http://www.eci-online.org/">European Construction Institute

Taskforce Members

Tony Maplesden, Head of Project Management, Major Projects, AMEC

Lorne Clarke, Head of Project Management, CEL International

Jan Broekman, Vice-President Engineering. CB&I Lummus

Naomi Brookes, Royal Academy of Engineering & ECI Professor of Complex Project Management

Background & Aims

The ACTIVE approach is an initiative aimed at improving the performance and competitiveness of capital projects in the process, energy and utility industries. It was founded in 1996 with UK Government funding and was re-launched as ECI ACTIVE in 2002. ACTIVE espouses eight principles of collaborative project management ACTIVE supports these with a number of value-adding practices captures in a wide variety of training materials, tools, documents and benchmarking assessments.

The aim of the ACTIVE taskforce is to continue to support and promote the use of ACTIVE throughout the European engineering construction sector. It will achieve this through:

• Gathering together a portfolio of cases that have used ACTIVE and understand what lessons can be drawn from these
• Working with other organisations and stakeholders in insuring that ACTIVE adapts and continues to represent the best way to run projects

ACTIVE and the Gibson Review

In December 2009, Mark Gibson produced a report for the UK Government entitled ‘Changing to Compete: A Review of Productivity and Skills in UK Engineering Construction.’ ACTIVE played a prominent role in its recommendations and ECI was tasked to work with other stakeholders to repackage and represent ACTIVE to the wider community. The ACTIVE taskforce is co-ordinating ECI’s response to this.

Links with NEPIC

NEPIC (the North-East Process Industries Cluster) is a UK based organisation that NEPIC was created by leaders from the Process Industry to provide the mechanism for very close collaboration along the supply chain. ECI has contributed to its events and has planned a joint ECI/NEPIC event for October 2010 entitled ‘Re-activating ACTIVE’ . This will comprise a series of cases from organisations that have still successfully used ACTIVE in smaller projects, projects with compressed leadtimes or in situations where establishing collaborative relationships with clients have been difficult. It will use this opportunity to ask participants to recommend how ACTIVE could be developed in the future to respond to the changing demands on projects. The ACTIVE taskforce will use this as a valuable opportunity to tailor ACTIVE to changing needs.

New ACTIVE Researcher

Sajitha Nambiar

The ACTIVE taskforce will be supported from July of this year by a researcher from the University Of Loughborough, Sajitha Nambiar. Sajitha has a first class honours degree in electrical engineering and a Masters with Commendation in IT Project Management. She is a PMI Project Management Professional and a PRINCE2 registered practitioner. She has worked for many years in IT with companies such as EDS.  Her master’s research project was entitled ‘How to Understand What Performance Improvements Applying a Formal Project Management Approach has Yielded’

Sajitha will be creating a portfolio of cases of where organisations have used ACTIVE and the results that they have achieved by doing so and any adaptations that they needed to make to ACTIVE in the process. Sajitha will use these cases to come up with recommendation on if and how ACTIVE needs to be changes to better support project management.

ACTIVE Cup

The ECI ACTIVE Taskforce supports the ACTIVE Cup – a twice yearly competition to promote the ACTIVE collaborative approach to project management amongst young professionals. The event is  run by the ECITB. Lorne Clarke and Naomi Brookes both contributed to the January 2010 Competition

For further details on the ECI ACTIVE Taskforce, please contact Anu Khandelwal (A.Khandelwal@lboro.ac.uk)