Acknowledgements
The foundation of all the concepts developed in this book is the authors’ work with clients via a number of consulting firms on particular issues for specific projects over more than 30 years. This practical experience was shaped in part by working with both clients and professional bodies on generic processes. This grounding fed a research process concerned with synthesizing the authors’ hands-on practical experience, its distillation in publications including synthesis with the broader literature, and feeding new insights back into practice in an ongoing iterative process.
The first process that the authors were involved in directly contained most of the key features of the PUMPs described in this book. The process was developed with BP (British Petroleum at that time) for their offshore North Sea projects by Acres International Management Services, beginning in 1976. It was successfully implemented on the Magnus project, then mandated world wide for all large or sensitive BP projects. It was referred to as SCERT (Synergistic Contingency Evaluation and Review Technique) for publication purposes (Chapman, 1979), to reflect its evolution from PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique) and PERT’s numerous derivatives (Moder and Philips, 1970). It provides useful examples of some ‘high clarity’ PUMP features, drawn on throughout this book.
BP’s attractiveness as an exemplar client was severely damaged by the April 2010 Deepwater Horizon accident in the Gulf ...
