What We Believe

Capital projects are critical undertakings for most organizations. Because organizations operate within complex and dynamic environments (business, political and social, etc) where the only constant is change, traditional project management is delivering far less than desired results. We believe traditional project management and its associated supporting systems alone are insufficient to ensure the successful delivery of today's capital projects. This is validated by the tremendous number of projects suffering from delays, cost overruns, outcomes that are less than fit for purpose and claims.
Traditional project management has been blindly accepted, (in part through the proliferation of computers), as the primary approach for delivering capital projects. The underlying concept is that projects are viewed as a cost (time and capital) rather than an investment that should be optimized to deliver client requirements that are ever changing. Project Management as such does not focus on operational or production related issues which are at the core of delivering value. Through the use of techniques such as earned value analysis, project management attempts to establish finite objectives (in order to enable progress measurement) in a very dynamic environment.
Better managing production (versus relying solely on project management) is the only way to achieve dramatic improvement in project outcomes. By managing production, we mean how processes such as design, engineering, fabrication, and assembly/construction are planned and executed including how program/project processes and operations are designed, controlled and how buffers are optimized. Specifically, we believe that concurrent processes are better than sequential, distributed planning and control is better than centralized and that collaborative team structures are more productive than those based on hierarchical command and control. Successfully and sustainably managing production in programs/projects requires processes, tools, and skills that are designed specifically for this purpose (versus those for project management).
The optimal approach to ensuring better program/project outcomes lies in integrating the fundamentals of managing production with required project management functions.

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