Develop Project Management

Some mechanical engineer pursue his career in project management. Usually, he start it as Project Engineer and after having enough experienxe and exposure, he finish as Project Manager. There are 5 general stage in project management. First stage is define project opportunity. At this stage, we explore about why we run this project, what is the project’s visions of success etc.

For example, we have heat exchanger (shell and tube type) problem. Water in shell side and chemical in tube side.  Found tube leakage, water from shell side go through tube side created chemical and water mixture. Chemical purity decreased, its performance decreased affect to production decrease.

project management stage 1

The project stage 1 is developed. Project team will repair heat exchanger. By doing tube replacement, it will increase chemical purity and production capacity untill 100% normal capacity. This project will generate production increase equal to 1,000 $ increase per day. Annualy, we will have 365,000 $ increase. In stage 1, we generate project opportunity statement. Here some example :

• Project will increase production capacity to 100% normal load.
• Project will generate 365,000$ annual cash in.
• Project will avoid additional problem resulted by water contamination.
• Project will stop water loss in this heat exchanger. Everyday we have water loss about 100 meter cubic equal to 25$/day loss.
• Project will increase reliability and process safety performance.

Project team usually make a small workshop or meeting with other team to get opportunity statement. We need to quantify the projetc impact to company. If we have high financial impact, Top Management will endorse the project to next stage.

In a year, we may have many projects stage 1 but limited resource and capital to run all these projects. How we select the best projects to be run? There are several considerations such as financial, safety or enviroment consideration. We may have a project that economically is not feasible but we need to run this project due to environment consideration.