Chemical Engineering August 2012 - 58

Every lead must
clusively in FEED/Pre-FEED stage of
project, it is difficult to design a plant
with good operability.
Specialists versus generalists.
When considering specific task assignments,
the lead must determine
whether his or her team members are
specialists with experience in only certain
topics or generalists with a less
thorough knowledge of all general
topics. It is most efficient to encourage
" semi-specialists " who possess a
general understanding of all topics as
well as thorough understanding of one
or two limited topics. In this way, we
are " building " a person who can give
specialist ideas in some topics, while
at the same time preventing a major
loss for the group after he or she might
leave the group. One way of " building "
such persons is by assigning 60% of
the tasks to a person in one topic.
Information routes in a team.
There is an inherent executive hierarchy
in the workplace where the individual
at the top (hereafter known as
level A) oversees the few immediately
below him or her in the pyramid (level
B), and each of those individuals supervise
those immediately below them
(on level C). As a result, it is more
efficient for each person on level C
to abide by a " filtering rule " that requires
only the result of their work to
be reported to individuals in level B,
whose knowledge of the level-C individual's
process may be unnecessary
and unnecessarily time-consuming.
Subsequently, the persons on level B
will only report their results to level
A, foregoing the disclosure of any unnecessary
details.
Conversely, when assigning tasks
the person on level A will present the
supervisors on level B with a vague
idea of what he or she requires of
them and trust the supervisors with
creating the details and determining
the approximate deadlines that accompany
it. As a direct result, what
may be considered a detailed version
of person A's idea on level B, will still
be added upon in the work of those
working on level C.
All these guidelines can help each
level of the workplace hierarchy run
smoothly and efficiently to create an
ideal result.
In summary it can be said that idesatisfy
project needs,
team needs and the
individual needs of his
or her team members
ally, ideas travelling from the peak
of the pyramid down grow less ambiguous
and more clear, while results
achieved at the bottom of the pyramid
and travelling upward undergo a decrease
in unnecessary and excessive
details (Figure 1).
Delegating tasks to the team. Following
every project meeting, the lead
must update and delegate the responsibilities
assigned to his team by the
project managers, and to assign internal
deadlines while keeping in mind
potential time-consuming back-andforth
communication that may arise.
Therefore, the internal deadlines
might exist before the actual deadlines
to account for any such problems.
Project information and requirements
that the lead's team must be
made aware of, should be filtered and
their target audience must be identified.
One way of doing this is transferring
the " required " information for the
project schedule to a simple Gant chart
(for example, in Excel), which can be
distributed to process engineers in an
internal process meeting.
When no deadline is specified, it is
in everyone's best interest for the lead
to determine an arbitrary deadline for
the task assigner's approval in order
to prevent future conflicts.
For every task, a lead should communicate
clearly with his (or her) process
engineers about his expectations
to hold them accountable. He needs to
tell them about the quality of work.
The level of details, the deadline and
the approximate hours needed should
be defined.
Deliverables features
Three main aspects of a project
(quality, cost and schedule) can be
applied to each task/deliverable in
the project. Each deliverable should
meet the required quality within the
specified manhours and in the required
time frame. Furthermore, the
quality of a deliverable can be translated
to accuracy and completeness
of the document.
Accuracy and completeness. The
accuracy and the level of completeness
of documents presented to the
client are not quantifiable qualities,
but rather subjective ones. It is therefore
the process lead's responsibility
to sense the importance of the level
of accuracy conveyed in a document.
In this case, document accuracy is dependent
on two parameters, the first
being the time-criticality of the document
and the second being the scope
of the document.
Time-criticality. It is sensible to
place the accuracy of a document required
at the beginning of a project
low on the engineer's list of priorities,
because throughout the course
of the project, a document created at
the preliminary stages will undoubtedly
undergo many revisions. Therefore,
a large quantity of time spent
on such a document will be inefficient
and unnecessary.
As an example, the first draft of a
document marked IFR (Issue For Review)
is not in need of such painstaking
accuracy as the revision marked IFC
(Issue For Construction), due to their
placements within the project timeline.
An alternate aspect of this parameter
for criticality is the occasional need
for the creation of a document before
other tasks can begin. The lead needs
to understand that the importance of
the accuracy of the starting document
is understandably not crucial in phase
one of a project where it may be simply
a hypothetical placeholder. However,
in the final phases, such a document
would require a higher grade of accuracy
simply due to its proximity to the
end of the project. Inaccurate data in
the final stages of a project can prove
to be disastrous for both the firm and
the client.
Document scope. The second parameter
is the target of any given
document: equipment, instruments or
software adjustments. If a document
is relevant to the design of equipment
- which are expensive and in certain
cases may be long lead items - then
it is of the highest grade criticality. For
instruments, which a process group
usually specifies, a " range " rather
than a single design number is given.
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Chemical Engineering August 2012

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