Setting up and adequate owner organisation for large, complex capital projects can be a challenge for organisations that do not execute such projects regularly or are faced with projects of an unprecedented magnitude and complexity. It is a transformation journey that needs to be conducted in a time-bound manner, in a context of very significant business impact. Based on our experience supporting owners through this journey, our new White Paper 2024-07 ‘How to Setup a Proper Project Management Capability within an Owner Organisation’ provides a structured approach to this challenge.

Establishing a competent and adequate owner team for capital projects is a journey that must start early during project definition. It will involve substantial investment for the organisation, hiring of experienced project professionals, and investment in specific infrastructure. A successful setup also requires sufficient awareness by senior executives to ensure the necessary steps are taken in a timely manner. It must be led like a transformation project around a roadmap agreed with all relevant stakeholders and provided with the adequate budget and governance. It is an investment, and this has a high return on investment on the actual success of the project: it should be considered as such, and anticipated as needed.

As a rule of thumb, the owner team expenditure should represent about 2-3% of the overall Capex for project execution (for the core team only, not counting on-site quality control technicians or similar expenditures directly linked with execution). As an example of the application of this ratio, for a 1 B$ Capex project executed over 3 years, this thus represents typically about 20-30M$ or 7-10M$/year or about 60-90 professionals. For the project development phase, the percentage will higher, with the team building up progressively to the execution size. Organisations with limited experience in large capital projects are often astonished by the team size required by this rule of thumb, but we see it as necessary.

Read our new White Paper 2024-07 ‘How to Setup a Proper Project Management Capability within an Owner Organisation’ to understand better the challenges involved and how to overcome them.

If you can’t access the link to the white paper, copy and paste the following link in your browser: https://www.projectvaluedelivery.com/_library/2024-07_journey_setup_PM_orga_owner_v0.pdf