Three to six months later…

Try to get the project team together for a day or two (or at least the key players from both the project side and the user side). To prepare for this meeting, the team members involved should review the shutdown narrative document. They should also read any lessons learned from prior shutdowns to see whether recommended improvements were made, and if not, why not.

Meeting minutes from the whole shutdown process from inception to closeout should be reviewed, and one person or a small team should be assigned to write what lessons were learned, with references to the minutes from the status meetings and with to source documents where appropriate.

This is a time when the team has should be rested and reached some perspective concerning events in the shutdown. Some fundamental issues are to be discussed here and it is essential that it not become a witch hunt or a blame game but an authentic inquiry into what really happened, what processes worked and didn’t work, and how could improvements be made in the future.

At an initial meeting, discuss generally what worked and what did not work. The report should start with an executive summary, with the high points limited to one page.

In this meeting, discuss and make notes on:

• Did the shutdown policies impact the shutdown for better or worse?

• In what way did the shutdown meet or not meet the customer’s needs and expectations (and management’s expectations) Be specific?

• Was engineering adequate for the project?

• Were planning and scheduling adequate for the size, complexity, and repetitive nature of the shutdown?

• How much did the shutdown change between the time it started and when it finished?

• How close were the budget and the baseline schedule to the final results?

• What worked and what didn’t work about the communications between shutdown team members, between the team and the customer, and between the team and the contractors

• How did shutdown and start-up of the plant go?

• What did and what did not work in the shutdown team allocation of responsibilities. On the same subject, were all parts of the shutdown responsibilities handled?

• What techniques or technologies helped this shutdown (and which ones should be dropped or what should be added in the future)

Lessons learned may also be in the following specific areas:

• Shutdown policies, overall evaluation of policy team

• Work scope, added work, emergent work

• Team work (in and between the major teams- planning logistics, engineering, execution, etc)

• Job planning (in general)

• Shutdown planning (and coordination of jobs)

• Cost performance (how good were estimates compared with the actuals?)

• Shifts and work schedule

• Work completed compared to work scheduled

• Scheduling accuracy, completeness, compliance

• Safety and environmental compliance

• Contractor performance, performance of bidding system

·         Vendor performance, purchasing system

·         Quality, measurement, control, management

Keep meeting minutes from this whole process and series of meetings. Record what lessons were learned with references to the minutes from the post shutdown meetings. Many great ideas will occur and be discussed at these meetings and it pays to preserve them.

Chapter Headings

In the discussions, the lessons learned may come out in several areas. Some suggested headings for these lessons (do not limit yourself to these items) follow the phases of the shutdown itself. Specific areas or chapter headings in the final document might be:

• Executive summary

• Shutdown metrics including duration, performance to budget, jobs complete percentages, safety, and start-up.

• Initiation phase issues

• Planning phase issues. How many hours did it take to plan this shutdown

• Engineering Issues

• Execution phase issues with a focus on:

v      Safety including statistics on accidents, near misses, and issues with permits, PPE. Include detailed summaries of serious accidents as appendices.

v      Environmental incidents include summaries for any serious in-cidents in the appendix.

v      Logistics Issues

v      Contractor and vendor performance

v      Added work and emergent work

v      Schedule compliance including schedule breaks, logistics issues, mobile equipment issues. Any specific items that caused delays

v      Execution and work assignments including a review of assignments, resource issues and execution issues

v      Close out or completion phase issues. How did the start-up go?

Copyright 2005, Industrial Press, Inc., New York, NY