Management of complexity in Norwegian oil & gas projects : an industrial case study

• Main Author: Deepack, Subbiah
• Other Authors: Yeo Khim Teck
• Format: Theses and Dissertations
• Language: English
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Mechanical engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/54775
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Project Management has for decades been considered as the most valuable contribution to the success of a project. Despite this accepted statement, project management has up to recently been identified with the person named project manager and his technical competence in complex project. Complexity of projects and requirement for timely delivery motivated the offshore oil and gas industry to establish management tools to support the project manager to succeed. This principal objective of this thesis is to study project management complexities, its root causes and suggest ways to improve on Singapore's marine industry in handling Norwegian oil and gas projects. The marine environment is extremely dynamic and this has resulted in widespread use of advance techniques and methodologies to cope with the intense competition of the big players in the international market. Oil and gas projects today are more complex. Existing traditional project management tools and techniques alone are not adequate to successfully manage highly complex projects. Complexity is a major critical project dimension which provides a basis for determining the appropriate managerial actions required to make projects successful. This dissertation will assess the structural, technical, directional and temporal types of complexity and issues related to managing complex situation in organisational settings. The industrial study has identified four different types of complexities in project context and analysed each complexity characteristics to present different management challenges. The emphasis is to adapt a system approach in front-end development phase of projects in order to better manage and avoid chaos. A global awareness is emerging towards the essential need for improved complexity management to delivery complex projects. Leading complex projects require an inventive approach to assess project complexity and to deploy the best techniques to achieve success. The case study captures the most practical dispute in managing oil and gas projects and provides better solution to deal with complexity issues while handling projects belonging to Norwegian shelf continental. The study result presents feasible solutions and recommendations for complexity issues from which project managers can better address the complex situations.