Reimagining Benchmarking

Over recent decades, asset owneers in sectors such as Oil & Gas and Chemicals have made a concerted effort to utilise high-quality datasets to drive improvements across the project lifecycle. This insight has helped organisations understand their own capabilities and how they drive performance and cost across a range of activities including robustness of business cases, the quality of front-end project development, analysis of execution risk & construction readiness, commissioning, and post project evaluation.

Asset owners in other parts of the Major Projects world, particularly in the public sector, have often struggled to fully embrace the power of Benchmarking. In the UK, leaders of many infrastructure progrrammes for example still suffer from a basic lack of data to support their decision making. Where Benchmarking is attempted it is not always integrated into a culture and process of continuous improvement, reducing its impact to the point wherre it can degenerate into an effort to squeeze front end costs in negotiations between owners and the supply chain. 

As the world slowly recovers from the economic hit of COVID-19, projects leaders will be under huge pressure to improve performance and demonstrate that they are delivering value for money. There has never been a better time for the projects community to reimagine its approach to performance data and Benchmarking. 

In this seminar, chaired by Ed Merrow of global megaproject consultants Independent Project Analysis, we will explore how Benchmarking can be used to inspire professionals in the public and private sector to take action that will deliver the value demanded by asset owners, governments and the public. 

We will hear from: 

• Experts from a range of Major Project sectors on their experience of utilising Benchmarking through the project lifecycle as an integral part of a continuous improvement regime. 
• Benchmarking specialists about the practicalities of creating and maintaining high quality datasets that can generate valuable insight. 
• The UK Government's Infrastructure and Projects Authority on its ongoing work to utilise Benchmarking more effectively across the public sector portfolio.

At the end of the seminar, attendees will have: 

• An understanding of the full range of benefits that Benchmarking can bring to major projects.
• An understanding of the link between being an effective asset owner and the effective use of Benchmarking. 
• An insight into the processes and techniques needed to create, maintain and exploit data.