Cleaning up at Sellafield01 December 2006

British Nuclear Group is a specialist site management and nuclear clean-up business. Part of the BNFL Group, it delivers accelerated nuclear clean-up programmes safely and cost effectively for customers in the UK and overseas. Experienced in working on highly complex facilities, its projects include new plant construction to enable accelerated hazard reduction and facility decommissioning, waste management and the decommissioning of the UK's nuclear legacy.

British Nuclear Group states that its most challenging nuclear site management programme is that at Sellafield in Cumbria on the west coast of northern England. Managed and operated by British Nuclear Group on behalf of the site owner the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), activities centre on remediation, decommissioning and clean-up of the historic legacy.

"British Nuclear Group's Sellafield projects are clearly defined with the NDA," says Robin Phillips, head of project risk management within the management services group at Sellafield. "We have clear timescale and budget targets against which we must deliver. To manage projects within those targets, we need good quality project intelligence, including areas of risk and its potential impact."

Until 2004, British Nuclear Group accepted a devolved approach to the selection of schedule risk management processes. However, the multitude of processes in operation meant it was difficult for senior executives to gain a clear overview of risk exposure and this inhibited effective understanding, communication and management of risk.

"With increasing pressure to be accurate in our proposals and then to follow-through with on-time, on budget project completions, we needed a formal and common framework and process," says Phillips. "We chose Pertmaster as our enterprise risk solution." British Nuclear Group had already selected Pertmaster in relation to the decommissioning of a nuclear reactor site and experiences put the tool on to a shortlist. Phillips and his team finally chose Pertmaster as their standard after finding how well it fitted their Primavera P3 project scheduling software environment, the clarity of its graphical output and how simple the product's sophisticated modelling features were to use.

Wide-scale roll-out
Working with Pertmaster, British Nuclear Group has been able to build its own configuration of the tool. "Initially, we used Pertmaster just on large high-risk projects. We are now so convinced of its benefits that we have rolled it out to sixty to seventy projects at Sellafield and have some forty key users across the business." British Nuclear Group has found Pertmaster to be very helpful in the creation of realistic project schedules and managing on-time and on-budget delivery.

"We are better at identifying risks, discussing them, modelling them and ranking them," adds Phillips. "We are better at targeting effort to mitigate key threats and to take advantage of key opportunities." British Nuclear Group is benefiting through:
- Being able to build in-depth user knowledge
- Easier movement of personnel between projects of standard methods
- More favourable licensing arrangements than when multiple tools were deployed.

For more information: www.pertmaster.com

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