Proposed Project Selection & Prioritization Framework during Front-End Planning (FEP) for Revitalization Project Portfolio at Indonesian Oil Refinery Plant

Abstract— Due to their aging, refinery facilities face the threat of suffering from incidents and accidents. Even fatal injury may be caused if running without proper maintenance planning. The revitalization project is performed intended to replace, repair, or increase production capacity at an existing refinery. Like other projects in the construction sector, the revitalization project tends to experience the same common flaws in their performance; project delay, cost overrun, scope creeping, operational mishaps, and canceled or stopped. The best time for a project to experience idea development, conduct scope changes, prepare excellent project engineering, etc., is at the Front-end Planning stage. This paper focused on project selection and prioritization at the Front-end Planning. The focus is then zoomed in to the sub-stage of Front-end Planning (initiation, conceptual, and basic engineering design). The aim is to eliminate the infeasible and unpromising projects that cannot meet the requirement. This focus is necessary before more resources are expended, which can ignite catastrophic events in the organization, primarily financial.The literature reviews have been done on the references to develop a comprehensive framework that decomposes the front-end planning into three sub-phases, providing the platform for project selection in each stage with its different focus and objectives. The new framework is proposed emphasizing the gate review and decision gates for those three sub-stages under the Front-end planning phase. The framework also provides the windows of having different selection criteria at each stage; hence the proper criteria will be efficiently used at the right time. Project proposals must go through a prioritization process since the organization's resource is not unlimited. Project proposals would experience the evaluation and selection as an individual project and, at a subsequent level, would be evaluated as part of the project proposals pool where the Project Management Office will prioritize the suitable projects worth execution.