Please be invited to the USPI workshop on lessons learned from large capital projects which will be held online on:
16 April 2024 from 12:00-13:30 UTC (corresponding to 14:00-15:30 CEST (Amsterdam)).
The purpose of the workshop will be to share and discuss bridging the gap between IM and the business in doing large capital projects.
When doing large capital projects in practice, amongst which the Pallas project in the Netherlands, we came across several problem areas and challenges in realizing the required information management system.
It seemed worthwhile to share this with the experts and managers from the USPI community that has grown over the years.
Bridging Information Management (IM) and engineering for the successful implementation of Common Data Environments (CDEs) within projects involves navigating various problem areas and challenges. These barriers can stem from technical, organizational, and cultural factors, among others. Understanding these barriers and their origins is essential to develop strategies to overcome them.
Problem Areas and Challenges
- Integration of Systems and Standards: The disparity in software and data standards between IM and engineering tools can hinder seamless integration, leading to data silos and interoperability issues.
- Data Quality and Consistency: Ensuring the accuracy, completeness, and consistency of data across different systems and stages of a project is a significant challenge. This often creates tension between quality of data and progress in the project as well as budget pressure
- Change Management: The adoption of CDEs requires changes in workflow, processes, and roles, which can be met with resistance from stakeholders accustomed to traditional methods. this is reinforced by a lack of data management skills within engineering in general
- Security and Privacy Concerns: Safeguarding sensitive information within a CDE, while ensuring that the right stakeholders have access to the data they need, is a complex balance to achieve.
- Training and Skill Development: The lack of familiarity and expertise with IM principles and CDE platforms among engineering professionals can limit the effectiveness of implementation.
- Cultural and Organizational Barriers: Different organizational cultures and structures can lead to misalignments in goals and expectations, hindering collaboration.
Barriers and their Origin
- Technical Barriers: Stem from the complexity of integrating diverse systems and ensuring data quality across them.
- Organizational Barriers: Arise from established procedures, hierarchies, and the resistance to change within organizations.
- Cultural Barriers: Related to the differences in work cultures, communication styles, and the willingness to collaborate across disciplinary boundaries.
- Semantically barriers: companies have developed their own technical languages which are difficult to integrate into a common data environment without in-depth knowledge and experience with interoperability
Overcoming the Barriers
- Standardization and Interoperability: Develop and adhere to industry standards for data and software interoperability to facilitate seamless integration.
- Organize ISO 8000 maturity checks within involved companies to create awareness of existence of barriers.
- Data cleansing: To integrate data into a CDE from the many legacy engineering tools, knowledge and experience is required with regard to data cleansing of any information flow towards CDE
- Education and Training: Invest in comprehensive training programs to build competency in IM and CDE usage among engineering professionals.
- Change Management Strategies: Employ change management techniques to address resistance, emphasizing the benefits of CDEs and fostering a culture of continuous improvement.
- Data Governance Framework: Implement a robust data governance framework to ensure data quality, security, and privacy, with clear policies and responsibilities.
- Collaborative Culture: Foster a culture of collaboration and open communication across departments, emphasizing shared goals and the benefits of integrating IM and engineering practices.
- Pilot Projects: Start with pilot projects to demonstrate the value of CDEs and work out any implementation kinks before scaling up.
In this workshop we will provide an overview of these problems and challenges and the fundamental concepts behind them.
This should enable the participants to gain an understanding of what they would need to do in their capital facilities projects to achieve a common data environment and appropriate information management system
We are planning for several subsequent workshops to handle the problems and challenges in detail using the experience of large capital projects, amongst which the Pallas project, as examples to make it concrete.
In these projects the standardization principles have been adopted successfully to handle the problems and challenges.
You may think of some 3 of 4 follow-up workshops. This will also depend on the interest of the participants.
The workshops might lead to a joint project activity in which several companies adopt the lessons learnt and examples in one of their own projects, with the willingness to share their experiences with the other participants in the joint industry project. Possible this may lead to further development of the example material into useful industry templates.
Looking forward,
Regards,
dr. ing. L.C. (Leo) van Ruijven MSc
Principal Systems Engineer – Croonwolter&Dros