Learned techniques for managing engineers on remote major projects

As world populations increase, the demand for non-renewable resources forces organizations to pursue mega projects in sparsely or non populated regions. Worldwide trends towards urbanization make it increasingly difficult to attract and hold skilled workers in these less attractive locations. As well, the skill sets required to design and build the large projects may not be required within the organization once the facilities are operating. The operating organizations turn to a variety of outsourcing techniques to provide the labor to design and construct their mega projects. The differing priorities of the organizations involved can create further problems on all sides. Over a fifteen year period, formal and informal interviews were held with a variety of players working on ten remote projects with budgets in the $1 to $20 billion range. Although the interviews included skilled craft doing the physical construction, this paper focuses on the design phase and in particular the challenges with the management of the engineering effort. Techniques that mitigated reappearing problems were found in some of the projects and are offered here. These learnings should assist others considering a venture into such an endeavor, particularly if they do not have the bench strength within their current organization.