A Successful Approach in Integrating People, Process, and Technology Inside Collaborative Environments: A Practical View of Challenges and Lessons Learned
Authors: Derenzi D. , de Sousa P. S. , de Oliveira S. A. , Herdeiro M. A. N. , Albernaz J. R. , Valadares A. 
Published: April 2009

In 2005, Petrobras created a corporate program named GeDIg, designed to guide and implement Digital Integrated Field Management among its production assets. The Barracuda and Caratinga (BRC) asset was chosen as one of Rio de Janeiro Business Unit pilots. This asset is composed of two offshore deep-water oil fields, where two twin FPSOs, P-43 and P-48, produce a total of approximately 200,000 bpd of oil, with an average density of 24° API. Management and technical teams from BRC are geographically dispersed among four different locations: the asset's headquarters in Rio de Janeiro, the logistics and operations base in Macaé, a city located 190 km (118 miles) Northeast of Rio de Janeiro, and the two offshore production units, located about 160 km (100 miles) East of Macaé. Collaborative environments (CE) were implemented in each site to connect and integrate those teams.

The GeDIg-BRC pilot project, initiated in October 2006, was divided in five different areas: real time production operations monitoring, integrated planning, process design, change management, and collaborative environment design and construction. Also, during the earlier stages of the project, a business case was generated to identify, quantify and validate the expected benefits of the project.

A major challenge faced during the implementation of the GeDIg-BRC solution, was making the whole integration proposed by the collaborative environments become a reality. The asset started using its collaborative environments in mid 2007, when process optimization initiatives and IT solutions development were still in progress, supported by a change management and communications program. Although several technical components and processes were planned to support managers and engineers on their daily operational activities, there wasn't any specific support tool for optimizing the collaborative environments utilization. That gap motivated the development of a customized solution, specifically designed to support some key processes, which run inside the asset's collaborative environments. The solution was named Collaborative Portal.

This paper's objective is to describe the challenges faced by the asset's team and the lessons learned during the process of designing and effectively implementing the asset's Collaborative Environment and its customized support tool, the Collaborative Portal. This tool is successfully running since August 2008. It supports processes like the daily production monitoring meetings, gathering the asset manager and his key staff to efficiently and quickly monitor and control production status (KPIs), production losses, threats and opportunities, as well as defining, planning and following-up on preventive and corrective actions. It also supports other processes like anomalies prevention, customized meetings, visualization of offshore CCTV video cameras and manages the content of the asset's internal TV.