The Year Turnarounds Hit the Limit
By the time most plants reached their last major outage of 2025, the story sounded familiar.
Schedules were tighter. Scopes were heavier. Contractor markets were stretched. And there was very little appetite for "we will do better next time" without a clear answer to how.
From NHD's conversations with turnaround, maintenance, and operations teams, a pattern emerged. Projects varied in size, geography, and type of work, but the friction points were remarkably consistent.
This article distills those lessons into five truths from 2025 turnarounds and, more importantly, what they suggest about where to focus in 2026 if you want real improvement without embarking on a risky big-bang transformation.
Truth 1: The Plan Looked Solid on Paper. The Execution Environment Did Not.
Most teams would say their planning maturity has climbed over the last decade. There is more structure, more historical data, better risk registers, and more sophisticated scheduling.
Yet when the outage started, the experience on the ground often felt much less sophisticated than the planning deck. Crews arrived to incomplete work packages, missing permits, or unclear constraints. Supervisors juggled last-minute clarifications in radio calls and hallway conversations.
The truth is that a plan is only as strong as the environment it lands in. If pre-work checks, permits, isolation procedures, and handoffs are scattered across tools and teams, even an excellent plan will feel fragile during execution.
Small win for 2026:
Move at least one critical pre-start check (for example, isolation and permits for high-risk work) into a shared, visible workflow that everyone can see and trust. Treat it as a non-negotiable gate, not an optional checklist.
Truth 2: Scope Growth Leaked In, One "Quick Job" at a Time
Very few turnarounds blew up because of a single massive scope change. Instead, 2025 was the year of the slow leak.
A flange that "might as well be inspected while we are in there."
A small piping modification that "will not take long."
An inspection finding that turns into a replacement.
Individually, these decisions are rational. Collectively, they quietly erode schedule confidence and resource availability. The original critical path becomes a best-case scenario, not a realistic forecast.
Most teams lacked a simple, enforced way to classify, approve, and communicate scope growth as it happened. Change control existed, but it lived in spreadsheets or static documents that lagged reality.
Small win for 2026:
Define a minimal, practical change-control path for the turnaround and actually use it. For example:
- Step 1: Log every proposed change with a short description, risk level, and requested timing.
- Step 2: Require a single accountable owner to approve or reject changes against a small set of criteria (safety, regulatory, critical reliability, contractual obligation).
- Step 3: Update the execution view in one place that all stakeholders use, rather than circulating separate lists.
You do not need a full-scale portfolio-management program to do this. You do need the discipline and a shared workspace that makes it easy.
Truth 3: Materials and Contractors Were the Real Critical Path
If you asked teams where their schedule risk lived, the conversation often started with complex jobs, specialty inspections, or heavy lifts. In practice, the most common constraints were simpler:
- Materials that were not on site when the crew was ready.
- Contractor teams double-booked across overlapping scopes.
- Vendor approvals or quality checks that took longer than assumed.
Materials and contractor availability quietly became the de facto critical path, even when the Gantt chart suggested otherwise.
The root cause was not a lack of recognition. Most teams knew these were risks. The issue was that information about materials and vendors was stored in different systems than the job plan. By the time someone connected the dots, options were limited.
Small win for 2026:
Promote materials and contractor readiness to a first-class status indicator. For high-risk or schedule-critical jobs, do not treat "materials ordered" as complete. Track:
- Materials at site and kitted.
- Contractor confirmed, with contingency identified.
- Dependencies (such as vendor inspections) scheduled and visible to all.
Connecting these status checks into your execution workspace allows supervisors to see risks in time to re-sequence work instead of firefighting.
Truth 4: Communication Failures Were Small, Frequent, and Expensive
When people talk about communication breakdowns, they often picture dramatic moments: a radio call missed in a crisis, or a major change not communicated to the night shift.
In 2025, the more common failures were mundane:
- Ownership of a job was assumed but not confirmed.
- A permit restriction was not visible to the contractor team until they reached the job site.
- An operations constraint agreed in one meeting never made it into the latest version of the schedule.
Each gap was small. Under time pressure, they multiplied.
The pattern is clear: communication that relies on memory, meetings, and email collapses under turnaround conditions. Teams need shared, persistent context that travels with the job, not with the last person who touched the spreadsheet.
Small win for 2026:
Choose one or two critical communication handoffs (for example, Ops-to-Maintenance before equipment release, or Permit-to-Contractor before job start) and standardize them in a shared digital workflow. Ensure that:
- The latest constraints and approvals are visible to everyone who touches the work.
- Changes create a visible audit trail, not an email thread.
Every gap you close here reduces rework and improves safety without adding meetings.
Truth 5: Lessons Learned Were Captured but Not Reused
Most plants hold some form of post-turnaround review. Teams discuss what worked, what failed, and what they want to change next time.
However, the output of those sessions often ends up as:
- A slide deck saved in a shared drive.
- A spreadsheet with hundreds of lines of "issues" and "actions."
- Notes in personal notebooks or emails.
By the time the next turnaround cycle begins, the practical memory of what happened is faded. New planners or contractors repeat old mistakes simply because they cannot see the last project's reality in a usable way.
Small win for 2026:
Turn lessons learned into a small, living playbook for the next turnaround, not a static document. For example:
- Distill the last project into ten highly specific "rules we will follow next time."
- Attach these rules directly to templates, checklists, or work packages in the tools your teams already use.
- Make them visible during planning and execution, not just in a kickoff meeting.
When learning is embedded where work happens, you do not have to rely on memory or heroics to improve.
Compounding Small Wins Add Up
The five truths above tell a clear story. Turnaround performance is not constrained by a lack of strategy, ambition, or even technical capability. It is constrained by the everyday mechanics of how work is controlled, communicated, and learned from.
That is why many organizations are moving away from large, multi-year "transformation programs" toward targeted improvements that build on each other:
- A more reliable pre-start check here.
- A tighter change-control loop there.
- A clearer connection between materials, contractors, and the execution plan.
- A living playbook that actually survives into the next cycle.
Individually, each change is modest. Together, they create a very different execution environment for the next turnaround.
NHD's work with AES/32 is focused on exactly this shift: giving teams a shared, digital operating picture that makes disciplined execution feel natural rather than heroic. Whether you use our platform or not, the opportunity is the same:
Stop chasing the perfect plan on paper. Start building the environment where good plans can actually survive contact with the outage.
If 2025 stretched your turnaround teams to the limit, you are not alone. The good news is that meaningful improvement in 2026 does not require starting over.
It requires seeing these truths clearly, choosing a few small wins you can commit to, and building the execution discipline to make them stick.
Where will you take your first small win?
