Turnaround Project Planning Primer


Lap Books


Updating the schedule requires timely and objective feedback on all progress achieved at shift end. To achieve this, Lap Books must be prepared and issued before the turnaround starts. Lap Books contain all of the detailed activities or tasks defined in the Work Order scope and the resulting schedule.

Objectivity is achieved in great part by a well-defined work scope. The greater the detail, the less guesswork is required to estimate percent complete for each item in the schedule and the more objective progress will be.

Approximately a couple of hours before the end of the shift, all supervisors that have Lap Books should record their daily progress against all work orders that are in progress. Two types of information should be recorded by the field supervisors:

  • "Percent complete", an estimate of the relative amount of work accomplished towards completing every activity
  • Time remaining to complete an activity in progress (if problems or delays are encountered)

All activities that were completed during the shift should be marked 100%. Those activities which are in progress should receive the best estimate of "percent complete", plus a fresh re-estimate of the remaining clock hours needed to complete them.

The Lap Books are then delivered to the turnaround planner, who updates the schedule, and returns the Lap Books to the field. The Lap Books are shared between the supervisors covering the same areas on different shifts. This promotes better communication between the day shift and night shift crews.

Lap Books could be organized by area, supervisor or type of work. Every field supervisor must have a Lap Book containing all of the work orders for which he is responsible (even if he is responsible for only one or a few of the activities listed).

The Lap Books, plus the daily Shift Schedules provide field supervisors with all the information they need to organize, schedule and control their work.


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The Turnaround Project Planning Primer is an abridged version of the STO Planning Handbook.

For further reading, we also recommend Joel Levitt’s Managing Maintenance Shutdowns and Outages.