Model for Managing Complex Projects
Explore the case in depth by using a Cynfig model of complex project management to understand how the project could have been better managed.
Managing large scale complex engineering projects such as Deep Water Horizon rig construction and drilling is difficult and the risks associated are also huge. In such projects, mistakes cannot be easily afforded as they can cause major damages to the project as well as to the people working on the project. Deepwater horizon is an example of one complex engineering project that faced a major disaster lead by an avoidance of the rigorous testing procedure that was to be followed.
This report explores the case in depth by using a Cynfig model of complex project management to understand how the project could have been better managed. To explore the right methodology for project management and apply the model for the same, it would be essential to first explore the causes that had lead to the project failure in the case of deep water horizon. surface
Deep Water Horizon was a complex engineering project that involved construction of a rig on a sea that was to be used for the drilling of oil and gas from the surface under the deep sea bed. Such construction projects after the completion follow rigorous testing procedures before they could be opened for the actual exploration. Thus, the project planning involved some tests like positive tress tests, negative stress tests, and cement tests. However, because of the project already crossing the deadline and going over budget by the time construction was completed, cement test was skipped with an aim to save money for the company. A 33,000 ton and 20 stories structure was built in The Deepwater Horizon project over Gulf of Mexico off the Louisiana coast for drilling the oil and gas reservoir from the Mississippi Canyon Block 252 in the Macondo well. The initial plan was to completed the project within 51 days at the budget of $96.2 million. However, because of the complications arising during the project, engineers had to modify the initial plans to accommodate for the geological formations that were revealed. The project fell 6 weeks behind the date when it reached 9000 feet and was over budget by $58 million (Cholan, Makin and Smith 2013).
The stress tests done on the project did reveal some risks but the same were not visible enough to predict a disaster. When the rig was opened for the drilling, both mud and water started to come on the rig which gradually lead to an explosion followed by multiple of them. In this report, the complex project management model would be used to explore the situations of the project and identify possibilities of mitigation of prevention of disaster in such cases (Burggren, et al. 2015).
Application
A variety of models are available to be used for management of complex projects or solving problems in such large engineering projects like Deep Water Horizon. These included Cynefin model, diamond model, and model of change. Cynefin model helps in identification of situations and devising a flexible solution the handle each situation on a project to avoid project from going into a chaotic situation. Diamond model focuses specifically on the risk portfolio of a project and helps in the identification of risks that can arise along four dimensions of the project including novelty, pace, complexity, and technology. Model of change dealt with the issues of stakeholders and involved considerations of the management. In this report, Cynefig model has been used to explore how decisions were taken on the project of Deep water drilling to understand the underlying causes of the damage and to determine possible approaches that could have been taken to avoid the chaos on the project.
The Cynefin model says that complex projects cannot be handled with one single solution as the situation can keep changing significantly on a complex engineering project as it progresses. Thus, a project team has to keep adapting to the new situations to be able to handle the progress well. The model is chosen as it can be used as a model for solving problems challenges that arise in a complex engineering project. Using this model for studying the case of Deep Water Horizon project, various situations that the project team faced at different stages of development into five domains that related with cause and effect relationships. This can help better understand the problems and the causes behind so that solutions can be arrived at. If this model could be used in the project while it was getting executed by the project managers, major problems that lead to the complete failure of the project could have been avoided.
The categories of situations are identified along the dimensions of order and complexity. The situations in any complex project can be categorised into obvious, complicated, complex, and chaotic as per the model. These situations can be handled with the use of sense-categorize-respond approach such that lessons are taken from experiences and solutions are applied by project leaders (Azim 2010).
Obvious situation: When the Deep Water Horizon project was started, the situations were normal and thus, the plan was executed as per the plan. However, at this time, the engineers started to face the changes in the geological conditions such that the initial plans would not suit the current situation and thus, the obvious response to the situation was taken which was to make changes in the project plan to suit the changing requirements and environment of the engineering projects.
Complicated situation: With the frequent changes in the plan, the situation got complicated as the project began to face the delays. By the time, the project reached its drilling level of 9000 miles, the project was already over budget and six behind the schedule. With this arose the complications as the stakeholders started to demand speeding up of the remaining work and also make attempts to save the costs on the remaining project.
Complex Situation: The key stakeholder was the project leader who came on board as the representative of the major stakeholders of the project and this person was interested in saving costs. While the project needed exhaustive tested to be conducted, the leader wanted to skip a few tests and conduct only those most essential for the project. The team who was responsible for the completion of the cement work was found to be very confident of their work and suggested that the tests were not needed as the work was completed with required efficiency. The testing of the cement would have added a major cost to the organization and thus, the project leader decided to skip the cement test while continue to do the stress test. However, the technical expert was of the view that tests may not be skipped. At this point a complex situation was formed where the project team wanted to have the tests conducted for the concerns of the safety while other people who had the greatest authority were not in the favour of tests. The hierarchy won in the situation and a decision was taken to skip cement test and conduced only the positive and negative stress tests on the drill.
Chaotic Situation: When the stress tests were conducted, the results obtained were not fully satisfactory for the technical supervisor but it did not reveal any major concern and thus, the team decided to continue with the drilling. As the drilling work started, the situation got chaotic. At this point, both mud and water started to gush out and spill over the rig. Before the situation could be understood, the mud started to blow the rig and spilled all over the place. At this point, a decision could have been taken to call for the emergency to control the chaotic situation but because of the lack of the authority with the person in the drill, the emergency was not called and the team was asked to take efforts to stop the mud from coming by closing down the drill. However, before it could be done, it was late and the gas started to blow out causing a fire on the rig.
Complete Chaos: With the break of the fire, the situation went totally chaotic as the fire started to catch up to the vulnerable areas which resulted several blasts. At this point, the team started to act assessing the emergency and was asked too vacate the rig before everything would blew up (Sperling 2015).
When considering the model, the situations could have been handled on the basis of the cause and effect relationships analysis using the “sense-analyse-respond” approach. In the complicated situation, the danger of missing out of the safety of the rig could have been sensed in which case, the tests that were to be conducted on the cement work would not be skipped.
Going to the complex situation when Mike could not find the zero value to get the true test in the pressure test, the model could be used to reflect upon the cause and effect relationship to identify issues that could have caused this variation. Considering the model, the variation would not have allowed the team to proceeded with the project but instead, more tests could have been conducted to verify the situation before the team would move ahead to start the drilling of the well. Although, the decision was taken to re-run the stress test for confirmation of the safety, Mike was still not satisfied with the readings and a decision was needed to stop the project progress and do something about the identified issue. This could have helped the project manager determine the actual cause behind variations in the reading and take necessary steps for the enhancement of the safety of the rig.
However, when the complex situation was not responded to correctly, the situation became chaotic and the mud as well as water started to blow up on the rig along with the oil and gas. In the situation which is chaotic, a fast response like emergency plan execution towards safety of workers could have been executed with the guidance from the model before the situation became chaotic. At this point, the project leader could have taken a decision to vacate the rig immediately before the mud could damage more parts of the rig and could result into fires and explosions.
However, in the project, the emergency was not sensed and the team started to work on the leak in the refinery that was brining up the mud to close it and close the drilling so that possible damages could be minimized. However, the project leader was unwilling accept the severity of the situation and was unable to understand the real consequences that were to follow. Before a realization could happen, the situation started to get more chaotic and a complete chaos was reached when the whole rig started to have blasts inside till the whole constructed was blasted into fire (Shane, Strong and Gransberg 2012).
Conclusions
In this report the Deep Water Horizon engineering project was explored which as a complete failure of the complex project that involved construction and drilling of the deep well inside the sea. It was found that a model that has been made for complex project management could have been used here to avoid the disaster that was faced by the Horizon project. For the deeper exploration of how this could be done, the Cynfig model was complex project management was chosen and applied to the case of Deep Water Horizon project. The Model helped in identification of five levels of situations that arose on the project and that could have been responded to in a systematic manner using sense-categorize-respond approach. The situations were identified as obvious, complicated, complex, chaotic, and total chaos.
Obvious was the situation when the plan was executed with some changes made by engineers in the plan which was an obvious and right action. However, the management took wrong decisions from the time project entered into the complicated situation as the conflicts arose between different stakeholders of the project and the decision was taken to skip the cement testing. The situation became complex when the pressure test reading was not found to be perfect. However, even at this point, the situation was not properly sensed and the leader could not take the right decision but allowed the opening of rig and drilling of the well. Post this wrong decision, the situation started to become chaotic as mud and water entered the rig. Even at this point, the decision could not be taken for emergency vacation and the chaotic situation turned into a total chaos failing the entire Deep Water Horizon project.
From this exploration of the situations of Deep Water Horizon project using Cigfin model, certain strengths as well as limitation of the model with respect to complex project management could be identified. The strengths of the model include:
- The model allows identification of specific type of the situation and at the time sense the possibilities so that the right course of action could be identified and problems can be solved
- The model is very simple to understand and could easily be applied in any organization
- The model covers the complete project management life cycle as it has the adaptability as per the situation
- The sense-categorize-respond approach to problem solving could be very effective and provides flexibility to discover solutions for different types of problems and situation that can arise on a complex project.
However, the model also had some shortcomings that are worth noticing:
- The model does not provide any feature for management of the stakeholder expectations
- The model does not provide solution for the management specific problems that can rise due to the differences of opinion and levels of influences
- The model is mostly focused on the technical impacts and situations and does not provide any solution for the people side of a project
- The model does allow a project leader or manager to assess situations and arrive at specific solution to the problems but it only categorizes the situations and not the problems and thus, for identification and resolution of the problems, the team would still have to use another risk management model which could be supporting this model to find the solutions
The shortcomings of this model can be overcome by other models including the diamond model and change model. The diamond model would help in identification of specific types of risks that a project can face while the change would help in understanding how changes on the project affect stakeholders and how their influences and interests can be managed to bring the project on track. From this study, it can be concluded that just using one single model for the assessment or solving problems on a complex engineering project may not be sufficient. Instead, the project would need the use of the combination of different approaches defined in these models so that a comprehensive view can be seen. While the first model would identify the situation, the diamond model would help in identification of specific risks in those situations and the change model would provide solution involving people or stakeholders on the project.
References
Azim, Syed Waqar. 2010. Understanding and Managing Project Complexity . School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering .
Burggren, Warren, Benjamin Dubansky, Aaron Roberts, and Matthew Alloy. 2015. “Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill as a Case Study for Interdisciplinary Cooperation within Developmental Biology, Environmental Sciences and Physiology.” World Journal of Engineering and Technology 7-23.
Cholan, Jothika, Tyler Makin, and Samantha Smith. 2013. The Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill A Case Study about the Development of an Evolving Communication Strategy. Marshall School of Business.
Shane, Jennifer, Kelly Strong, and Douglas Gransberg. 2012. Guidebook: Project Management Strategies for Complex Projects. National Academy of Sciences.
Sperling, Daneil. 2015. Guide to Project Management Strategies for Complex Projects. TRANSPORTATION RESEARCH BOARD.
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