ENGINEERING AND INFRASTRUCTURE

BUILDING A FOUNDATION TO CREATE ROCK-SOLID RESULTS

Engineering and Infrastructure

A global market brings many positive advancements for our society as a whole…but with those great advancements comes new worlds of uncertainty. Areas of uncertainty include the environment, legislation, geo-political influences, governance, and financial variations; therefore, when undertaking major projects such as construction of a new airport, bridge, or a ring road around a city, project teams are faced with an increasing range of risks and challenges.

The landscapes in which these projects are executed tend to be dynamic and highly complex, and they often involve global considerations in terms of supply chain and resources. In a business environment in which all parties are looking to reduce costs, improve quality, and meet compliance and safety standards, there are ever-greater pressures on everyone to outperform the competition. But the complexities don’t stop there…as technology advances seemingly at the speed of light, the importance of implementing sustainable projects becomes ever greater. The pressure to make the right decisions mounts, as do the costs of making the wrong ones.

Ultimately, these complex projects involve committing very large amounts of capital, time, and effort with multiple stakeholders. In such cases, a structured approach to thinking through the key decisions adds enormous value. Decision Strategies’ tried-and-true Integrated Decision Management^TM approach minimizes risk and ensures identification of the best decision choices that meet the objectives, significantly increasing the chance of a successful project.

Once an engineering concept has been agreed upon, it is important to take a brick-by-brick approach in which we continue to incorporate uncertainties into our forecasting throughout each step of project implementation. An embarrassing number of major projects fail to come in on time and on budget, largely due to over-optimism (a natural human bias) and/or failure to appropriately incorporate uncertainty and risk into cost and schedule forecasting. Our facilitation methods help to draw out and deal with biases, while our approach to probabilistic cost and schedule forecasting yields critical, non-intuitive insights into those aspects of the project most likely to cause surprises – and in the end, the result is far fewer of them. This process enables the team to take preemptive action and to mitigate situations where prevention isn’t possible, resulting in significantly higher success rates.