Process Safety: Sustaining Change: Oil and Gas
The Situation
The Upstream part of an oil and gas company had spent $10bn on improving Asset Integrity across their assets as an immediate response to the Texas City refinery explosion of 2005. Asset Integrity at its most basic level is the systematic approach to ensuring that assets like oil rigs are safe and not subject to potentially catastrophic incidents. The Deepwater Horizon Macondo explosion and leak in 2010 added further reinforcement to the need for the work. The Asset Integrity programme focused on making and embedding a series of operational improvements, for example in routine & predictive maintenance or in the running of Operations Rooms. Having made significant improvements across the operation, the concern was how this would be embedded once the programme ended. The fear was that the investment made in this area was contingent upon a high oil price- bad practice might return if this changed and the business focus became "keep pumping".
The Approach
We conducted an initial survey and interviews with 62 members of staff across every geographic region that was rank ranged between Executive Vice President to operational site managers reporting to an Asset Manager. The scope of the interviews also crossed asset, regional and head office functional boundaries, as well as key members of the programme. We fed back the finding and proposed actions in a series of global meetings in order to validate the work and the conclusions we had drawn. This then led into a series of workshops with the programme team focused on 3 key issues: Maintaining Chronic Unease on Asset Integrity, Developing Post Programme Organisational Capability and Embedding Asset Integrity in the Business. Implementation would take place in the programme and at each level of the organisation over the following years. We supported the initial stages of implementation from within the programme, including aspects of the organisation design.
The Outcome
Permanent staff roles and processes were established up and down the organisation to ensure the change was operationalised and transitioned successfully after the programme ended . Operational leaders were trained on Leading Process Safety across the organisation over the subsequent year. All sites achieved "Calculative" status on Maintenance Integrity, with many continuing to achieve "Generative" status. Asset Integrity performance measures were embedded in operational management targets. Our recommendation on cultural change focused upon developing a more coherent approach to "consequence management"- there were many bonuses and rewards for production, but less recognition for AIPS performance. Consequence Management was also weak for management lapses irrespective of whether these eventually led to a release to atmosphere/ an incident or not. Our view was, and remains, that matrix based management without adequate consequence management beyond the Asset Manager is a significant risk. Efforts in Asset Integrity require rigorous discipline in applying thousands of repetitive activities in a myriad of difficult locations. Managing and leading this successfully is about behaviours,, performance and investment rather than engineering.
The Upstream part of an oil and gas company had spent $10bn on improving Asset Integrity across their assets as an immediate response to the Texas City refinery explosion of 2005. Asset Integrity at its most basic level is the systematic approach to ensuring that assets like oil rigs are safe and not subject to potentially catastrophic incidents. The Deepwater Horizon Macondo explosion and leak in 2010 added further reinforcement to the need for the work. The Asset Integrity programme focused on making and embedding a series of operational improvements, for example in routine & predictive maintenance or in the running of Operations Rooms. Having made significant improvements across the operation, the concern was how this would be embedded once the programme ended. The fear was that the investment made in this area was contingent upon a high oil price- bad practice might return if this changed and the business focus became "keep pumping".
The Approach
We conducted an initial survey and interviews with 62 members of staff across every geographic region that was rank ranged between Executive Vice President to operational site managers reporting to an Asset Manager. The scope of the interviews also crossed asset, regional and head office functional boundaries, as well as key members of the programme. We fed back the finding and proposed actions in a series of global meetings in order to validate the work and the conclusions we had drawn. This then led into a series of workshops with the programme team focused on 3 key issues: Maintaining Chronic Unease on Asset Integrity, Developing Post Programme Organisational Capability and Embedding Asset Integrity in the Business. Implementation would take place in the programme and at each level of the organisation over the following years. We supported the initial stages of implementation from within the programme, including aspects of the organisation design.
The Outcome
Permanent staff roles and processes were established up and down the organisation to ensure the change was operationalised and transitioned successfully after the programme ended . Operational leaders were trained on Leading Process Safety across the organisation over the subsequent year. All sites achieved "Calculative" status on Maintenance Integrity, with many continuing to achieve "Generative" status. Asset Integrity performance measures were embedded in operational management targets. Our recommendation on cultural change focused upon developing a more coherent approach to "consequence management"- there were many bonuses and rewards for production, but less recognition for AIPS performance. Consequence Management was also weak for management lapses irrespective of whether these eventually led to a release to atmosphere/ an incident or not. Our view was, and remains, that matrix based management without adequate consequence management beyond the Asset Manager is a significant risk. Efforts in Asset Integrity require rigorous discipline in applying thousands of repetitive activities in a myriad of difficult locations. Managing and leading this successfully is about behaviours,, performance and investment rather than engineering.
