It is human nature to defer tasks to later – why do today what you can do tomorrow? However, this is not the reason that your capital projects are always late.

The reason your capital projects are late is that you probably have not provided a completions & commissioning strategy to your team. You may have provided them with the framework to initiate projects (budget approvals, schedule approvals, weekly and monthly reporting), but you likely have not defined the process they need to follow to complete capital projects (subsystem definition, construction completions, and commissioning workflows managed in software).

You may be expecting your project team to figure out how to complete projects on their own. But when you ask them to do this, you get 10 different ideas from 10 different people on how to complete projects. Projects are complex, and without a process to follow to complete them, your project team makes their own assumptions, and everyone quickly starts heading in their own direction, with nobody focused on the real target you need them to achieve (on-time and on-budget project completion).

It is not your project team’s procrastination that causes delays, it is that you have not provided them with the process to follow to get to the end. They don’t know the steps to follow to achieve your project objectives. And on complex projects, there are lots of decisions to make for projects to be completed efficiently. Your project team needs a structured process and decision-making framework to keep all activities aligned on getting to the end.

The Integrated Completions Methodology is the framework you are missing to complete capital projects. Your project team requires guidance on the processes to follow to navigate the complexity of capital projects. And since you have not provided this to them, their delays appear to be procrastination, when really delays are because they don’t have clear direction on how to complete capital projects.

The Integrated Completions Methodology provides project teams the clear steps to take to stay focused on the end of projects and achieve your project objectives on-time and on-budget. The Integrated Completions Methodology consists of:

• Completions in Contracts – to start with the end in mind and set your project up to be finished on-time, right from the start
• Completions in FEED – to ensure that early engineering groups are aligned with later commissioning groups for successful project integration
• Completions in Off-Site Testing – to ensure the first physical tests on equipment identify issues early so they do not delay on-site testing, especially for control systems
• Construction Completions – the last 10% of any task is always the hardest, and you need robust processes to get installation activities 100% complete while ensuring the small details that cause big delays do not get missed
• CSU Completion Workflows – commissioning is fast-paced, and you need industry-best processes to ensure the work gets completed smoothly, and that you can achieve your operational objectives

Integrated Completions must be embedded into all phases of projects if you want to complete them on-time. But when one or more of the Integrated Completion frameworks are missing, your projects are destined to be late and over-budget before you even know it, just like 9 out of 10 projects are.