Visualization

Challenge and Selection

I was a leader of project control team in an oil and gas plant project. One

of the main tasks was to perform the change management. The change  management is that something added or deleted from the original scope of the  work, and the relevant compensation shall be proposed by the contractor for the  approval by the client. In the process of this change management, my team had  to prepare the justification and supporting documents while coordinating with  other related EPC (engineering, procurement and construction) teams within the  project. By the nature of the EPC plant project, the teams involved in the change  management had various professional/engineering backgrounds and experiences.  For a successful change management, my team had to communicate and gather  all available information and data at such an extensive level in a limited time  and resources. Therefore, I realized that the conventional approach by simply  requesting the info and data from other teams would not make the output that  we needed. I needed something simple and common visualization to make the  other teams to understand and tie them together on what we wanted in this  change management.

Application

While my team sitting in a meeting room, I started by listing items what

might be required for a successful change management. I listed Strategy –How  we will do this? What the other teams can provide? Networking – How we will  make a channel with the client from working level to the top management? How  we will make an inter-discipline communication with the client? What will their  roles and responsibility? Item Management – How we will efficiently log and  manage all the information and data from other teams and the client? How we  will categorize to build-up a case for a successful change management? From  these three items, we were making simple graphics.

Strategy shall have Approach / Documentation / Concentration /

Coordination. Approach can be categorized Argument / Negotiation /  Cooperation. Under normal circumstances Argument always shall be avoided

with the client. Negotiation is not recommended since normally there are winner  and loser. Cooperation is our stance with the client while proposing them win- win solution for the change management. Documentation is the back-bone of  the change management. We need to make the Documentation up to the level  the client fully satisfies. At the end of the day, a successful change management  is what the client satisfies and approves, not we satisfy by winning over the  client. Concentration is required since there are always limited time resources.  If some information and data is not up to level to make a case, we need to  discard those with hesitation.

Over a week of period, our team exercised the visualization of the

change management. We progressively went into the details of the Networking  and Item Management in a similar manner that we did for the Strategy.  Although this visualization process was for the other teams with various  engineering professions and experiences, throughout the visualization process,  our team could acquire the better understanding of the change management and  build up the confidence how to proceed and deal with unexpected situations in  the process of the change management. Also, after we shared this with the other  teams, we could have shortened the time for preparing the Documentation, and  exceeded our anticipated targets in terms of cost with the client via the  structured Networking and efficient Item Management.

Insight & Approach

What I have learned from conducting this visualization exercise is the

simplicity in the details.  To include all insights from the various teams and  work groups, we shall embrace the details, but those details shall be visualized,  using graphics in this case, to be more accessible. I have learned several things  throughout this process – things that will help me in the future, as I make my  way through the future projects.

