An owner needs a small AWP organization, assigned full time from FEED, with its decision authority written down. The roles are few. Each one has to exist on the organization chart before the first package is defined, because on projects that staffed AWP late the packages were defined without them.
What the Owner Does
The owner's role is oversight, stewardship and support. The engineering contractor is responsible for engineering and procurement, the construction contractor for construction, and the owner guides implementation, participates in the key reviews, monitors performance, assesses compliance and reviews the key deliverables, from the path of construction and the procedures to the release plans and the packages themselves.
The Roles
The owner side has two roles. The AWP lead is the owner's representative for AWP, information management, material management and workface planning across every stakeholder, and reports into the owner's project management team. The information manager reports to the AWP lead, acts as the project's data gatekeeper, and is supported as demand requires by a data engineer, a developer, a Power BI analyst, a BIM specialist and a material management specialist.
The engineering contractor side has three. A full time AWP manager with internal ownership and decision authority for AWP, assigned during FEED or at sanction. An information manager accountable for data governance and the quality of the register, the ISO lists, the tag register, the model attributes and the MTOs. An EWP coordinator who develops and organizes packages against the path of construction and acts as the gatekeeper so that only complete, approved and compliant packages are issued.
The construction contractor side has a workface planning manager, who leads IWP, TWP and SWP development, constraint management and the 90 day and 4 week lookahead processes, and the workface planners who build IWPs from the model with the general foremen.
What Makes It Work
It works under three conditions. Leadership is dedicated and full time from FEED or immediately on sanction, in both the owner and the contractor organizations. Responsibilities are formalized in a RACI, and AWP leadership sits in project management, engineering management and governance meetings. Continuity is protected with formal transition plans whenever staffing changes.
What Each Lead Owns
The owner's AWP lead owns the AWP procedure, the nomenclature, the requirements for vendors, fabricators and the module yard, the workflows, the work breakdown structure, the AWP Matrix, the distribution and allocation matrices, the forecast and review trackers, the change management procedure and log, the skylines, the performance metrics and the checklists. The owner's information manager owns the IM procedure, the IM requirements for vendors and fabricators, the data requirements, the 3D model attributes, the reporting plan, the IM and model workflows, the data warehouse, the conditioned models, the dashboards and the 4D reports.
Where an owner cannot staff these roles from its own organization, the gaps are the natural place for a partner who arrives with the procedures, the registers and the software already built. That is the shape of owner-side AWP services, and it is the organization behind how owners run AWP across several contractors and why the record should outlive the contract. Whoever fills the roles, the procedures, the registers and the data they produce belong to the owner.