Capital Project Simulation: Impact of Project Decisions on Cost and Schedule overrun

Capital Project Simulation

Low oil prices put a lot of pressure on the industry. Without change, Capital Projects cannot be executed or those in execution mode have to be stopped. Key changes required are moving the engineering workforce to competitive thinking and transparency in decision making. Project decisions are made that potentially have a negative impact on cost and schedule overruns.

As an example, when a Capital project is facing a delay during the Front-end Engineering Design stage, the decision is due to postpone the Final Investment Decision or not. These type of project decisions have conflicting interests and impact on the quality of the Front-end Engineering Design that might result in execution issues at a later project stage.

A management game will help Project teams to understand the performance impact caused by certain decisions during a project’s lifecycle.

Are you passionate about efficient Project Execution and the limitations the current low oil price is triggering? Are you ready to help connecting the dots between causes and effects in Project Decision Making? And are you appealed by the opportunity to help develop a ‘serious game’ that will be used in the industry? Then this is the internship for you!

Job description

Accenture is going to develop a management game that simulates a Capital Project in the Oil and Gas industry in which different decision-making scenarios are modeled. The latter is to be able to mimic the impact of certain decisions on project performance. To support the development of this game, a MSc graduate will be recruited who performs a research on this topic and captures the findings in the game’s outcome. 

The aim of the graduate’s research is to quantify the potential impact of key decisions during a Capital project. Exciting co-outcome of the research is development of a management game that will take participants through different project stages and key decisions that have to be made by taking the complex context into account. At the end of the game, it should reveal how the project performed looking at cost and schedule overrun. The performance will be evaluated by reflecting on the decisions made by the participants. This will give project teams the opportunity to learn through cause (project decision) and effect (impact on cost and schedule overrun), for example:

• The effect of Front-End Loading quality in later project stages
• Can Systems Engineering help reduce complexity of the project?
• Impact of Leadership Behavior

We encourage candidates to develop their own research questions in this area, which meet both academic requirements and Accenture’s interests.

Accenture will help you by providing and the opportunity of being in contact with our clients for conducting interviews and collecting data.