The article is selected from CNNC's "Bimonthly Observation of Engineering Management."

Submission email: wuchenghao@cnncnit.cn

To implement the strategic deployment requirements of CNNC since the "14th Five-Year Plan" and build a world-class nuclear energy engineering company, China Nuclear Power Engineering Co., Ltd. adheres to innovation-driven development and deepening reform. Guided by the concept of performance excellence management, it continuously summarizes years of practical experience in nuclear engineering general contracting project management and optimizes its project management system. With strategy-driven development, process control, performance evaluation, and assessment-based improvement as key levers, it continuously improves the operational efficiency of the project management system, gathers comprehensive momentum for performance excellence management in business areas, and pushes the project management capability and level of nuclear engineering general contracting to a new level.

The performance excellence model aims to guide organizations to continuously pursue excellence, enhance their competitive advantages, and promote high-quality development. CNNC Engineering persists in advancing the general contracting management model. During the window of opportunity for batch nuclear power construction, it fully integrates customer and market needs, formulates development strategies in the project management field, coordinates the advancement of project standardization management system construction, integrates management resources of all project participants, emphasizes process management and multi-party collaboration, concentrates efforts on building a project portfolio performance excellence evaluation system, and deeply advances the implementation of integrated design and construction, ensuring high-quality construction of all nuclear engineering general contracting projects.

1. High-level planning: establishing excellence performance management goals for general contracting

Since its establishment in 2007, CNNC Engineering has resolutely implemented the construction concept of the engineering project general contracting model. Centering on achieving high-quality construction of nuclear power engineering projects, it has built a project management system featuring "the company oversees the overall, projects lead the battle, and business sectors lead construction." Through years of continuous optimization, it has now formed a professional nuclear engineering general contracting capability capable of simultaneously undertaking the construction of 16 nuclear power units.

Facing a new window of opportunity for nuclear power construction and development, CNNC Engineering actively implements CNNC's strategic deployment and fully leverages high-level strategic leadership. With the strategic goal of basically building a world-class nuclear energy engineering company by 2025 and with the construction of three core capabilities—"R&D and design, engineering general contracting, and equipment manufacturing"—as the strategic driver, it further enhances core functions, continuously expands the engineering project market in the nuclear power, nuclear chemical, and nuclear fuel fields, advances digital-intelligent integration and talent engineering, focuses on reducing costs and increasing efficiency, enhances core competitiveness, and promotes the company's high-quality development.

2. Coordinated advancement: gathering momentum for excellence performance management in general contracting

Using project standardization management as the benchmark to consolidate project portfolio system-building capability. In the process of continuously advancing general contracting project management capability building, CNNC Engineering upholds the concept of "three servings" (functions serve business sectors, business sectors serve projects, and projects serve owners). Centering on whole-life-cycle project construction, it advances collaborative cooperation among all project participants, emphasizes multi-project portfolio management system construction and process management, continuously identifies shortcomings and weaknesses in the project management business area based on customer satisfaction, and continuously optimizes and improves the project standardization management system.

CNNC Engineering has established a four-tier standardized project management procedure system, achieving comprehensive standardization of management requirements across four levels: top-level planning, outline management, standard process, and work instruction. It continuously advances the project management system toward refinement, intensification, and digitalization. Based on general contracting project management experience in nuclear power engineering and nuclear chemical engineering, it has gradually established procedure systems dedicated to nuclear power, dedicated to nuclear chemical engineering, and shared by nuclear power and nuclear chemical engineering. Among them, the first through third tiers have formulated a total of 363 standardized procedures in the project management field. At the same time, it focuses on advancing the preparation of fourth-tier work instructions, having completed the preparation and application of a total of 195 work instructions covering 11 business areas, and advances standardized training management activities matched to employees' different development stages, steadily improving project portfolio management capability from the perspective of overall company management.

With project portfolio operations control as the core, strengthening project portfolio process management capability.Focusing on the entire process of nuclear engineering general contracting construction, the project management stages are divided into eight major stages: project pre-phase, general contracting contract signing, project initiation, design stage, procurement stage, construction stage, commissioning stage, and project closeout. In the whole-process project management, CNNC Engineering focuses on studying the construction characteristics of nuclear power projects with multiple reactor types, builds a lean management system around the four major control objectives, comprehensively strengthens progress, cost, quality, and safety control at each stage, continuously optimizes the engineering project risk management system, improves communication and coordination mechanisms, and gradually enhances multi-project construction process management capability.

In the process of introducing the performance excellence management model and comprehensively advancing "end-to-end" process optimization in various business areas of nuclear engineering, it focuses on introducing new technologies, new equipment, and new methods, and on mining knowledge improvement methods and tools for application at different stages of process design, implementation, and improvement to support the achievement of strategic goals.

With project evaluation and improvement as supervision, enhancing project portfolio continuous optimization management capability.Guided by performance excellence management theory and based on the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) method, each business area focuses on advancing four types of evaluation and improvement activities: "stage self-assessment (including questionnaire interviews, experience feedback, summary and analysis reports, etc.), joint review by internal and external experts, business process benchmarking management and sandbox simulation, and special supervision and inspection of the management system." It continuously evaluates the execution of work in business areas such as progress, cost, quality, safety, risk management, project management, construction management, project manpower allocation, and standardized training for standard project positions. For common issues identified during multi-project system evaluation and work supervision, it provides solutions at the institutional and mechanism level and incorporates new requirements into standardized project procedures. For various differentiated management needs during project execution, it prepares special-needs procedures for standardized management, and after such special management processes have operated for a period of time, carries out operational effectiveness evaluation and process optimization evaluation, continuously iterating and optimizing the project management system.

To promote management innovation, CNNC Engineering annually organizes each project department to carry out research on soft management topics and evaluation activities for excellence-seeking topics, encouraging each project department to summarize good experience based on frontline practice, distill excellent management cases into management processes, and ultimately incorporate the management processes into the procedure system, forming closed-loop management. At the same time, to continuously improve customer satisfaction, CNNC Engineering annually organizes each project department to evaluate the applicability of and satisfaction with standardized procedure documents. For five consecutive years, the applicability evaluation results of procedure documents by each project department have all been above 99%.

With project portfolio comprehensive performance as the lever, empowering project portfolios to pursue excellence performance capability.CNNC Engineering has built a project portfolio excellence indicator evaluation system. By focusing on five dimensions—progress, cost, quality, safety, and sustainable development—it has built a "3-4-5-50" excellence indicator system covering key nodes of whole-process process control in engineering construction across the business domain, time domain, and logic domain. It selects typical process measurement indicators and process result indicators from the domain indicator library, and at the same time sets new process-type indicators in combination with various special tasks for high-quality development. Through scored calculation of indicator data, it determines the current-period performance score of each project, thereby determining the current-period comprehensive excellence performance ranking of multiple projects. In May 2023, CNNC Engineering released guidance opinions on system execution and assessment and organized each nuclear power project department to launch comprehensive excellence performance evaluation work. In June 2024, it completed the development of an online excellence indicator cockpit. At each period's multi-project management monthly meeting and the company general manager's special coordination meeting, the cockpit is used to report online the monthly indicator monitoring status of each project, providing management decision support for project general managers and the company's leadership.

By planning excellence performance management goals at a high level and coordinating the advancement of project standardization management, project portfolio operations control, project evaluation and improvement, and project portfolio comprehensive performance evaluation, CNNC Engineering has solidly carried out the introduction and implementation of the performance excellence management model in the engineering general contracting field, effectively improving project portfolio system-building capability and project portfolio process management capability. Looking to the future, CNNC Engineering will further adhere to lean management, continuously explore and practice, strive for excellence, push engineering project management to a higher level, and contribute greater strength to the development of China's nuclear power industry.

The original article was published in the 6th issue of 2025 of the magazine "China Nuclear Industry."