NTPC Limited is India’s largest energy conglomerate. Commissioned in 2019, the Khargone Super Thermal Power Station is a coal-based thermal power project in Madhya Pradesh. It’s India’s first ultra-supercritical thermal power plant. The plant operates at above-average efficiency levels in keeping with NTPC’s efforts to lower greenhouse gas emissions. Power plant projects are among the world’s largest and most complex projects. There are many external stakeholders and moving parts. This would be no different. NTPC had over 40 years of experience delivering projects broadly similar to Khargone. Their teams were among the best in India and the world. And yet. On the Khargone project, they would face long-standing challenges they had been trying to improve on for years. Namely, how to synchronize the actions of so many internal and external partners? And how to create meaningful early-warning signals for management to help them better control the project?

30 contractors, 10,000 drawings, 100,000 tasks

Most projects in this category easily involve over thirty contractors and vendors. Beyond that, there are typically over 10,000 drawings and thousands of major and minor orders. Trying to combine all those individual schedules could mean generating a plan with 100,000 or more tasks with thousands of inter-task dependencies. Which almost always meant one thing: plans were never used in the actual execution of a project.

Three overarching problems threatened the timely completion of the Khargone project. Planning and execution were disconnected; information was subjective and scattered; and a persistent gap between management’s view of things and reality.

While there were planning and scheduling systems in place, the front line wasn’t always clear on what exactly to do and when to do it. That problem is linked to traditional project management software; it cannot automatically convert plans into daily schedules. The frontline’s list of tasks came with no prioritized schedule. This often forced them to improvise, to set their own targets, which impacted delivery targets.

Streamliner

Streamliner helped scale back the original 100,000-plus task plan into a 1,600-task plan. Just 30 focus and finish tasks put the entire project in a nutshell for executives. At ground level, execution details and procedures were captured as subtasks, with checklists below the 1600 tasks.

As engineering would submit drawings, purchasing would place orders, and execution teams would fill out Daily Progress Reports. Streamliner would not only automatically update the project plan but also provide forward-looking alerts, or early warning signals to executives and project managers. The number of last-minute surprises for executives dropped, and everyone proactively took care of the issues that were slowing the project down.

“In NTPC Khargone, within a month of implementing Streamliner, our project management team had complete visibility into areas that had bottlenecks.” ~ MR. AJAY SHUKLA AGM, NTPC

Even when new bottlenecks emerged, the teams weren’t taken by surprise. This allowed project teams to take a series of proactive steps, which meant that the entire management team had full control overdue dates. Team Khargone outlined some of the key benefits of Streamliner They reported that priorities were aligned for the project level of management—decisions and subsequent actions were faster. And that each level of management had reliable, unbiased and meaningful visibility into their respective areas. And critically, early warning signals from the system were always forward-looking.‍

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