Controlling the Turnaround Event Scope “Thinking Beyond the Scope Challenge”

Maintenance Turnaround events involve major expenditures of time and money for any large continuous process plant. Without careful planning and preparation they can quickly and easily overrun their target cost and schedule. The larger and more complex the scope to be executed in the turnaround, the greater the risk is, of cost and schedule overruns. For this reason, it has, in recent years, become the norm for turnaround teams to use a “scope challenge” process, just before freezing the scope list. The purpose of the challenge being to review every work item and decide whether it should be in the scope of the turnaround event. Some of these “scope challenge” sessions can get quite sophisticated, involving a risk assessment, balancing the cost of doing the maintenance repair in the turnaround against the cost of doing it after a (probability weighted) breakdown during normal running. Many turnaround teams stop there, and assume that if they’ve had a “scope challenge”, then they’ve done what they can to optimize and control the scope. But more and more are beginning to realise that a “Risk Based Work Selection” Scope challenge session, while useful and necessary, is only one element in a process for choosing and controlling the work scope at an optimum level. This paper will describe a successful and more holistic approach, using scope control methods that start with the premise document (reference earlier article), include the scope gathering phase, go through the “Risk Based Work Selection” process and carry on to the “Additional Work Request” process after scope freeze. Along the way it will also discuss how to ensure that site leadership and plant operations staff “buy in” to the need to control the scope.