MOCs and Capital Projects – Getting the Best out of Both Processes

The safety community, bolstered by the PSM regulations, has emphasized the importance of proper management of change, "MOC", to ensure safe, reliable and economic operation of chemical plants, refineries and increasingly, on- and off-shore pipelines and installations.

Various authors[ref] have stressed the importance of a systematic process of conducting MOCs. Hoff[ref] has taken this further by proposing the use of a standard lifecycle model for MOC, and has demonstrated how the lifecycle model can be used as a basis for an MOC best practice. A typical lifecycle for a permanent MOC consists of 8 "states"—Initiation > Scoping > Change Design > Impact Analysis > Approvals > Implementation > PSSR > Close-out—although other state sequences are possible.

The majority of MOCs involve physical changes to facilities—a much smaller fraction of MOCs addresses procedure-only changes, document-only changes or organizational changes. Physical changes to facilities are implemented in different contexts such as maintenance work orders, project work orders, small capital projects and large capital projects. Each of these contexts has its own notion of a "work process".

Given that changes to existing facilities are not either MOC or a "work process", but rather involve both MOC and a "work process", it is important to understand how these processes interrelate. The focus of this presentation is to explore effective methods for allowing MOC and "work processes" to proceed with no confusion, no gaps and no duplication of effort.

Examples and case studies are drawn from actual implemented projects.