What Advanced Work Packaging is
Advanced Work Packaging (AWP) is a construction planning strategy that organizes engineering, procurement, and construction work into a structured hierarchy of packages before execution begins, so that field crews receive work that is genuinely ready to build — with the right drawings, materials, equipment, and access available when the work is scheduled.
AWP was formalized as an industry practice by the Construction Owners Association of Alberta (COAA), initially in the context of Alberta oil sands megaprojects, where poor work-readiness was a major driver of cost and schedule overruns. It has since been adopted more broadly across industrial, energy, and infrastructure capital projects.
The package hierarchy: CWP, EWP, IWP
AWP breaks a project down into three linked package types. A Construction Work Package (CWP) defines a geographic or systems-based scope of construction work, aligned to how the project will actually be built and commissioned. Each CWP is supported by one or more Engineering Work Packages (EWPs) — the engineering deliverables (drawings, specifications, material take-offs) required to execute that construction scope.
Within a CWP, work is further broken down into Installation Work Packages (IWPs) — the field-level unit of work a crew executes, typically sized to a few days of work for a single crew, sequenced according to how the work will physically be built. This IWP-level detail is what distinguishes AWP from higher-level project scheduling: it connects strategic sequencing all the way down to a specific, checkable unit of field work.
Why it matters: predictability, not just planning
The core claim behind AWP — supported by industry research from bodies including the Construction Industry Institute (CII) — is that construction productivity losses are disproportionately caused by work that starts before it is truly ready (missing materials, incomplete engineering, unresolved constraints), not by a lack of a schedule. AWP's discipline is specifically aimed at closing that readiness gap before a crew is mobilized to a task.
AWP is often paired with Workface Planning (WFP), the field-execution practice that manages IWPs day to day — sequencing, resourcing, and releasing them to crews once constraints are cleared. AWP defines the package structure; Workface Planning operates it.