Sometimes the most challenging impediments to success can be overcome or even avoided altogether by adding a little 'special sauce' to the works.
According to Kane Hittle, vice president and project manager at HollyFrontier El Dorado Refining, the single largest issue impeding desired performance, from an execution standpoint, is eliminating gaps in productivity by assuring alignment among all those involved in the project.
"That obviously is a big factor, as is productivity as a whole -- the entire project site's productivity -- from making the engineering productive so that you can move into a procurement and to making handoffs to construction efficiently so that they are seamless and there are not a lot of challenges," he said, addressing delegates at the recent Refining Engineering & Construction event in Houston. "The engineering might have gone fairly well, but then it was kind of 'thrown over the fence' for the construction side, and it wasn't a good handoff. We see a lot of challenges there. It's not just a craft productivity issue, but that does factor into it."
To unlock savings in small to midsize capital project portfolios in refining and to drive productivity, it is essential, Hittle said, to develop and maintain alignment between the owner and the contractors in the earliest stages of the project.
"It's alignment internally and with the owner's side, alignment with our operations organization and maintenance and lateral organizations," he said. "It's making sure that we have good alignment and there aren't messy handoffs where, when things get to a different phase of construction, people aren't throwing up red flags and slowing down the project because they have concerns or questions."
The same attention to alignment applies to the contractor's side.
"Again, that's why I stress to the contractors that, for organizations like ours that are fairly small and fairly lean, anything they can do to get involved in helping us with our alignment is a great asset to helping us do our jobs and making sure their jobs go more smoothly once we get those hand-offs made," Hittle said.
Driving alignment, he explained, is a 'cultural thing' reflected in how project groups operate and how they interact with each other -- not just on a single project, but how they go about their daily business.
"I really think it is a lot of involvement early on," Hittle continued. "It's about getting people involved in the early stages, from the operations folks down to the lowest level, from the operators who are out there operating the equipment to the people who may be permitting the actual construction job. And, once you get into the actual construction, the reliability engineers and getting them involved early on, too."
It's also integral to align with individuals involved in specification equipment -- the maintenance personnel who are going to work on the equipment -- "to understand what their needs and desires are for the new equipment. "We are extremely lucky at the facility where I work," Hittle said.â
"We have a strong culture with a lot of involvement and alignment among all of our groups. There's a lot of cooperation. We may disagree about things, but people are very involved and want to be involved. I've seen other locations where that culture just doesn't exist."
Hittle admitted he can't specifically identify the exact recipe for that 'special sauce' that inspires stakeholders to become involved and achieve optimum alignment.
"I can't claim to know exactly what it is," he said. "If we knew, we could probably bottle it and sell it for a lot of money."
