project management plan document
Running Head: COMMUNICATION 1
BUSINESS AND FINANCE 6
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Project management
Summary of the Halliburton Company case study under review
The Halliburton Company is known all over the world for its excellent project management. The company is known for meeting most if not all the deliverables or expectations of the clients. A particular project that the company handled rather well is a project that involved a Western Hemisphere operator. The operator was interested in having its productions accelerated in some of the fields that it was working on in South Mexico.
There were many challenges that were hampering the acceleration of production for the company. The challenges included; the fields had high depths that were as high as 23,000 feet, high pressure and temperatures and the fields had complex geologies. For fear of incurring unnecessary financial risk, the company tendered the project where the Halliburton Company won the bid. The contract awarded to the Halliburton Company was a $684 million contract that required the project management company to drill 58 wells and deliver them on a turnkey basis. According to the company, the Halliburton company was supposed to drill each well for no more than 213 days. The operator expected that the whole project would at the most take seven months for it to be complete.
The first thing that the Halliburton Company did was to come up with an experienced project management team. The company had project managers who had vast experience in the fields as well as the region handle the project. The project managers had close to twenty years of working experience in project management. The project managers were supported by also experienced teams and teams that were conversant with the operator as well as the area. For example, the Halliburton Company had geophysicist as part of its project management team. The geophysicists were tasked with the responsibility of assessing the complex geologies were posing a challenge for the operator who hired the services of the Halliburton company.
Other than having a project management team, the Halliburton Company relied on an integrated project management team. The integrated project management of the assigned project enabled the Halliburton’s project management team to drill the 58 wells that the operator needed. In order to do so, the company had to have 10 rigs running simultaneously which made the whole project quite demanding for the Halliburton Company. The Halliburton company had to deploy all the technologies they had in their arsenal to make the project a success. The company used pressurized drilling techniques, geo pilot to build complex walls and borehole enlargement tools to open up the wells amongst others.
As a result of using state of the art technology in tackling the project, the Halliburton’s Company managed to complete the project assigned to it in record time. The company beat the time deadlines set by the operator by 3%. Instead of completing a borehole in 213 days, the Halliburton’s company completed the drilling of a borehole in 208 days. The Halliburton’s Company delivered the finished project on a turnkey basis in less than seven months beating the set expectations of the operator. In short, The Halliburton Company did not only deliver on the project but the company exceeded the expectations of the operator. Just to understand how effective or successful the Halliburton’s company was successful in handling the project assigned by the operator, the operator extended the original contract it had with the company and if that is not enough, the operator plans to extend and expand the contract further in the coming years.
Incorporating the terms used in Unit 1 and Unit with the case study
The first term that is touched on the units up for review is the term “project”. In simple terms, the word or term project refers to a task or series of tasks that need to be tackled in order for a specific outcome to be achieved. In Halliburton’s case study, the project was the drilling of 58 wells in South Mexico. There were several series of tasks in the case that needed to be handled so that the outcome of the project was achieved. The tasks included; drilling the wells in the given time which was a well had to be drilled in 213 days or less, ensuring that the whole project was done in not more than seven months and the acceleration of production in the field.
The second term that is touched on the units up for review is the term “project manager”. A project manager refers to an individual charged with the responsibility of overseeing the handling of a project until its completion (Harrison & Lock, 2017). A project manager ensures that all deliverables of a project are met. In the Halliburton Company’s case, the project manager referred to the individual who was in charge of ensuring that the project was done and handled as expected. In the case study, there were more than one project managers and this is because the project that was undertaken by the Halliburton’s company was a large project and for that reason had to haven integrated sub-projects that were part of the main project.
The third term that is touched on the units up for review is the term “project management”. Project management simply refers to the acts of initiating, executing, managing the tasks and sub-tasks that lead to the achievement of the final outcome of a project (Kerzner, 2018). In the Halliburton Company’s case, project management referred to the ensuring that all the tasks of drilling 58 wells were initiated, managed and completed for the entire project of drilling the wells to be complete.
The fourth term that is touched on the units up for review is the term “project selection”. Project selection refers to the assessing of projects or project idea in order to identify the project that is of the highest priority. In the Halliburton Company’s case, the project management team had many projects or sub-projects that they had to prioritize on and they had to use the quantitative method. This is because the projects that they were selecting from had to play a role in accelerating production for their client which by itself involves the use of statistical and numerical analysis.
The fifth term that is touched on the units up for review is the term “risk”. Risk in simple terms refers to an uncertain condition that should it happen would affect a project objective (Kerzner & Kerzner, 2017). In the Halliburton Company’s case, there were several risks that threatened the completion of the project as well as the objectives of the project. One of the risks that were causing the project management team sleepless nights was that the drilling of the wells in the complex fields could potentially cost the company much more than anticipated should the fields pose as a hindrance to the project team.
References
Harrison, F., & Lock, D. (2017). Advanced project management: a structured approach. Routledge.
Heagney, J. (2016). Fundamentals of project management. Amacom.
Kerzner, H. (2018). Project management best practices: Achieving global excellence. John Wiley & Sons.
Kerzner, H., & Kerzner, H. R. (2017). Project management: a systems approach to planning, scheduling, and controlling. John Wiley & Sons.