The Shaping of Large Capital Projects

A critical phase of project management.

Published December 2004 Perspectives on the elements of project shaping from Tradeline's Conference on The Up-Front Planning, Structuring, and Shaping of Large Capital Projects 2004.

Project shaping is an ill-defined but critical phase of project management. Little is written about the up-front shaping of large capital projects, yet anyone with large-project experience will say that big projects are made or broken in what does or does not get done in the time before detailed design even gets started. In that sense, this conference was plowing new ground, and any insights, metrics, tools, innovative ideas, and processes that might have been gleaned should be considered significant and formative to the body of knowledge on large-project shaping. In terms of scale, a really big project can have shaping teams with literally hundreds of shaping team contributors -- the total cost of which will be small relative to the potential cost of a mis-run project. For big projects, a big up-front shaping effort makes sense economically. Also, shaping periods are starting further in advance of construction. As indicated at General Motors, a metric of growing sophistication of capital project planning is a longer time period between the beginning of the shaping to construction. GM went from a 2-year shaping period in 1993 to a three and sometimes four year shaping/planning period currently.

Project shaping defined.