During the shutting down phase of a project which involves sign-offs, compliance audits, and official approval, there are possibilities of unforeseen things happening. Shutdowns are largely unpredictable because the normal or programmed operations of project systems are altered. While this may help in discovering problems with the current systems, it also raises certain issues that highlight the burden that may come with project shutdowns. The problems include safety risks, creating expensive or complex problems, delay in respect to the set schedule, ambiguity in decision-making, and the possibility of general failure of a project.
Project systems may be designed to operate safely when running but fail to consider the safety issue during the shutdown because they are generally designed to be functioning. Safety risks may arise from the uncertainty in being safe considering that there may lack a tool or method for quantitatively estimating the safety risk (Frank 29). Due to the focus on project management of aspects such as design initiation and completion, it is possible that concerns over sophisticated hazard detection may be overlooked and thus failed to be integrated into the shutdown system to ensure that a safe shutdown is achieved. This means the possibility of safety problems arising is likely in the shutdown of a project. There are also cases where a review of the lessons learned from shutdowns are not conducted and documented to be taken into consideration in subsequent shutdowns. This brings up the safety risk issues and the risk of creating more complex problems in relation to the standard logic of the project when running.
Project shutdowns are highly unpredictable and in the process, there is a possibility of creating either opportunities to uncover problems or creating some of the problems that may be expansively costly (Frank 29). In the shutdowns, the possibility of reconsidering the scope of a project also emerges since it is possible for project managers to discover that additional work may be required when system elements are observed. This can possibly spin the budget or even the schedule of the project out of control thus making decision-making quite difficult considering that the budgets and schedule provisions overlook the unpredictability that characterizes the shutdown uncertainties.
Focusing on safety risks is the basis of a risk assessment in the project development scenario in which aspects such as human actions, system errors, system malfunctions and the possibility of failure are taken into consideration (Frank 31). In the safety assessment, trigger events and end states of project system components are defined and relied upon to develop strategies that will uncover the possible errors early. By focusing on safety problems, it is possible to develop a fail-safe design in which measures will be designed to check for problems, and ensure shut down occurs in safe ways. In addition, a control system can be integrated into the shutdown system to enable a programmed safe shutdown.
It is, however, difficult to address cost escalations and schedule problems that may arise due to a failure of a project system component or the possibility of raising problems during shutdown. Even with safety concerns in focus, the possibility of problems arising cannot be completely addressed because it may be difficult to generalize about the type of problem that may arise during the shutdown that warrants the time and expense increments. Typically, the scope of a project tends to expand during the shutdown phase because of the uncertainties which certainly affect aspects such as costs and schedule.
Work Cited
Frank, Michael, V. Choosing Safety: A Guide to using Probabilistic Risk Assessment and Decision Analysis in Complex, High-Consequence Systems. Washington, DC: Earthscan, 2008.
