Category: Project Management
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The interface problem: scope gaps in wind farm construction
If you decide to divide the work on building your wind farm among several companies, you will likely save money. However, the trade-off will be coordination issues. This is the problem that shows up when two subcontractors are standing next to a half-finished cable trench, each one explaining why the other should complete the work….
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Quality Control in BoP: what to check and when
Quality control in wind farm Balance of Plant is not glamorous. Nobody writes articles about it, and frankly nobody wants to be the person filling in forms at seven in the morning while the concrete truck is waiting to pour in the foundation pit. But some problems during construction could have been caught earlier if…
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Taking Over in Wind BoP: The Documents, The Dispute, The Day
What happens if the contractor wants out and the owner doesn’t want to sign? A painful interface in the BoP lifecycle. Taking Over (sometimes called Provisional Acceptance, Takeover, Take Over or Substantial Completion) is the milestone where risk, custody, and responsibility shift from the contractor to the owner. In EPC contracts it also unlocks a…
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Order out of chaos: Risk Breakdown Structure
There is a good number of techniques that can be used to identify risks. Some are techniques focused looking at past (every Tender Manager should be able to create a list of issues he had experienced in past projects), other tools are focused on the present (spending a few hours reviewing your current assumptions should…
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Risk metalanguage: how to make a proper Risk Register
One of the key deliverables in project risk management is the risk register. The idea is that after risk identification, qualitative and quantitative analysis, and planning of risk response the tender manger (or project manager) should end having a list with all the risk identified at that point in time. I assume that the content…
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Risk & contingencies – a brief introduction
One of the hot topics frequently discussed in the creation of the budget for big projects is the appropriate contingency level and how to estimate it. My colleague Giuseppe had found an interesting paper online that has been the starting point for this post. So, what are contingencies? Some far reaching definitions consider different typologies…
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Wind farm project management: PRICE2 vs PMP
In another post I have discussed my experience with the PMP certification and its (somehow weak) relationship with wind farm project management. In a nutshell, several processes and concepts are not directly applicable given the peculiarity of our industry. Said that, I believe that the PMP has a value, because it explain in detail a lot of…
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PMP methodology & wind farm project management
This week I had the pleasure to pass the PMP (Project Management Professional) exam – one of the two leading certifications for project managers, the other being PRINCE2 from the UK. The exam itself is notoriously not trivial: long (200 questions in 4 hours) and based on a book very hard to read, the Project…
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Wind farm construction steps: generic timeline infographic
One of the pleasures of fatherhood is the fact that you have quite a lot of extra times during the night – if your kids do not sleep. Yesterday night has been exceptionally short due to a son diving out of the bed and hitting his head and another who decided that at 6 AM…
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Where do I go from here? Careers path in the renewable industry.
This post is about my personal experience with possible careers path in the onshore wind industry – what are the easy and the not so easy movements. I believe that the main concepts would be applicable to similar industries, such as Solar or Offshore. It’s applicable to medium and big size companies organized in a…