Brutus Operational Readiness: Building on Past Projects
Authors: Smith Chris , Wintermute Roger , Duran James , Broussard Ken , Spillman Frank 
Published: October 2008

Overall, the Operational Readiness activities have been very positive on Brutus. A strong core group of personnel were put in place that did a good job. However, a number of changes were made in the organizational model and the staff ramp-up for Operations personnel that might have gone too far, especially considering some of the technical changes that were also introduced in the Brutus design. In addition, the work environment changed considerably from 1998 to 2001 and some of the assumptions concerning workloads and skilled staff availability did not manifest themselves exactly as assumed. This paper will discuss the model implemented on Brutus and provide a hindsight critique of the model.

Introduction

Starting up Major Projects will continue to be a vital part of the E&P business. As the number of projects increase, the demand for experienced Operations personnel to work on the front-end activities will also increase. Unfortunately, it is always a challenge to pull these people in from the active field locations to work on assets that are not currently producing revenue. It is important to get the right balance between streamlining these activities versus going too far and having a new project start-up that is not operational or experiences significant issues during its first year of operation. Brutus is the fifth TLP platform for Shell in the Gulf of Mexico. For each of the previous four, Shell Production Operations personnel got engaged early on in "Operational Readiness" activities aimed at assuring that the new facility is operationally ready to produce and the personnel are ready as well. However, the degree to which Operations was involved on the past projects varied considerably. For the Brutus project, attempts were made to learn from the previous projects and standardize the processes so that they can be replicated for future projects. In addition, we tried to take advantage of the fact that we had put four TLPâ??s into service and we had a great wealth of operational readiness information that did not have to be reinvented for Brutus, as well as a strong base of experienced operations personnel. This lead to changes in the Operations organizational design and the model for engagement prior to first production.

Major Projects Operations Team (MPOT)

Early Operations support for Brutus began with a single individual working with the Project Execution group early in the System Selection phase of the project. He was a resource from a central group called the Major Projects Operations Team (MPOT) within the Production Department. MPOTâ??s role is to provide Operational support to all new development projects in order to ensure that the projects are fully operational at first production. The amount of support varies from one person to a fully staffed organization depending on both the type of project (e.g. Hub facility or subsea tieback) and the phase of the project (eg. System Selection, Project Execution, etc.). Regardless of the type of project, MPOT defines its work as assuring "Operational Readiness".