A project moves from area-based installation work packages to system work packages at roughly 75 to 80 percent construction complete, or 90 days before the first commissioning need date, whichever comes first. The planning method stays the same, and only the container changes.
The Transition Happens in Steps
The move is staged so the field keeps one method throughout. After about 40 percent construction progress the soft craft packages for insulation, painting and touch-up, and heat tracing start to be developed, with boundaries based on the test work packages and the same AWP and workface planning philosophy as every other discipline. After about 70 percent the construction contractor begins moving from bulk, area-based IWP planning to turnover-sequence planning, re-shuffling upcoming IWPs in the 4 week lookahead to satisfy the turnover order. At 75 to 80 percent, or 90 days before the commissioning need date, the remaining scope is repackaged into system work packages.
What a System Work Package Is
An SWP is a multidisciplinary deliverable tied to a system or part of a system that lets a commissioning crew work in a safe, predictable and measurable way. It captures all remaining work for the system and is scoped to be progressed, with estimated hours remaining and planned and actual dates, so it carries labor and dates the way an IWP does.
An SWP contains the remaining work from IWPs that are past 95 percent complete, which is mostly construction punch items, the remaining work from test work packages, walkdown punch items as punch IWPs, outstanding RFIs and deviation notices, pre-commissioning IWPs and vendor clarifications as tasks, under an SWP cover page.
How It Is Planned
Systems are planned at Level 3 in the schedule with logic linked to their CWPs, and a system schedule baseline is issued. SWPs are developed and packaged at Level 4 in the AWP software, mapped from the hierarchy of construction work area, CWP, IWP and tag, so that every tag and every piece of remaining work for a system lands in one SWP. Every IWP, TWP, punch pack, RFI and remaining task is assigned to a single SWP, and the SWP is named after its system. Development starts once all IWPs for the system are identified and past 95 percent, with the incomplete work listed.
The governance stays where it was. The 90 day and 4 week lookahead meetings continue, constraint management continues, and the SWP schedule is reviewed every week in the 4 week lookahead. The packages stay in the project software through turnover.
The point of the sequence is that workface planning does not stop when area construction does. The same rules on scope, constraints and closure that define what complete means for an IWP define it for an SWP, with system acceptance for turnover as the final state. Planning the transition with a construction contractor is part of workface planning services. The SWP record, system by system, is what the owner carries into commissioning and keeps.