Situation: The Offshore division of an exploration and production company had lost $1bn on a single well and the Group CEO wanted to hold someone accountable (his actual words were, “I want someone’s head on a spike!”). There was a lot of tension between the parent organisation and the offshore organisation and the business was at risk of being sold or closed down.

Task: Ascertain if this was a one-off project failure or whether there was a systemic problem in the offshore division, then design and implement solutions to turnaround the performance of the business, saving 500+ jobs.

Actions:

• Talked the Group CEO around to the Task to ensure cooperation from the people in the offshore division.
• Designed and approach to fulfilling the task by running a strategic operating model review concurrently with a subsurface technical review of the project.
• Ran the strategic operating model analysis and design first phase: Interviewed Group Exec, the Offshore Exec, Technical functional leads in multiple regions, to determine the nature of the problem, the underlying causes, the options / solutions available to them, what value each represented, and a plan of the sequence and dependencies between the solutions.
  • Strategy, Process [QC, QA, Project Management, Risk Management], Governance and Accountabilities, Capabilities, Performance Management, and Knowledge Management.
• Presented findings and recommendations to the Group and Offshore Execs, agreed the desired outcome with them, defined the transformation programme with them, levers of value, and resources and budget.
• Led the Process work stream at the heart of the programme, mobilised and led a 45-person transformation team (15 + 30) across work streams, iterating solution designs and the operating model for the offshore division
• Led the design and running of the pilot, and seconding members of the team to support regional teams with their project execution.

Results:

• Enabled effective cross-functional project delivery
• Met commitments to first oil
• Transformed divisional performance
• Improved cross-functional working, reduced rework and project slippage, and c.20% improvement in time to first production
• Delivered $100m benefits ahead of schedule.