BP Oil's Project Management Praxis

John I. Dick-Peddie

In recent years British Petroleum, like many companies, has seen changes that affect the way capital projects are managed—reductions in staffing, elimination of central engineering groups, loss of experienced people, lack of young people being developed to follow them, and a capital-investment climate that makes future project workload uncertain. These changing conditions suggest the need for new techniques for preserving project management expertise and promoting good project management practices.

Four years ago BP Oil initiated a major new program to upgrade its U.S. refineries, largely to support Clean Air Act initiatives. A Major Projects Group composed of six project teams was established to manage the various projects. A core staff of functional experts was also assembled to support the project teams. Because of a previous dearth of major projects, the people and organizations for managing big jobs had virtually disappeared. The new group had to recruit personnel from BP Exploration (the “upstream” part of the oil business), BP Engineering in London, individual refineries, and outside contractors. The organization went through the usual periods of adjusting to new people in new roles and developing policies and procedures, while pushing forward with fast-track, complex projects. During this shakedown period there were problems and mistakes, but by the end of three years an efficient operating group was in place. Unfortunately, by that time the projects were being completed and, with no new ones in sight, it was time to demobilize the organization.

This organizational build-and-demolish cycle has been repeated many times in the last two decades by BP in the United States (formerly Standard Oil of Ohio). After a big job is done and a good project management team has been developed, most of the people drift off to other organizations, taking away newly enhanced skills and knowledge. The operating practices, so painstakingly developed, evaporate as people leave, and the policy/procedures binders go into storage or the wastebasket. When the next big project comes along, the project team starts from scratch to repeat the cycle. Some of the mistakes made before are likely to be repeated.

BP Oil was determined to end this cycle and find better ways to manage projects. A system was needed that would:

• Preserve the best guidance, policy, and procedure documents in a readily accessible format
• Capture some of the expertise of the key project-team members in a form easily passed on to the next team
• Present all of the information in a way that would encourage its use by future teams.

Something new was needed to meet these objectives. Too often, earlier attempts to preserve expertise had been lost or ignored when the next project started. BP Oil's answer to the need for a new system is the Project Management Praxis. The PM Praxis is composed of three major components, all included in a single CD-ROM disk: Checklists, Reference Library, and Information-Management Software.

Checklists. Before BP Oil's Major Projects Group demobilized, key members were asked to develop detailed checklists of the steps that should be taken for successful project execution. The checklists begin with earliest project conceptual studies and follow through the project life to commissioning of completed facilities. Nearly 1000 steps are identified and presented in six individual checklists for various project functions: organization/staffing, engineering/quality management, project control, contracts/purchasing, construction, and handover/commissioning. The checklists are organized by a common set of project phases and major milestones, as shown in Table 1.

Table 2 is a sample page from the Checklists. Some of the activities are followed by annotations in columns headed “Guidance” and “Warnings.” These refer to specific pages in documents contained the Reference Library. The “Guidance” references provide background or assistance in how to carry out the activity. The “Warning” references note what to watch out for to avoid problems. Most of these warnings come from a booklet of lessons learned that was distilled by the BP Group from post-project appraisals of worldwide projects over a ten-year period.

Reference Library. The PM Praxis includes over 6000 pages in documents or sets of documents collected from many sources. Important quality-management, contracts, and other guidelines were developed by BP Oil's Major Projects Group. For years BP maintained a central engineering group in London that produced many detailed guidance texts on project management. Several good contributions came from BP Exploration's various projects for Alaskan oil fields.

An invaluable part of the Reference Library is 30 booklets on project management topics prepared by the Construction Industry Institute. Inclusion of the CII guidance in the PM Praxis makes it available and readily usable by many in BP who might not otherwise be aware of it. The CII booklets are heavily referenced throughout the Checklists.

A list of the contents of the Reference Library is shown in Table 3.

Information Management. The software program selected for the PM Praxis is Interleaf Worldview. The Praxis was loaded into this software by UNISCAN, the firm representing Interleaf World-view in the Cleveland area (BP Oil had already adopted the software for its refinery technical standards). Features of this software that make it attractive for the PM Praxis include:

• “Hyperlinks” are easily established between different points in the PM Praxis. For example, hyperlinks enable the user to click on an icon next to a reference by a Checklist activity and jump directly to the relevant page in one of the Reference Library documents. Likewise, clicking on the title of one of the Reference Library documents jumps to its Table of Contents; another click moves to a chosen section.
• The user can leave “bookmarks” to quickly return to the sections marked.
• “Sticky” notes can be inserted anywhere and easily recovered when needed.
• Any part of the text or graphics in the PM Praxis can be printed with good quality.
• Text can be imported to the user's word processing program and tailored to meet one's needs.

All of the PM Praxis material and software is incorporated in a single CD-ROM disk that can be run on a PC with Windows or on a Macintosh. It is easy to install and begin using without special training.

The Future for PM Praxis

The PM Praxis is just becoming available for use within BP. Like any management tool, its benefits will depend on how users choose to implement it. The hoped for and intended uses include:

• Even experienced project managers and their teams are usually grateful for a good checklist to assist in planning and executing projects. The Checklists in the PM Praxis provide a starting point for developing a checklist tailored to a specific project.
• A senior manager with limited staff can monitor the plans and progress of many projects if they are all structured by the common milestones in the PM Praxis.
• People who are new to project work can find training in the step-by-step guidance on project management, with as much background explanatory information and assistance as needed.
• If project teams refer to the Checklists on a daily or weekly basis, they will be reminded to review relevant lessons learned, CII publications, etc. The visibility of the reminders and the quick, easy access to guidance and warnings should make them more likely to be used than now, when too often good guidance sits forgotten on the shelf in the press of project activities.

These are the objectives and the hopes for BP Oil's Project Management Praxis. We have done something new and different. We will be finding out in future years whether or not it really helps us to do things better.

John I. Dick-Peddie has been with BP for 13 years, first managing Alaskan oil-field projects and, recently, refinery projects. He conceived and developed the PM Praxis for BP Oil before his retirement.