Defining Internal Interfaces for a Refinery Upgrade Project
from the Ask an Interface Manager Series
Defining Internal Interfaces for a Refinery Upgrade Project
By William Becerra, Project Interface Manager
When defining internal interfaces for a project, you first need to define the main project scope boundaries and the stakeholders that will be related directly or indirectly with the project. When thinking about interfaces, try to answer the question: how will stakeholders impact the main project? Are there other projects (i.e. other stakeholders) who will have an indirect relationship with the main project? Stakeholders could be people from different organizations in the same company or the owner of the main project. As an example, in an upgrade project for a distributed control system (DCS) in an existing refinery (DCS Modernization), the owner of the refinery is also the owner of the project, but the division of the organization will make the existing operation team in the refinery a very important stakeholder to deal with during the implementation of the new project.
The best way to improve communications with the refinery operations team is to add, as part of the main project team, a representative of operations who will be the liaison with refinery operations regarding the interfaces that will happen with the existing refinery units.
This article is part of our Ask an Interface Manager blog series. This series answers the question: How do you structure project interfaces?
William Becerra is an experienced project engineering manager with interface management expertise. Mr. Becerra has worked the past 20 years as a client representative for companies like ConocoPhillips, P66, Aramco Services, and Marathon Oil Co. Visit LinkedIn to see William Becerra's full profile.
We asked how project interfaces should be structured, William provided the following response.
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