PIC can bring the data together in a shared, yet personalized, environment the vendor and platform agnostic integration capability is essential to the success of the project. Organisations adopting a PIC solution with these properties can at last leverage personalization, community working, enterprise data and social networking to produce genuine improvements in efficiency.

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 5.6.2. A Social Perspective

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The traditional dashboard view of a project assumes that the user will be monitoring it constantly, yet this is not practical; users will be diverted for good reason at certain times. Also not all data is best presented in a dashboard, e.g., conversations, status or progress updates. Therefore the PIC needs to present activity in an event-driven, timeline view. Doing so will kick start collaboration and allow offline users to be brought up to date provided of course that the timeline is relevant. Fortunately there is a way to ensure relevancy; when a user nominates data as relevant to their community or communities, they are filtering out all the irrelevant data and thus ensuring the timeline remains useful. Building on the concepts in the Total Integration section above, the vast connectivity and self- service capabilities of the PIC allows the user to nominate data from virtually anywhere in the enterprise. As the ideal PIC provides a wealth of collaboration options it is also ideally situated to update the timeline with the latest discussions. This means that an offline user can get the full picture from the PIC and be ready to contribute. This is truly a social platform. As discussed throughout this paper, projects depend on bringing people in different organisations together. So the timeline facility is valuable to all parties as it promotes transparency and rapid response further breaking the delaying cycles shown in Figure 3.

Figure 9. A Social, Event Driven View

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6. Meeting Workflow & Collaboration Challenges

New technology brought to bear on project and mega-project challenges, breaking down boundaries and delivering visibility and control.

6.1. Easy & Focused Collaboration

Ad hoc collaboration between Project Managers as described in section 4.3 is clearly beneficial and should be encouraged. When combined with new technology which allows users to share project data as described in 4.2, messaging features can become powerful collaboration options. A good example is instant messaging, or chat; by putting project data at the centre of the discussion, it becomes a valuable collaboration tool. It has the advantages of being immediate whilst having just the right level of intrusion; like a ringing telephone, it encourages a reaction but can be ignored. Given the importance of collaborative communities (section 6.3) any messaging mechanism should allow groups of interested users to easily collaborate. If a user can bring an entire community into a real-time, shared, collaborative environment then there can be no quicker way of exposing insights, resolving incipient situations, or expediting business processes.

Figure 10. In Platform Chat, Showing Community Focus Perhaps more intrusive but likely to gain in acceptability is video chat; face to face discussion via webcam. High-resolution web conferencing capability is not the aim here more a rapidly accessed collaboration facility. Often preferable to text only messaging as interpersonal and environmental considerations can be made, its a welcome development provided the collaborative environment is not compromised; if the user has to sacrifice their view of the data, situation, or process to get the video chat software initialized, then its non-optimal. 2012 Sabisu Ltd
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Obviously accommodations need to be made for offline, non-real-time collaboration. These should still be data-centric in their use, using some sort of notification process so that users can be brought up to speed.

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6.2. User & Community Autonomy

Giving each user a personal perspective on a shared experience means substantial complexity; each user needs a personalized environment. Some degree of assistance in determining this environment is appropriate. As communities of users cluster around common interests, it seems logical that the PIC provides the facility for communities to determine a default project dashboard that can then be customised by individual users if required. These community pages will themselves evolve over time as data sources evolve, merge or are superseded. As the PIC is an enterprise platform, care should be taken around administration of communities, their proliferation and their protection. In particular, the following considerations should be made:
Administration has to be an end-user responsibility; awaiting IT involvement every time a user needs to be added to a community will lead to delays. End-users should be able to create communities as situations require, yet with some oversight from a corporate administrator. Communities must have some sort of privacy structure to ensure they stay relevant, corporate intellectual property is protected and confidentiality respected.

6.3. User Community Focus

User communities come in all shapes and sizes. Each project has many communities and they dont necessarily mirror the organisation structure. Communities are reliable, robust and inclusive; they lead to better decisions and by their very nature engage users and ensure that the relevant data gets to interested parties. Project Managers already share information so as to protect the overall programme, particularly with regard to vendor production capacity. The ad-hoc communities that form as a result give great benefit in and across projects, so the PIC needs to support this; it needs to be intuitive so that communities can organically grow as needed. An intuitive and easy to deploy solution will grow at the required pace without training or IT constraints to prevent it from reaching the required constituencies. Communities are the key organisational construct for bringing mega-project teams together; bringing all project conversations into one place builds a reusable library of expertise and best practice. Its also the easiest way for a Project Manager or Director to see which issues are being actively worked. Filtering and making data directly available to a community removes the traditional reliance on email, or any other form of serial information delivery. It also opens the door for streamlining complex business processes and breaking the behaviours that introduce delay. 2012 Sabisu Ltd Page 30 of 35 V1.0

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6.4. Content Distribution

With the user/community relationship established, the PIC is uniquely positioned to ensure that users are provided with relevant content. This content is important to the business in terms of ensuring project efficiency and consistency and to users for understanding trends or developing new insights. The PIC has a role in terms of propagating best practice; as the platform responsible for bringing communities of users together around project processes and issues it is the ideal place for determining, communicating and ensuring compliance with revisions to best practices. The amount and varied nature of project data available to users in the enterprise means enterprise search is of limited use. This is where curation becomes valuable; by highlighting the most valuable version of content, or collaborating to produce new versions, users filter the most relevant content. This content is then propagated by allowing users to then easily share the data with their communities. In this way, the PIC can add value to existing document or content management systems, such as SharePoint or Open Text Livelink. The PIC must have at least rudimentary link to permit the sharing and hence propagation across the social network of content from these sources.

6.5. Frictionless Business Processes

Though ERP systems ensure compliance in key financial and operational business processes, many processes that depend on third parties fall outside the ERP systems control. The PIC must support the evolution of these processes as new communities are identified and new datasets are shared. This could be thought of as a virtual enterprise network; a permanently available, zero configuration, on-demand facility for cross-enterprise working. Every project partner can be included - independent consultants, SMEs and contractors. This capability means its no longer necessary to treat contractors as employees; they dont need to be on-site, or on the clients enterprise network, or provided with IT support. All third parties can be provided with direct access to the data that they require, saving costs and reducing the risk of accidental data exposure. As referred to in section 5.6.1, Enterprise 2.0, this is the extended enterprise in action; Enterprise 2.0 technology applied to the challenges of large capital projects is a great example of how data-centred enterprise social networks can deliver real business benefit.

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6.6. Exceptional Service Delivery

Whilst the focus of the PIC solution is on project delivery for the client, it should be acknowledged that external service providers of all kinds could use the same properly architected PIC solution to deliver significant benefit for both parties. This is particularly relevant during commissioning and hand-over to production. Beyond the improved inter-organisation collaboration described in section 6.5, service providers can look forward to early inclusion in developing operational situations allowing earlier and lower cost resolution to issues. Such an involvement is ideal for third party consultants and knowledge workers. Service providers are already using this cloud-based PIC collaboration capability to differentiate themselves from competitors, providing on-demand access for customers to key data and instant, pro-active collaboration. Service providers also find that new customers can commission their services more easily; its simply a case of making appropriate provisions for storing the new customers data and allowing appropriate access. The service provider also benefits from a robust, scalable computing resource that would be cost prohibitive for the service providers to implement themselves.

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7. Sabisu

There wasnt a solution on the market that could achieve genuine improvements in efficiency or collaboration, or extend the enterprise. So we built it.

7.1. Functional Fit

With Sabisu, we believe weve built the ultimate project intelligence centre, focusing on integration, collaboration and the extended enterprise. Other solutions may meet some requirements but no others meet all. Sabisu was constructed with the extended enterprise in mind; the platforms On- Premise component is designed on industry standard operating systems and database servers so as to permit rapid global deployment to locations where IT expertise may be limited. Sabisu delivers all the functionality outlined in this document. All of the practices and impacts have been proven within existing customers, e.g.,
Visibility throughout complex supply chains and business processes Users migrating to centralised collaborative platforms, e.g., from email to instant messaging. Improvements in business process execution efficiency Identification of operational cost savings Improved service delivery from and to third parties Reduction in IT expenditure, particularly around meeting new information presentation requirements

Our customers are finding uses for Sabisu throughout their large capital projects; KPI dashboards, document management, commissioning and asset management, and of course executive reporting and day-to-day business process execution. Sabisu is also in constant use by those who create and maintain it; its used to monitor the various production environments and service our customers.

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7.2. About the Sabisu team

Were a technology company; we build, implement and help our customers exploit Sabisu. Sabisu is designed, built and hosted in the UK. We have offices in Teesside and Manchester; our cloud facility is a dedicated Sabisu private virtual environment hosted from our datacentre in Manchester. Sabisu was established in 2003 to provide IT services, principally to the petrochemicals industry. Realising that we had a unique value proposition in enterprise software we launched Sabisu into beta in January 2010 with the aim of building a platform to make complex enterprises easy to manage. Our approach was to use the best hybrid-cloud, social and integration technologies to build a platform with unprecedented reach and applications. We worked in partnership with a number of early customers in the oil & gas sector to make this happen, with the product going live in January 2011. Since then we have been racing to keep up with demand as existing customers expand and we add new customers. Our customers are finding that Sabisu can bring data together from disparate sources regardless of location to refine business processes, eliminating time-consuming manipulation of data and the need to manually move data between systems. As a small, agile, responsive technology company, we regard ourselves as having partners rather than customers; two way, long term, mutually beneficial relationships. For a more detailed presentation of our values and differentiating approach, we would be pleased to provide or present additional material.

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7.3. Typical Industry Sectors

Designed in partnership with leading petrochemicals and refining companies, Sabisu is a perfect fit for the oil & gas downstream sector. Its been designed and built with the resilience, security, quality and system integrity that this market demands. Therefore Sabisu will bring benefits to any large-scale manufacturing and process industry operation, with compelling success stories in chemicals & biofuels in particular. With its extended enterprise capability Sabisu is also the delivery platform of choice for service providers as it enables the customer to digitally commission easily and provides excellent collaborative features to ensure optimal delivery.

7.4. Case Studies

Construction of Sabisu was started in mid-2010. The solution was designed and built with help from leading petrochemical manufacturers and process industry figures, though the company and all intellectual property related to the platform continues to be privately held by its founders and team. At http://www.sabisu.co/CaseStudies.aspx youll find a growing number of case studies.

7.5. Next steps

Contact us. Wed love to hear your comments. You can reach us at: enquiries@sabisu.co Our contact details and contact form are here: http://www.sabisu.co/contact-us Or our office contact details are: MANCHESTER TEESSIDE Arden Hall A311 The Wilton Centre Sale Wilton M33 3SJ Redcar +44 1619 733 138 TS10 4RF Google Maps +44 1642 438 124 Google Maps

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