TURN AROUND MANAGEMENT

Good luck Shiv! With 4 people you may be able to just pull it off, assuming that the update information comes to you and you don’t have to run out to get it.

Shiv,



One thing I’m concerned about is the number of activities you’ve got. I would normally say a scheduler should be responsible for no more than 5k activities per month; you have closer to 60k. At 700k labor-hrs this comes out to no more than 10h per activity, which means there are at least 1,500 activities in progress on any given day. If it takes you just one minute to update each one then that’s 1,500 minutes per day, or about 24h. Now if you have an automatic tie-in from your timesheets to each activity and if it were operating extremely reliably then maybe you could pull that off, but otherwise I just don’t see it getting updated in any meaningful way. Is there something that I’m missing here? Do you have a staff of ten people entering updates? Are there other schedulers that manage 60k activites per month?



Andrew

Another note on turnaround management: your peers may have been updating the "schedule" in the way you describe because they are turnaround managers and not schedulers. You need to have a full-time scheduler to manage a schedule on a turnaround, there’s just no way around it. So if there has not been a full-time scheduler then the turnaround managers have most likely been filling out this "schedule" in order to satisfy the demands of an exec who wants to see a Gantt chart but doesn’t actually know anything about scheduling. When you have a real schedule it totally changes the way the project is managed, decisions can be made quantitatively, coordination is much smoother, problems get anticipated and nipped in the bud, and stakeholder expectations are more clearly and accurately set.

Shiv:



I schedule outages of all types, mostly for power plants, and I’m going to agree with Omar that not only should you gather dates and reschedule for a turnaround but it’s much MORE critical that you do this for a turnaround, because the fixed schedule means that it is that much more critical to get the thing back up and running on the correct date. This particularly goes for the large projects that are candidates for the critical path--any construction work, large repiping jobs, changeout/overhaul of very large assemblies like big tanks, fans, turbines, motors, or even control systems.



Now it’s true for turnarounds that you often have a large number of disconnected activities--a thousand valves to change out, a thousand instruments to recalibrate, etc. Those kinds of miscellaneous jobs can be managed in more of a checklist way, keeping track of the status of each individual valve or instrument or even forgoing that to simply keep track of the number of valves/instruments completed vs. the total left to do. In that case you would have one bar for valves and one bar for instruments, and you would status them based on your checklist. But you definitely want to track the progress of those bars and edit their remaining duration, and if they start to fall behind on the calibrations, then that bar gets pushed out.



You also want to decide if you’re going to manage resources or not. If you are already tracking which jobs everyone is working on every day through timesheets, then you could probably manage resources as well. In that case you would want to load level those big calibration/valve bars as well. But if you’re just starting out, status is communicated through a shift turnover meeting and there are no detailed timecards, then you might want to skip resource management, as it’s quite a lot more work than simply managing activity status and remaining duration.

Hi Shiv - well, you have my sympathy! On such a large & obviously complex schedule I believe it would be absolutely critical to measure progress against the planned dates; slippage against baseline starts/finishes are not only important to the critical path(s) activities but also to the effect on float paths on non-critical activities. Have you been offered an explanation for your team’s approach to the schedule - have they done this in the past?



cheers,



Omar

Shiv - can I ask how many activities and over what period of time is your turnaround scheduled for? In fact your team are using a checklist - not a schedule as we normally understand it!



cheers,



Omar

i’ve never done it to be honest, but from my unusual learning, allow me to comment as follows:



1. I presumed the working team is solid and experienced (maybe they’ve done the same thing over and over).



2. The Planning Unit maybe in Hours.



3. You cannot afford to go out of the Schedule (huge losses if delayed).



4. I suggest you prepare a Baseline Plan (Target Plan).



No. 4 is the only way you can determine if there were any changes in the Schedule.