Skip to main content

What I learnt...working on a major oil and gas development project

I spent 6 months carrying out a management system assessment on a offshore facilities and subsea infrastructure development project.  The project had just passed the Financial Investment Decision stage and the operator (a global super-major) had a growing project team of circa 70 people working alongside the EPC contractor's team.

So what I learnt was:
  • a lot about the technical challenges and processes involved in getting oil and gas out of the ground.  For an accountant, and consultant, with a wide industry experience and a high level "head office" view of what actually happens in the oil field, this project provided a rapid deepening of my knowledge of how the upstream oil and gas industry works.
  • the challenge of getting a physically remote project team, staffed mainly with contractors, to comply with the global policies and standards as well as the fundamental role project leadership plays in meeting that challenge
  • for major development projects like this, the key role the future operations team plays in getting the design right and making sure that operations does not pick up the bill for decisions made for project delivery expediency

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Making operational risk personal

Having worked in in the risk and safety management area of the oil and gas industry I have seen, and in small part helped, some of the leading operators work hard on improving their safety culture.  The realisation in the industry has been that layers of processes and controls can only go so far. Front line staff need to remain aware of the risks they face and not become complacent such that they do not spot those small indicators that something is out of place.   So creating a culture that counters this tendency toward complacency, or risk normalisation, has been a focus for oil and gas operators. The oil and gas industry is not the only one that faces risks that could lead to catastrophic losses and the removal of the licence to operate. Financial institutions have faced such losses through failures in processes and controls around rogue trading, mis-selling of products and failures in anti-money laundering controls.  The Basel Committee on Banking Stability (BCBS) as well as re
Post a Comment
Read more

Are safety KPIs counter-productive?

A colleague who works with a major international oil and gas company said “Safety KPIs achieve the exact opposite of their original intent”. Whilst he was undoubtedly being provocative to stimulate internal debate, the basis for such a bold statement can be seen in organisations that have comprehensive reporting mechanisms but still suffer from major safety incidents. Safety performance metrics face an inherent difficulty in that managers have a strong temptation to make their numbers as good as possible when they report their performance.   This will be true for safety just as it is for production, sales, financials and any other business performance metric.   Unfortunately, this tendency is the exact opposite of what is required for good safety performance.   A common theme in many of the major catastrophic industrial incidents is the fact that warning signs were there but were not reported.     If there is a bias that emphasises the good and glosses over the bad, there is li
Post a Comment
Read more

What I learnt...as Finance Director of a small UK motor car manufacturer

I was reminded recently of one of the more interesting episodes in my career when, for about twelve months, I was fortunate to be seconded to a small car manufacturer as Finance Director (both the cars and the company were small!).  It presented an exciting departure from my normal way of working but was also an opportunity to learn.  Here are the major takeaways for me from this experience: Collective executive responsibility Being part of the executive team meant that we plotted the course for the company and that we all bought into the strategy and the plan to deliver it.  We were making significant changes to the products, to the manufacturing process and to the supply chain and we all had to be clear about what we were doing, why we were doing it and how we were going about it.  Employees, shareholders, bankers, auditors and the press would be asking questions and we had to be consistent and clear in answering those questions but then in the actions and decisions we took. Vis
Post a Comment
Read more