Managing Brownfield Projects

Amit is a Senior Design Engineer with a rich, versatile experience of 20 years in engineering, project and construction management in the HVAC discipline.

  Change Management   Communications Management   Risk Management  

In the world of project management, the words “green” and “brown” aren’t just colors—they carry important meanings. Organizations often conduct greenfield projects, wherein everything begins from scratch (such as augmenting a new land, new investments, new planning, etc.), and in some circumstances they conduct brownfield projects—the ongoing/incomplete projects taken over by a company or a project team from another organization/project team.

Though brownfield projects are completed to a certain extent, they still carry several constraints, risks, issues, differences in opinions and more—and often arrive with an unknown history, making the project environment ambiguous.

Brownfield projects come in various forms, such as:

1. An acquisition of a stranded project by an organization from another organization
2. An ongoing project taken over by an organization from another organization (which will still be involved with the project)
3. The taking over of an ongoing project from a project manager who has resigned from the organization

This article will focus on some of the important considerations in effectively managing brownfield projects, which present many complicated aspects that must be carefully dealt with. I will explain these concerns as they relate to each process group.

Initiating
Usually, project kickoff …

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