Snowy Hydro – Hunter Power Project

Project Overview

This project consists of the construction of two heavy duty ‘F Class’ open cycle gas turbines, 132kV electrical switchyard and associated incoming gas and hydrogen infrastructure. The facility will have a capacity of 750MW and will supplement Snowy Hydro’s existing generation portfolio by providing additional firmed energy to the grid during peak periods.

TBH’s Role

This project faced considerable cost and time pressures, and TBH was engaged to provide Project Controls support. Primarily this was to develop a robust plan for completion, provide visibility on progress, with a focus on critical activities and mitigation strategies to proactively address slippage. Under the direction of the Project Director the scope included:

• Providing a Project Controls Manager to establish robust Project Controls practices that would drive progress on site.
• Completing a discovery phase to map processes, systems and capabilities and make recommendations for future state.
• Provide Project Controls team to augment the project delivery teams
• Schedule – all scope covered, activities detailed, critical paths, resource loading, quantity loading, contingency, alignment with budget etc.
• Budget – audit to establish current budget and validate original budget v changes, commitments, contingency drawdown, estimate to complete, estimate at completion etc.
• Risk – assess Project risks and mitigations and make appropriate allowances for residual risk
• Internal & external reporting Internal reporting of progress measurement – baseline production rates, weighting, lead and lag KPI’s, EV, collect cost and hour actuals and validate. Format / cadence of reporting along with KPI’s and tracking requirements, develop useful trend analysis and forecasting.
• External reporting to various Governmental stakeholders and Boards.

The TBH Difference

Over the course of the engagement, TBH was able to uplift the master schedule to include any gaps in scope, resourcing, quantities and methodology using it to communicate the plan, sequence of trades and critical activities. Roadblocks, slippage and other issues were able to be identified early and mitigation agreed at weekly war room meetings.

The budget was reviewed highlighting gaps, agreeing remediation and then set as a baseline. The WBS and CBS were mapped to allow for Earned Value Reporting which was then automated through PowerBi dashboards. This was used to report progress, flag issues and prompt timely resolution.

TBH was able to improve scope management, progress tracking and forecasting to significantly impact project delivery by leveraging data from multiple sources, including the schedule, 3D / 4D models and quality systems to graphically communicate progress, slippage, interfaces, and look aheads. Additionally, the data extracted from the models was also used to validate the planned and completed quantities in the schedule.

By instilling good Project Controls, supplementing the controls team with additional capability and augmenting the reporting process with data contained in the BIM (4D) model, TBH was able to provide better visibility of site progress, prioritise critical activities and allow management to efficiently direct resources and to drive completion.