Revisiting Planning Bases and Assumptions: A Crucial Step in Project Recovery Planning
In the world of project management, unforeseen challenges and setbacks are almost inevitable. Despite detailed planning and rigorous execution mechanisms, no project is immune to disruptions, delays, or cost overruns. A critical part of addressing such challenges is crafting a well-structured recovery plan to bring the project back on track. However, a key aspect that is often overlooked in this process is the review and validation of planning bases and assumptions – a step that can make or break the effectiveness of recovery efforts.
Understanding Planning Bases and Assumptions
Before delving into why revisiting assumptions is essential for recovery planning, it is important to understand what planning bases and assumptions mean. In the context of project management, planning bases refer to the foundational elements upon which a project’s execution strategy is built. These include resource allocations, schedules, budget estimates, methodologies, and tools. Assumptions, on the other hand, are the anticipated conditions or scenarios that are presumed to hold true for planning purposes. These could range from regulatory compliance to logistical feasibility or even technical parameters.
Planning bases and assumptions are integral to defining the scope, schedule, cost, and resource requirements of a project. However, they are often approximations made under conditions of limited information and carry varying degrees of uncertainty and risk. Broadly speaking, while assumptions help project teams estimate and strategize effectively, they also introduce an inherent risk if they prove to be incorrect or unrealistic in practice.
The EPC Project Case Study: A Hard Lesson Learned
Consider this case: a complex brownfield Engineering, Procurement, and Construction (EPC) project located on an island offshore. Civil works were delayed despite repeated recovery interventions, ultimately crippling the project’s ability to move on to subsequent phases. Upon deeper review, it became clear that the contractor had factored mechanical excavation into their resource plan based on faulty assumptions regarding the project’s environment. In reality, the brownfield site with underground facilities rendered mechanical excavation unfeasible, forcing the use of manual excavation instead.
This disparity between the planned and actual methods of excavation highlights the ripple effect of unverified or overlooked assumptions. Not only did it cause significant delays and productivity issues (actual progress being only 33% of the planned progress even with significant increase in resource deployment), but it also introduced a logistical constraint. Accommodation constraints at the offshore site restricted additional personnel deployment – another overlooked factor upstream in the planning process.
Why Revisiting Planning Bases and Assumptions is Essential
The scenario provides a powerful illustration of why it is imperative to revisit planning bases and assumptions as part of preparing the recovery plan for a troubled project. Here are several reasons why this step is non-negotiable:
- Identifying Root Causes of Disruption
A project encountering setbacks often reveals symptoms such as resource shortages, productivity gaps, or scheduling clashes. While these might offer immediate clues about the issues at hand, they are rarely the root causes. By revisiting planning assumptions, project managers can uncover foundational misalignments. For instance, discoveries like the wrong excavation method planned in the EPC project would likely elude detection without a focused assumptions review.
- Mitigating Snowballing Effects
Flawed or unrealistic assumptions can quietly propagate across various project factors – resource planning, logistics, scheduling, and stakeholder expectations – until constraints converge and project performance deteriorates. Early assumption reviews can stop this snowball effect before it cascades further, allowing adjustments to tackle the source issues rather than merely patching symptoms.
- Enabling Realistic Resource Optimization
Recovery plans often revolve around schedule crashing by deploying additional resources or reallocating existing ones and fast tracking. However, recovery measures hinged on incorrect planning assumptions will be misaligned, leading to ineffective or even counterproductive efforts. Revising planning bases and assumptions ensures the recovery plan aligns with actual conditions, enabling realistic resource allocation and optimization.
- Enhancing Stakeholder Confidence
A project’s recovery phase is often marked by heightened scrutiny from stakeholders. If recovery efforts fail to demonstrate logical alignment, stakeholders may lose confidence in the project team’s ability to resolve issues. Revisiting planning assumptions introduces transparency and rationale into recovery efforts, helping stakeholders understand the corrective steps derived from a thorough analytical basis.
- Preventing Recurrence of Issues
Beyond addressing immediate setbacks, revisiting planning assumptions offers project teams an enhanced perspective on risk management. By uncovering flawed assumptions, the project team also gains critical organizational process asset (OPAs) and inputs to flag similar vulnerabilities in future projects. This builds organizational resilience and prevents recurrence of issues.
Steps for Revisiting Planning Bases and Assumptions
A systematic framework ensures that revisiting planning assumptions becomes not only useful but also actionable. Here is a step-by-step procedure for project recovery based on revisiting assumptions:
Step 1: Reconciling the Original Plan with Actuals
Gather documentation from the planning phase including schedules, budgets, resource plans, and risk registers. Compare these with actual project status data to highlight variances.
Step 2: Engaging Key Stakeholders
Facilitate workshops with contractors, project teams, and stakeholders to discuss project assumptions. Validate whether presumed conditions are holding true – for example, logistical capacity or regulatory permissions – and whether they are mutable.
Step 3: Auditing Assumptions
Categorize assumptions by significance and risk level. Assumptions underlying core processes such as excavation methods, offshore staging, or mechanical versus manual implementation should receive immediate attention.
Step 4: Identifying Impacts
Map the interplay of erroneous assumptions to quantify their effects on cost, schedules, logistics, and overall project outcomes. For instance, the EPC project’s brownfield excavation constraints would directly lengthen durations and compromise workforce utilization.
Step 5: Reassessing Feasibility
Introduce back-to-basics feasibility checks for assumptions to flag overly optimistic or outright faulty assumptions.
Step 6: Integrating Findings into Recovery
Incorporate revised bases and assumptions into the recovery strategy. Document the changes to build new alignment and resilience thinking among stakeholders and project teams.
Step 7: Deploying Risk Management
Treat revised assumptions as part of future risk plans during remaining project phases. Actively monitor these factors to uphold recovery momentum.
Conclusions and Key Takeaways
The EPC example is far from unique – numerous projects across industries grapple with delayed schedules, escalating costs, and diminished stakeholder confidence due to ineffective recovery plans based on flawed or unchecked planning assumptions. As project managers and consultants, our responsibility goes beyond simply responding to disruptions to investigating, uncovering and remediating underlying flaws during recovery planning.
Revisiting planning bases and assumptions may require added scrutiny and effort. However, the value it offers in preventing misaligned corrective efforts and providing effective project recovery far outweighs the initial time investment. Each fault identified in the planning stage is an opportunity to craft a recovery plan that not only resolves issues but restores confidence, sets realistic expectations, and reaffirms the project’s foundations.
In complex environments like offshore EPC sites or brownfield projects, the stakes of overlooking planning assumptions are amplified. Recovery efforts can be trapped in perpetual inefficiency if they don’t address core misalignments such as inappropriate methodologies or crowded logistical flows.
To project managers reading this – isn’t it time to prioritize revisiting planning bases and assumptions at every phase of recovery planning? After all, the success of your recovery plan lies not in how fast you react, but in how deeply you understand and fix the problem at hand. Let’s look beneath the surface.
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