Interface Management 101

When considering the implementation of an interface management program, three key components should be considered:

• The Business Process –  The Master Interface Plan (MIP) is developed to describe in detail the overall interface management procedure and policies. The MIP provides a single set of clear and consistent rules for the management of project interfaces, establishes a communication plan, and defines the roles and responsibilities of key stakeholders.  
• The People – Having the right people in place, with the correct skillset, and ensuring alignment
• The Tools – Ensure you equip your team with the proper tools to succeed. Interface issues can translate into serious schedule delays and cost overruns, so be sure to choose an interface management solution that is built to meet your requirements (aligns with your MIP) and has been proven in the field.  
  
  

Now, let’s take a closer look at planning a successful interface management program. Here are the critical steps you’ll need to follow:

• Step 1: Develop the Master Interface Plan
• Step 2: Develop the interface register
• Step 3: Select a tool that supports your plan
• Step 4: Ensure communication & training
  
  

Step 1 – Develop the Master Interface Plan

Achieving a high-impact interface management program involves the development of a Master Interface Plan, which clearly describes the roles, responsibilities, and expectations of both the owner and the contractors. This is critical to alignment and ensures that the right people, processes, and tools are in place when and where needed.

The Master Interface Plan generally ensures:

• All contractors clearly understand the interface management objectives for the project
• The methodology to identify, manage, and resolve interfaces is defined and understood
• Roles and responsibilities are fully defined
• Contractors understand how to resolve conflicts and overcome barriers to the benefit of all
• Communication channels are described and understood by all
• The Interface Register and its expected use is clearly described
• Appropriate representation (generally a designated Interface Manager) is established for each contractor
  
  

Aligning all contractors and project team members in an interface management program is critical to ensuring everyone is working towards the same goals, with straightforward methods to resolve potential conflict. The Master Interface Plan is the document that ensures this alignment.

How Involved Should Owners be with Interface Management?

Before you finalize your MIP and identify the right tools to support your plan, you may be wondering, how involved should owners be with this overall process? 

The answer to that question may not be straightforward, and it has long been debated. So much is dependent upon the contracts, the complexity of the job, and your relationship with your contractors. However, we do know that interface stakeholders benefit the most when they have established owner representation to oversee the interface process for each contract or scope of work. 

While owners must remain directly engaged within the interface management processes (they ultimately underwrite all interface-related risk and the project's success rides on their shoulders), their level of involvement within the exchange of information and deliverables is unclear. 

The trick is to not become a bottleneck. Project teams typically promote open lines of communication between interface stakeholders, with the owner team available to facilitate resolution when problems occur or require clarification. These representatives (individuals or teams) are responsible for managing scope, responding to technical queries, and ensuring that engineering standards and quality are met. They must ensure interface issues get resolved and deliverables get exchanged on time. 

If you cannot review interface agreement requests fast enough, and end up causing delays, you are doing more harm than good. Take steps to delegate when possible. It is also beneficial to hold regular interface meetings with your contractor; this way, the interface agreements you do receive will likely not be a surprise and approvals can be quick. 

It boils down to this: owner involvement can be as simple as a notification when an issue is raised or as extensive as direct involvement in each interface agreement's review and approval process.

The level of involvement can depend on many factors, including the relationship with the contractor and the complexity of the scope of work. However, in the end, whether you are directly involved in each interface agreement or kept informed through automated notifications, regular interface meetings, or reports, owner representation is essential to the interface management process.

Related Content:

• Webinar: Planning Your Program
• “How Involved Should Owners be with Interface Management.”
• "The Master Interface Plan (MIP)"

Step 2 – Define the Interface Register

Good upfront planning requires stakeholders to understand how interfaces are defined, how scope is broken down, and who's responsible for what. 

Identification of interfaces is an essential step in the process. Early identification helps to expose potential problem areas and risks to your projects such as scope gaps and overlaps. The project type, stakeholders, and contracting strategies will all impact how this activity is executed.

A preliminary interface register is an early interface management activity completed during a project's FEP  (Front End Planning) phase, and prior to contract award. However, interface identification is an ongoing process with additional interfaces identified throughout the whole project life cycle.

Figure 4: Interface Register from the Interface Connect solution.

"Interfaces are typically identified by a group of experts from the project, using the project’s design documents, work breakdown structure (WBS), contract documents, project specification, etc."

-Chua and Godinot, 2006

The interface register is a key tool to define and control scope delineation, track all interfaces to completion, and ensure key stakeholders are kept informed. Defining the structure of interfaces is a key first step to a successful interface management program and can vary from project to project. The goal is to eliminate gaps and overlaps; to ensure that parties that share a common boundary understand the shared interfaces, and all while, at the same time, balancing to ensure a manageable interface register is created that does not add additional and unnecessary overhead. 

Related Content

• Structuring Internal & External Interfaces on a Major Project
• How Do You Structure Project Interfaces?

Step 3 – Select a Tool

Setting up a proper interface management process supported by a purpose-built system will include additional upfront costs and resources. However, the return on investment is huge; potentially saving millions of dollars by avoiding rework, delays, and subsequent production loss.

Projects must select proven tools to manage a high volume of interfaces and their resulting complexity to ensure interface risk is managed effectively throughout the project. Although interface management systems cost more than a basic spreadsheet,the value they provide far outweighs the substantial costs historically associated with poorly managed interfaces.

Related Content – Learning from Our Mistakes: Why Interface Management is Vital to Project Success

Crucial to the success of your project is using automated interface management tools built specifically to support the interface management program designed for your project. The tool you select should support your plan, not the other way around.

With Coreworx Interface Connect, automated workflows and forms work to ensure compliance with your plan. The work processes within the system are designed to ensure the appropriate reviews/approvals are obtained. With built-in alerts and escalation, all stakeholders are kept informed. Online forms are designed to support consistency in data capture, which in turn will support the reporting and interface management KPIs you’ve designed for your project.

Supporting a web-based online interface register provides a single source of truth since all interface and delivery teams can reference and contribute to a single register. With an online register, the project team responsible for managing all interfaces is no longer required to decipher and merge multiple spreadsheets from multiple delivery teams. Global project teams can access the information anytime from anywhere.

And the data in Coreworx Interface Connect is secure. By using a robust roles-based security model, access to interface data is always controlled.

Top 5 Reasons Why You Should Use An Interface Management System

Here are the top 5 reasons why you should use the industry-leading Interface Connect solution on your project:

• Real-time reports and dashboards – Get quick access to insights that help support timely interface risk mitigation
• Schedule integration – Get insight into high-risk interfaces that may harm your overall project schedule
• Automated workflow – Ensure all contracting parties and stakeholders are compliant with your interface management process that is critical to project success
• Complete audit trail – Should conflicts arise, get quick access to detailed logs of all activities related to interfaces
• Stakeholder notifications based on RACI Matrix – Keep all stakeholders involved and informed automatically based on the responsibilities matrix defined by the project
  
  

Related Content – Advanced Project Insights with Interface KPIs

Step 4 – Communication & Training

Crucial to ensuring the success of your interface management program is providing ongoing communication and training of all stakeholders. It is important to promote clear, timely, accurate and consistent communication. This becomes even more critical when dealing with multiple contractors in many locations with different languages and cultures. Stakeholders need to know who they are expected to communication with and how.

The communication plan or strategy is a component of your Master Interface Plan. Here you document the expectations with regards to communication and collaboration.

Interface Agreements document the exchange of information and deliverables between two interface stakeholders. Deliverables can include engineering drawings, specifications, design reports and calculations, equipment details, and project schedule information.

Ensuring interface teams are communicating and sharing information needed to successfully manage interfaces will have a significant impact on the success of your program.

Facilitating regular interface meetings is another form of communication and is important to stakeholder alignment and the overall interface management program. Project teams should establish regular interface meetings between interface stakeholders. Objectives include:

• Ensure ongoing alignment of interface parties
• Resolve interface and scope issues
• Review all open issues, confirm delivery dates, and update as necessary
• Identify/document new interfaces
• Prioritize critical interfaces
  
  

Training is also essential. Not only should stakeholders be given training on the tool(s) used to support your interface management program, but they must be fully aware of and trained on the methodology to identify, manage, and resolve interfaces.

Related Content

• Overcome Poor Communications that Lead to Design Conflicts
• Mitigate Integration Issues Across Scopes of Work

Managing Interfaces:
The First Mistake Most Companies Make

Not recognizing interface management as a project management practice distinct from other project management practices and understanding that it provides its own unique and valuable benefits is a big mistake still made today.

These projects often underestimate the challenges they will face, the volume of communication to be managed, and the risk a single interface left unnoticed represents.

Just one poorly managed interface can easily translate into hundreds of millions of dollars lost.

Interface management is more than meets the eye. To ensure the timely exchange of information and deliverables, project teams must manage hundreds (or even thousands) of dependencies. Added to this challenge, this exchange is often between external entities with no contractual relationship, yet it is critical that they collaborate. For many projects, interface data and deliverables aren’t treated with the same level of governance as other project artifacts. For example, interface data and deliverables should be included in the project handover process at project completion, yet it is often forgotten.

Some organizations think they can manage interfaces using existing project practices, processes, and tools.

Why Managing Interfaces with Spreadsheets Is Risky

Current methods of managing interfaces through spreadsheets and email do not provide the level of control or up-to-date real-time information required. Spreadsheets were not built for interface management. Even the most sophisticated spreadsheet cannot properly document the distribution of information needed to support a large complex project.

At first glance, doing it this way may seem like the most cost-efficient approach: it doesn’t cost anything extra – spreadsheets are free, right? Wrong! 

Using spreadsheets for interface management may cost you millions of dollars due to errors, lost time, and inefficiencies. Here are the many reasons spreadsheets are insufficient at managing interfaces on large, complex projects:

• Spreadsheets can be lost or corrupted. Yes, both of these have happened!
• Decisions are made using incomplete and usually outdated information
• The project team has no visibility until monthly updates are provided
• Inconsistency in the data captured for each interface
• No alerts and notifications make it difficult to ensure deliverables are received promptly
• Lack of real-time reporting and dashboards
• Zero audit trail
• No ability to enforce compliance and standards
• Lack of integration opportunities with other key project management practices

Related Content – Spreadsheets Were Not Built for Interface Management