New Oilfield Technology Deployment Requires Team Approach

Over the last 20 years, I have helped to champion the adoption of new technologies in the oilpatch - most of which both improves efficiencies and improves production.  This has included specific technologies and broad impact technologies, many of which are beginning to merge.  Applications have been slow and learners over the years have seen many notread the history that is available to them.  Younger engineers have "latest information" syndrome and I see many of the same mistakes causing the corporate enterprise to loose multi-millions, even billions in lost production, problem wells, poor well architecture, poor intervention and production planning, and poor remedy analyses.  Many of the problems with horizontal wells and horizontal well technology, multilateral well technology, underbalanced drilling technology (later coined managed pressure drilling), coiled tubing drilling and applications, smart well completions, and others have been with application and development with a real team approach and with histories well searched and populated with ease of reference.

There are many directions I could take with the above paragraph.  It could fill a whole book.  The recent BP and their contractors' disaster point to the stakes being extremely high and possibly very visible hurting industry.  The importance of communication, team, and commonality of mission is so important. 

I give a case outside our industry on harnessing the power of the team to mission.  Solutions and optimum performance and results become hard to achive, but where teams have been effective, nine times out of ten, there are better results.

NASA had a fellow Charlie Pellerin who served as director of astrophysics, but was the leader of a team that built the Hubble Space Telescope.   His major challenge was rebuilding and transforming underachieving groups into very productive teams, after the Hubble fiasco of a flawed mirror made the $1.7 billion Hubble useless (which he led earlier).

I always use the premise in complex technology application that you are as good as your weakest link.  The Challenger disaster due to an o-ring and rigorous review points to the idea of the weakest link concept.  If your team is not a high collaborative productive team, the weak link will for many times rear its ugly head and cost you millions.

As we also know in the oilfield, that cookie-cutting can get a person in trouble real quick if the application has not been properly reviewed.

Pellerin notes that collaborative process sucess depends on the "soft side" (human capability and interaction).  He works off eight behaviors that aide collaboration:
"*expressing authentic appreciation
 *addressing shared interests
 *appropriately including others
 *keeping all agreements
 *expressing reality-based optimism
 *100 per cent commiting
 *avoiding blaming and complaining
 *clarifying roles, accountability and delegated authority"

I have taught geosteering over the years, with also planting the requirements for team to be successful in having the highest return on investment as possible by the group.  Drillers and drilling engineers have a hard time when the geologists and reservoir engineers request that they increase dog leg severity (crooked hole) that the thing the drilling engineer and driller are measured against (rate of penetration, days to drill the well, etc) are impacted negatively.  However, staying in sweet spots (highly productive areas of the reservoir) and keeping offset from reservoir boundaries can drastically increase the production results of the well being drilled.  It is only through a team concept can these issues be properly addressed and planned for effectively.

You need people who that work together without feeling threatened, without holding information hostage as a power struggle.  When a "team" of highly capable, highly educated, and highly creative people work together, team concepts and execution becomes critical for success.

All Marketing Links Must Be Used for Conferences

I recently came across a great article by Michael Healey, President of Yeoman Technologies.  In the article he notes that the next few years will see the rewriting of enterprise collaboration and communication processes.  All business enterprises are being challenged to figure out the correct way to go while still preserving data/information/knowledge integrity, archival, disemination, creation, capture, and structure.  The social network and its multiple channels only layers more complex tiers and challenges to petroleum and information data management.

Healey noted that 89% of his respondents to their 2010 survey say their companies are using some type of social networking via blogs, wikis, discussion forums, or full-blown enterprise social network systems.

When you look further at his results, 90% of those using it have poor to small pockets of usage, with only 10% where usage is high and communication is improved.  Emails also had this type of usage over 10 years earlier, and it seems to still be a gold standard in general communication processes in the enterprise. Also he notes that when it comes to policies and procedures related to enterprise social networking, no one wants to make the hard rules.  Standards and standard processes have to be developed to be effective to the enterprise.

From a conference perspective, unfortunately conferences must use all channels available to manage a conference, event, or function properly.  We must continue to use snail mail, email, phone, face contacts, etc. across the board to be effective and have a great event.  We use multiple channels effectively to get our business accomplished and managed with quality and certainty of process accomplishment.