Setting Expectations: Providing Flexible Project Guidance to Align the Management of Projects Across an Organization

Abstract Description Loudoun Water's Project Support Office (PSO) has undertaken an innovative, yet practical, approach to establishing guidance documentation for the initiation, execution, and closing of projects across its many groups and needs. The resulting Project Delivery Guidance documentation avoids the common pitfalls of standardization efforts to provide accessible, actionable guidance to project managers across the organization. Abstract Located in the westernmost suburbs of Washington, D.C., Loudoun Water provides public water, reclaimed, and wastewater services to one of the fastest-growing areas of the country. As a result of recent growth, over half of Loudoun Water's infrastructure was installed in the last twenty years. The rapid growth will not stop- over the next thirty years, the area's population is expected to increase by another 125,000. Loudoun Water's capital planning assessments show that over one billion dollars in capital infrastructure is needed to serve future customers. Loudoun Water's responsibility to implement capital projects at such a hurried pace coupled with the need to update the two decades old project delivery system led to a strategic initiative of establishing a Project Support Office (PSO). The PSO works with various departments/divisions, supports to implement the capital and O&M projects, and carries out portfolio and program management level activities. The PSO led many tasks during its initiation to establish and ensure that optimal and required project management practices were followed across the organization to implement capital projects. The PSO assists project managers and project teams with their efforts to improve project definition, schedule, cost, and quality performance for their projects by defining minimum expectations and providing guidance and oversight. A primary goal of the PSO is to provide support documentation to aid project managers across the various divisions and departments to successfully initiate, execute, and close projects. As part of this goal, the PSO embarked on the development of a series of guidance documents aimed at providing project managers with a common understanding of the key deliverable components at typical design milestones, including preliminary engineering, 60% design completion, 90% design completion, and bid-ready design submittal. The Project Delivery Guidance documentation details the expected components (mandatory and optional) and completion level of specifications, design drawings, permitting, and coordination items at each design milestone. This presentation will describe Loudoun Water's approach to developing and implementing their new Project Delivery Guidance. A key focus of this process was soliciting input and generating buy-in and acceptance of the various stakeholder groups across the organization through collaborative workshops and guideline review cycles. The presentation will detail how Loudoun Water solicited feedback and insight into the processes and approaches of similar utilities and navigated the common pain points and pitfalls often associated with efforts to standardize an approach to critical processes across such a large organization. This work resulted in guidance documents that were broad enough to meet the varying needs of projects across Loudoun Water will be specific enough to provide actionable information to assist in the execution of projects.