Organizational Effectiveness: Collaboration in an Integrated Project Team

Projects in the process industry are getting more complex from a technical as well as an organizational point of view. These projects can be considered as series of multi-phase and multi-discipline design and engineering activities involving contributions from many parties on many locations. In order to successfully perform such projects collaboration is required. This paper presents the results of studying a refinery revamp project. In this project the opportunity was offered to investigate the collaboration in the project team. Objective was to study the effectiveness of the organization in a multi-actor, multi-office and multi-discipline environment and identify potential areas for improving the collaboration. The method chosen was to study the business process model and combine this with a social network analysis (SNA) via observations, surveys and interviews. The differences shown in the comparison between the SNA and the business process model indicated areas where the collaboration could be improved. Furthermore, early identification of potential overload of people has been discovered from the social network analysis. SNA showed to be a powerful analysis method for investigating softer factors in projects, which is not yet common practice in the process industry.