EnglishMeasures to Implement a Sustainability Strategy
In every engagement, sustainability is a crucial factor that decides the fate of a project’s success. Installing a comprehensive Sustainability Plan ensures a smooth transition to the client and makes sure that there is no lost knowledge during the period. The significance of having a solid sustainability plan becomes evident towards the later phase of a project when the client starts to take over the responsibilities and accountabilities for project activities.
In a typical Oil & Gas engagement for gasoline blending optimization, a project team consists of members from the refinery that have a unified commitment to continuously improve blending strategies to reduce quality gasoline giveaway. Each department tackles inefficiencies that come down to improving blend scheduling and prediction accuracy, blend execution accuracy, and analyzer measurement and testing accuracy. All the installed processes, systems and behavioral changes will revolve around these workstreams. With multiple stakeholders involved, there are measures one should take towards the final phases of the engagement to ease the transition process for the client once the engagement is complete. This includes putting together a comprehensive framework for clients to follow as well as install tools to aid the review process.
Implementing a Sustainability Review Process:
It is crucial to have a recurring review process in place to ensure all the installed changes are sustained and improved by the client when necessary. Referred to as a sustainability meeting, this crucial step acts as a platform to review the current performance of the refinery with respect to the established KPIs to revisit baseline and targets to establish new goals as part of continuous improvement, and to develop action items for initiatives that can further help achieve project goals.
Design and Implementation of the following tools can further aid the sustainment of project activities and improve client engagement during discussions:
- Performance Monitoring Dashboard: To highlight the weekly and seasonal trends for overall KPIs.
- Financial Evaluation: To track the project benefits/savings with respect to the baseline on a cumulative and annualized basis and determine a project’s overall success.
- KPI Grid: To provide a high-level overview of the KPIs and compare them to the current performance to baseline and targets.
- Action Log to capture action items discussed during the meetings with clear responsibilities and due dates set for each action.
Post-engagement Sustainability Monitoring:
Once an engagement is complete and the client team takes ownership of all the project activities, they can follow the framework provided in the sustainability plan to ensure a continuous flow of activities. This includes the continuation of the sustainability meeting where all stakeholders involved would engage on a frequent basis and maintaining a Sustainability Scorecard to guide the meeting and provide a checklist for the client team to review and discuss all installed changes. Continued use of the Action Log to discuss action items can promote a culture of continuous improvement in the client environment. In addition, it is essential to have frequent recurring touchpoints with the client to ensure all activities and improvements are well sustained.
The author of this blog – Ajay Ramanujam is a senior consultant at Trindent Consulting.
Blog post photo courtesy of tableatny via Flikr
