doi:10.3850/978-981-08-7920-4_S1-C10-cd

ABSTRACT

Reducing project duration has significant strategic implications for the market share and revenue stream of owners and contractors in the oil and gas industry. The business benefits of early completion challenges projectmanagers to employ strategies to achieve shorter project duration. Among those, strategies applied in the engineering phase are of vital importance. The objective of this paper is to introduce the main strategies that can be used in the engineering phase to speed up the project delivery. The paper also aims at addressing the analysis of each technique from the managerial standpoint through literature review, empirical analysis and industry survey. Initial study shows that strategies like overlapping, crashing, early freezing of project scope, over-design, modularization and standard design are widely used in the industry. Some of these strategies may create significant cost saving opportunities and may lead to smoother project execution while other strategiesmay negatively impact project performance by imposing additional risks and driving up the costs. The outcome of this research helps to pro-actively plan and manage projects using the most suitable fast tracking strategies to improve project success.

Keywords: Fast tracking, Schedule reduction, Schedule compression, Cost-time trade-off, Overlapping, Crashing, Scope freeze, Over-design, Standardization, Modularization.

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