Cross-Departmental Alignment Frameworks during Major Expansion Projects: A Strategic Review of Operations and Project Interface Management in Brownfield Liquefaction Expansions

Abstract

A brownfield expansion places two organisations on one site with incompatible success criteria. The operating organisation is accountable for uptime, containment and the safety of a running facility, and is rewarded for stability. The project organisation is accountable for schedule and cost against a defined scope, and is rewarded for progress. Both are behaving correctly and their objectives conflict at every point of contact. This review examines the alignment mechanisms available and argues that the problem is one of organisational design rather than of cooperation, so that interventions directed at relationships and communication address a symptom. It draws on the classical differentiation and integration literature, which established that organisational subunits facing different environments necessarily develop different orientations and that integration must therefore be engineered rather than assumed; on the information processing view of organisation design, which supplies the vocabulary for choosing among integrating mechanisms; and on the megaproject literature, which documents the performance record and the recurring failure patterns. Four positions are developed. First, the interface is a design variable and the range of available mechanisms is wider than the liaison roles and coordination meetings that constitute standard practice. Second, the mechanism should be selected against the volume and uncertainty of the information the interface must carry, and standard practice systematically under-provides for high-uncertainty interfaces such as tie-in execution. Third, the safety consequence of interface failure is asymmetric, falling predominantly on the operating facility, which means the operating organisation should hold the authority at contested points. Fourth, the measurement of interface performance is almost entirely absent from practice and its available measures are cheap.