Insight AWP’s Post

Transcript

Hello, Jeff, and welcome to Project Control Summit. I hope you had a great experience so far. It's been very good. Lots of great conversations, lots of lots of interesting people here. And yeah, it's good. Good. Yeah. Good conference. Awesome. Thank you very much. So for today, we're going to talk about AWP advanced work packaging. With an expert on the topic, but also own a company AWP inside. So we are going to talk more about AWP. So to get started, I want to ask you Jeff, tell us what AW is all about and what benefits we gain from AWP in project controls. OK, so first of all, it's advanced work packaging and I guess importantly it is a an industry initiative, been in development for about 20 years. These were packaging started out as a result of the Construction Owners Association in Alberta. I did a bunch of research on mega projects to try to find out what was working and what doesn't work. They came back with the answer that we all know the more you plan, the more you get done. That became workface planning. We were applying workface planning on mega projects in Alberta for a little while and luckily the Americans, through CI saw what we were doing and got involved. They researched it some more and came and identified that it needed to expand beyond construction and needed to involve, you know, engineering and procurement. So that model expanded into advanced work packaging where we are now. So that was around 2009. Since then we've been working basically with companies around the world trying to help them understand what AWP is. It is for anybody that's involved in projects as sort of a project management 101 take a project. And break it into chunks and you manage the chunks. It's not rocket science, but you know, we have a hard time making it happen on a regular basis. The key for AWP is that those pieces of work or those work packages are the same across engineering, procurement, and construction. And then when it gets to the field, we take a construction work package and we break that down into installation work packages. We hand an installation work package to a foreman and before we give them the package, we make sure that they've got the material. Got the right documents, they've got access to the workplace, you've got the right tools, you've got manpower, basically trying to remove all of the things that would normally stop work from happening. So if you do that on a consistent basis, if you get the form and what they need to get work done, they get lots of work done. That's it. The benefit of planning in advance, right? Advanced work packaging. Exactly. So talking about that, you mentioned that for the four men in construction. So it's a WP just limited. Construction or you can apply AWP concept to pretty much any industry. Well, we certainly apply AWP across a lot of different different disciplines, but I mean being prepared you before you do anything is a beneficial. He sounded out in mega projects, of course, and oil and gas. We moved into mining nuclear power. Now we're doing some warehouses, automated warehouses. We've consulted with organisations that build apartment buildings. The other thing to note is that we work globally, so we've worked in five continents around the world and we've done about 100 projects. So we've got a fairly good understanding of what the world is doing on on the project level. Everybody has the same problems. Alright, so basically the same problems that we're trying to resolve with AWP, very common across the world and that's sort of why the world is reaching out to us now and asking us to help them understand AWP and how to apply it. Talking about the help, so you have a great company inside AWP. Tell us a bit more about inside AWP, what kind of services you do and how it can help other companies. OK, So importantly we embedded project management so. Typically we get involved with the company when they want to apply AWP, they would come to us and ask us and own our organisation. Typically how do we how do we get our contractors to do this? We would give them two or three or four people, embed them in a project and they would stay there for the whole project and sort of coach the the, the project on how to apply AWP. AWP has multiple elements, so we need to look at. Advanced work packaging in engineering and procurement. We need to look after our information management. So how do we manage data and information? We need to look after workplace planning, so how do we execute work in the field. We also need to have a fairly big influence on material management, document control, because they they control obviously how much we can get done. So it's very expensive, the influence that we have on a project and that's the coaching that we provide. We've got about 40 people working for us now at the end of last year. We were working on a 12 mega projects around the world. So so like how many people are needed to be able to implement AWP net company like you just recruit the whole team for a company or how how would it work? So the biggest. A group of people is workface planners and workface planners is not a term that's a common to a lot of construction and organisations. This is essentially a a new position that that came out of the research. We have one workforce planner per fifty workers. So you know that, you know, if you look at them, you do the math on that and you you look at a project that has 1000 workers, that means you have to have 20 planners. And so the the biggest new element. The biggest staffing is workforce planners. It's also not something that exists right now, so we don't go to a. A labour outfit and asked him for workplace planners. There's no such thing. We have to make them ourselves. But so we look for people that have the right background, which is typically construction, a little bit of project management, some supervision and we help them to become workplace planners. Fantastic, thank you. And for those who are interested in learning more about AWP, I understand you also provide some resources and education too. Is that right? So this is this is the book I wrote. This is the second book I wrote on private. Yes, it's very nice. Well, and basically this is trying to explain what AWP is. We've got this available in five languages now, essentially because those markets came to us and asked us to translate the book because they wanted to help their workforce understand what AWP is. That's Russian, Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese and how people can get this. Is it through Amazon or through your other one? So you can go to just look it up on the web. It'll take you to either Amazon or. To to Wales site. So it's called even more schedule for sale, right? Ohh, that sounds good. You see? OK schedule. Well, you buy schedule with effort and planning. Sounds good. Thank you very much. So the last question, how was your experience so far with the conference with project Yosemite? Very good. Yeah. Lots of lots of great conversations here. You know, obviously we're here to draw a link between advanced work packaging and project controls so that people understand, you know, the foundation of project controls. What's, you know, what are we planning to get done? What did we get done? You know, how much did we spend getting it done? Well, all of that is a product of advanced work packaging because we send the packages out there, we know how long it should take. We get timesheets back with them. We know how long it did take. That tells us where the finish line is, and that's project controls one-on-one. Exactly. Well said, very educational. Thank you very much, Jeff, for the time and for all you do on a WP. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much.