Overview

A large Southern California Utility Provider constructed a transmission line to deliver renewable energy into one of its regions and needed support from project management experts to help with the complex challenges of the project. The Utility Provider was tasked with the update, replacement and maintenance of all aging transmission towers, and progress of these were dictated by and reported to CPUC. Typically, there were more than 300 active projects at any given time. They needed a solution that would assist them with coordinating and scheduling the work while also maintaining the schedule established by CPUC requirements.

Challenges

Primavera P6 was in use by the vendor as their primary scheduling tool; however, the existing internal staff was unable to keep up with managing the steady flow of new work requirements. A major construction management firm was brought in to assist with the effort and DRMcNatty was tasked with providing implementation and support for the scheduling efforts needed for the program. Challenges included the large volume of projects, the accurate tracking of statistics for CPUC reporting as well as the changing process workflow for these projects. Lastly, the base schedules that were being initially used were unable to accurately report the

health of the projects because of incorrect logic in the schedules.

Solution

DRMcNatty was tasked with assisting development of accurate and usable project templates that reflect a true reflection of the individual project requirements and components. In addition, DRMcNatty worked with both the internal staff and the CM firm to develop accurate views of the work types and processes. DRMcNatty obtained approval of the finalized templates, updated all the current projects to these standards and updated the activity logic on all schedules. In addition, DRMcNatty customized layouts and used exports of the P6 data into a formatted Excel worksheet to report project health via a visual heat map report. DRMcNatty staff provides ongoing support to update schedule information based on feedback.

Results

These modifications greatly assisted the utility in gaining a stronger control over these projects and providing staff and management an easy to use progress view. This also takes some workload off of the utility’s internal staff and the CM firm’s management requirements. Currently the utility provider maintains the additional project support services for other fulltime responsibilities.