A Project’s Plan for Turnovers Drives on Time Delivery
Without creating and executing a comprehensive Turnover Plan, your job will run the risk of not finishing on time.
What this means to your project team is that the deliverables defined within a given turnover drives all work – ALL WORK. You must always ask yourself…“what will it take to satisfy the turnover for “fill in the blank?” Whether it’s a concrete pour, major equipment installation, or simply providing spare parts to the client, you must know what the deliverables are that will get you to the final acceptance stage.
A Turnover Planning initiative is very methodical. It’s linear. It’s multi-disciplined. It’s collaborative. The level of complexity is dependent on the size of the project, type of industry, level of risk, etc. Therefore, not all Turnover Planning efforts demand the same amount of rigor. If done properly, the turnover plan can pay back over and over.
Remember…the earlier a plan is in place the bigger the payback can be and the smoother work can be completed.
Things to consider when assembling a Turnover Plan:
- Packaging (By: Discipline, System, Classification, Contractor, Etc.)
- Know how to manage a given turnover effort…”thanks captain obvious!!!”. Seriously, your turnover package nomenclature must reflect what work is going to look like upon final completion and not as the work progresses.
- Not Too Simple and Not Too Complex
- Make your turnover packages manageable. Don’t make the turnover packaging so broad that everything within the project falls inside a few turnover packages. This is unmanageable. On the other hand, do not create so many turnover packages that you cannot get your arms around any given issue. There is a sweet spot and every project category has one.
- Track Deliverables From Multiple Disciplines
- Documents and Items come from all directions. Be prepared to support the oversight of the effort including review and acceptance of each item. Be sure to have a tool that allows for you to see where any given “person” (supplier, contractor, person, client rep) is with an item at any given time.
- Turnovers and the Project Schedule Must be Synched
- In order to understand how your schedule is truly impacted or what details are required for upcoming work, you ought to know what is driving the completion of any given turnover. Turnover activities within the schedule should be a milestone activity with the understanding that everything driving that turnover is being managed accordingly offline. The assumption is that all deliverables have been satisfied and we now are checking boxes.
Turnover Plans, if assembled properly on the frontend, help streamline the closeout of work. There will be fewer delays in chasing down incomplete physical work and fewer hours charged in order to satisfy paperwork requirements. Even better, your overall risk diminishes over the life of the job simply by ensuring that work is accepted upon the completion of tasks.