How do Project Management Practices guide Turnaround Execution

Abstract

The complex nature of turnaround maintenance projects leads to the development of various methods of managing plant turnarounds. To discover the strengths and weaknesses of each approach during plant turnaround, it is useful to determine the main expert management approaches. Recent work identified 33 suitable project management practices linked to critical issues during the plant shutdown process in the hydrocarbon industry. In this article, turnaround management styles have been identified that reflect the application of these 33 project management practices. Some 44 shutdown experts from 36 chemical firms took part in the study. The experts marked in a checklist which practices they were employing to manage their plant shutdowns. A hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) was performed to group these experts according to their use and non-use of these project management practices (PMPs). Three groupings of experts were identified that define the common approaches for managing major outage maintenance. The common practices being used by each group show the distribution of well-established PMPs among experts. Moreover, the practices unused by each group enable us to discover what should be done to improve expert performance in plant shutdown projects.