Megaproject execution and monitoring are a domain never discussed in the desalination conferences and forums or on the websites of the main EPC companies. The reason is that this silence is the best way to maintain the status quo on the EPC desalination market where the same 3 - 4 companies have been topping the list for the last 20 years.
Conventional project management views execution as a repetition of three basic steps
- Distribute work packages - a collection of actionable tasks
- Monitor work package execution progress
- Report progress
In megaprojects this seemingly simple procedure turns into a challenge as the number of repetitions is astounding - the megaproject schedule normally includes over 3500 tasks and milestones.
In such cases the accepted practice is to divide the megaproject into a number of subprojects, each one having its own manager and expeditor. A temporary team of project managers (having different expertise and interests) adds substantially to the project risks, to say nothing of its budget.
Work distribution and monitoring are time-consuming and stressful as they include a lot of meticulous manual work and personal communications. Project management accounts for about 25% of the project team work hours.
Digiman service
Crenger.com entirely changed this practice by introducing Digiman service. It is a plugin to the schedule-generating software developed by crenger.com. The schedule is a uni-directional graph of atomic tasks.
Every task is fully sized - it has the scope, work hours, price, and a list of future submittals documenting the task completion. Most of this data is generated automatically.
The task may be linked to several agents: assignees, reviewers, subscribers, project managers, or contractors. Normally linking tasks to named resources takes a couple of minutes. This procedure is discussed in the article "Subcontracted Work Scope Definition".
Digiman is a request broker. When it is time to execute a task, Digiman sends an assignee the request to start working on a task.
Later, the assignee may get a request to report the progress online, or expedite the work if the progress is not sufficient.
After the assignee reports the task completion, Digiman sends a request to review and approve the task output to approvers. Once the task is approved, Digiman searches for the next tasks and sends new requests to assignees.
If a task completion is a condition for payment Digiman updates the percentage of work done and notifies the procurement department about the due payment.
Finally, Digiman generates the project status report available online.