Critical Success Factors for Preventing Commissioning and Start-Up Schedule Overrun in Megaprojects

Oil and gas megaprojects are unique, associated with high execution cost and long execution schedules. The Commissioning and Start-up (CSU) delivery of such projects in offshore environment is a complex task. This is mainly because of harsh offshore environment, logistics limitations, integration with producing fields, uncertainty in subsurface data, design flaws, construction errors, etc. This paper analyzes the actual delivery of CSU in offshore oil and gas megaproject. In addition, it shares with the industry the best practices, mitigations, and recommendations for adoption. A series of Root Cause Analysis (RCA) sessions were held with subject matter experts (SMEs) from different disciplines and stakeholders such as engineering, operation, reliability, commissioning, and vendors. Moreover, statistical analysis was conducted on the RCA outcomes to categorize them by relevancy. The root cause categories are feedstock composition changes, engineering flaws, construction errors, manufacturing defects, human errors, and inadequate maintenance. In addition, these categories were further rationalized and coupled with schedule analysis to understand the impact of each root cause category on CSU schedule. Finally, insights were drawn from this analysis in the form of project management lessons and best practices. It is worth noting that the offshore execution of this project took place during the peak of COVID-19 pandemic. The productivity, resources mobilization, and material delivery were heavily impacted due to global lockdowns and changing standard operating procedures imposed by authorities to control the outbreak. The impact from COVID-19 was considerable during the offshore construction phase, which is alternatively known as hook-up phase prior to achieving Ready for Start-up (RFSU) state. It is because the construction progress heavily depends on labor, unlike the CSU progress post RFSU which heavily depends on the actual feedstock properties, design quality, and construction quality. Therefore, the impact from COVID-19 was neglected in this analysis because the paper focuses on the performance of CSU post RFSU.