STAGE GATE SUCCESS | COVER STORY Instead, companies with much more collaborative models


in terms of the contracting are emerging. Stone explains: “Some big nuclear projects are looking at consortia, where the owners and suppliers are actually coming together in a kind of pain-share/gain-share type of model on the contract. You’re then getting the owners requesting more information from the suppliers in terms of schedule, budget, and project progress so that they can then intervene where things are going wrong because, ultimately, it is the owners who still bear the risk and need the project delivered on time and on budget. This model also has the advantage that it gets rid of ‘man marking’. In the old model, owners had project managers and owners engineers checking on their prime EPC; and the prime EPC then had their own project managers and engineers checking on all their sub-contractors. In a more collaborative model, with joined up data, processes and governance routines, a lot of that man marking goes away, saving costs, leading to slicker decision making and action taking as there are fewer interfaces to navigate, and ultimately to more satisfied project teams when done right”. In addition, he foresees far greater collaboration within project teams too. Historically, engineering teams have had a primary interest in optimising engineering parameters, such as efficiency and sometimes costs, with less focus on the trade-offs implied for operability or contractability, for example. On the other side, operations teams want to maximise operability and the safety of operations, amount of multi-skilling required, complexity of spares management, but perhaps don’t care about the constructability of a plant and its economic competitiveness. “You really need to connect the engineers with the


procurement, with the operations, with the construction, with the schedulers, and get those teams working together as Integrated Project Teams (IPT) or Multi-Disciplinary Teams (MDT). Critically - many companies deploy these models in title – saying people from different functions are part of an MDT or IPT – but then fail to update the processes, governance, data flows, objectives and incentives, values and ways of working that enable that. That results in MDTs / IPTs being nothing but a name, with people still operating largely in functional siloes. Those that do it successfully, in some industries, can improve project cost by 20% and the schedule by a similar amount. It’s only by bringing people together and having those cross- functional processes that you get the real value out,” says Stone.


He suggests going well beyond the traditional stage


gate structure and considering the actual people who are working together to progress projects from beginning to end and putting cross-functional processes and agile ways of working in place, “because it’s the front line where the real value gets created.” This approach should start from the very beginning during the initial design, which should also consider how to build a plant and make it happen on time and in increasingly compressed time frames, as well as work and be safe.


Building a programme approach to projects A second key point is the development of a project programme approach to nuclear development. “More and more companies are going to be deploying a programme.


When you have multiple SMRs or gigawatt-scale reactors being built that creates huge opportunities to not just optimise individual projects, but actually standardise designs across that whole programme and can save on engineering costs. It means I can now give certainty to my supply chain, so they can keep the factories and their people going and actually invest in those people and their equipment to ever increase efficiency, quality and timeliness . You get huge productivity benefits as people do the same thing over and over again, rather than chopping and changing and relearning each time,” says Stone. Thinking as a portfolio of projects rather than several individual projects means many of the factories that are creating equipment for one project are able to keep operating, creating the same equipment for future projects that can then put to one side ready for when installation begins on the next project. “That makes it much cheaper, much higher quality, much easier for the manufacturers to produce it, and with much lower risks and much higher confidence,” he says. Changing the mindset to a production line approach


certainly sits squarely in the SMR wheelhouse but there are standard practices in manufacturing environments that can inform and support sectors like gigawatt-scale reactor development too. Creating nuclear power stations as products, built in automated factories to be installed (much less constructed) as quickly and efficiently as possible, is the model needed. Stone points Hinkley Point C and Sizewell C in the UK


as the beginnings of that approach even though they are effectively 10 years apart in development. “The UK is quite a good example of an early-stage programme that covers things like advanced qualification of suppliers and Fit For Nuclear. They’re only doing that because they know they’ve got a programme of builds coming out and rather than qualifying suppliers one by one on a project-by-project-by- basis, we know we’re going to need a bunch of civils, people who are pouring concrete, who can do nuclear walls, etc. Let’s go and pre-qualify, pre-train those people so we’re ready for the programme,” says Stone.


Above: A more sophisticated approach to project management may yield results for on-time and under budget development Source: EDF


www.neimagazine.com | July 2024 | 17


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53