Better Industrial and Infrastructure Projects are Possible and Brilliant.
A variation on this post appears on Adaptovate.com and its social media.
Working with one of the world’s largest mining and resources companies and a Fortune-100* oil and gas company has shown new approaches that can benefit to large, heavy-industry high-capital projects:
- Using and adjusting agile frameworks to welcome change
- Ensuring a focus on value and quality through detail and execution
- Using transparency encourage autonomy and alignment
Agile?
Agile is a set of principles and processes. It gets its name from welcoming and adapting to change throughout a project. It’s emerged as the way to deliver and continuously improve new products in digital and tech.
The principles that guide agile are constant, but there are variations in process.
We can gain many of the benefits from agile by adjusting process (not principles) at different points along the delivery of a project. Each allow you to welcome change slightly differently.
What does an agile industrial project look like?
One that can welcome change and be more effective as a result!
Let’s look at it by generalizing a large-scale construction project. How can we deal with change?
- Design — sketch, discuss, and strategise your project.
Change is cheap and healthy — welcome it as it makes your project better! - Detail — detail your plans for how to deliver it.
Change here is still cheap (because you’re changing paperwork, not bricks and iron).
Welcome it, and balance it with the benefits of moving forward. - Deliver — execution according to your plans.
Change is now much more costly. It should still be welcomed, so long as the net benefit can be proven to outweigh the cost of the change.
An agile industrial project follows this sequence and changes the paradigm according to the phase.
Change your agile process to suit the phase of your project as you go
So that you can welcome change to the extent practical
Start by gaining certainty quickly
At the early parts of a project, there are lots of unknowns.
We’re not building anything yet, we’re agreeing what’s realistic based on the requirements given by the person paying.
Scrum is great for that. It’s a popular agile process that helps cross-functional teams gain rapid alignment and move through prioritised, granular work increments in fixed-time intervals of anywhere between a day and a few weeks, called sprints.
The predictability and ruthless prioritisation that comes as part of the Scrum package blows all but the most valuable bits of a project away, leaving a value-efficient remainder and much less wasted effort.
We quickly get to, “yep! That’s what we want, for the right cost, and the right timeline!”
Working with Adaptovate and some of its valued clients in industry, we’ve seen this early phase — for projects valued between $10m and $4bn — finish in as little as four weeks. That’s an epic change to the months and years usually spent in this phase.
One of the US’s largest oil and gas companies was able to cut an eighteen-month-plus concept selection phase down to a repeatable four-week scrum, a time saving of 85%.
Now we need to detail our project and build it. As a framework, Scrum is good here, but not great. So what about the detail and deliver phases?
We ditch Scrum… well, some of it.
Change process to suit your needs.
Incorporate a Kanban flow
For these two phases, I’ve found success in changing process to a Kanban flow, borrowing some of the communications and roles from Scrum.
Many engineering and manufacturing companies use Kanban successfully today. It enables high specialisms to run in parallel with high visibility — a systems thinking approach. This creates an environment where team members can focus on their craft, and push the quality of their work gradually up.
Take it steady, don’t sprint — we don’t need time-boxed intervals in which to get through ambiguous work because there is little ambiguity following the discoveries of the previous phase. The likes of Taiichi Ohno** and W Edwards Deming — the people who revolutionised the post-war Japanese manufacturing economy — proved that concentrating on quality (including taking one’s time) results in a shorter project duration, reduced total costs and a more robust outcome.
Transparency and predictable communication encourage autonomy and collaboration
We carry through the team and dedicated roles from the previous phase, however this time the emphasis is more on specialism, quality and alignment needed to complete the project.
We also retain most of the meetings, but they’re less about delivering commitments sprint-by-sprint and more about resolving dependency and maintaining a whole-project view for the team and stakeholders.
Transparency means every team member can see every piece of work. If you’re trying to figure out whether the plumbing is going to get in the way of your load-bearing columns, you can see who is doing that drawing and ask them about it.
Our client at Adaptovate achieved a higher quality outcome in its engineering package development in a quarter the time through using a Kanban approach.
Another was able to completely avoid re-work and defects in packages and meet a tight deadline — a feat in an industry used to dealing with costly change orders.
The project can use this transparency alongside the autonomy of the specialists to balance the flow of work and self-correct.
Welcome change as much as possible,
even when certainty is high
- In the detail phase, this means change should be welcomed because it’s still cheap.
When a specialist thinks a change is needed, they can discuss it with the team. The impact is immediately visible on the rest of the project.
This immediacy eliminates costs resulting from sending documents across multiple different siloed specialisms, and has the longer-term effect of reducing defects in the delivery phase.
Where you’re less likely to change the premise of the project, you can readily change the method through which you’ll deliver it if a better one presents itself. - In the delivery phase, transparency allows you to assess whether change is practical for the same reasons, and with input from your specialists quickly.
In this phase the cost of change is going to be much higher, but it’s still possible if it significantly improves the overall result.
Kanban works for detailed design, and then works for delivery/construction, for all the same reasons.
