planning & scheduling philosophy of refinery projects

your background in power generation should stand you in good stead, after all its all just concrete, steel, pipes and pumps at the end of the day.

the first thing to consider is the environment... is it an active plant or a green field site? if it is an active plant the planning requirements will be quite high so as to minimise downtime, a good place to start is to see how much of your work can be done within presecheduled maintenance shutdowns without affecting the overall completion date of the project.

The main point with planning refinery work is process... study the PFD’s and P&IDs and learn how the plant works, planners earn their bucks by keeping production downtime to a minimum and targeting systems/processes that realise production increases early in the project.


hope this helps

Ritesh,

I have considerably more experience with nuclear plant outages than with refineries, but here is one addition to Brennan’s comments:

"Emergent work" is often a threat on outages -- potentially beneficial work that is suggested during the project, which may or may not be mandatory. A good planner can be worth his/her weight in gold by:

1. Quickly assembling a fragnet of the work and incorporating it into the schedule.

2. Conducting risk analysis to estimate the probability of the emergent work affecting the project’s critical path.

3. Performing cost/benefit analysis of any optional fragnets.

4. Presenting this data to the outage manager, with recommendations, ASAP.

Two alerts:

1. Watch out for the danger that optional work will suck resources away from, and thus extend, the critical path.

2. Be very careful to identify any parts of a fragnet where a predecessor is optional, but the successor is mandatory! (E.g., REMOVE VALVE is optional, but REPLACE VALVE is mandatory!). In such cases, do NOT ever do the predecessor without having performed a thorough risk analysis/mitigation of the possibility of the successor failing!

a very good point Stephen... I am usually extremely hessitant to take on additional work during a shutdown (although sometimes there is no choice). If you are confident you can manage it without affecting your current scope, you probably allowed yourself too much time :)