Competence Assurance in a Complex Company
Authors: Clarke C.C. , Sykes R.M. 
Published: December 2007

Shell companies have their own separate identities. In this paper the collective expressions 'Shell' and 'Group' and 'Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Companie's may be used for convenience where reference is made to the companies of the Royal Dutch/Shell Group in general. Those expressions are also used where no useful purpose is served by identifying the particular company or companies.

Competence is the fundamental control that is used in industry to function in a safe and effective manner. Even after all mechanical interventions are applied within a system, the competence of human beings is relied upon to make the final decisions and to implement the ultimate actions.

To be effective, an organisation must assure itself that all the controls and barriers that are necessary to keep the operations of the business within the designed envelope, are effectively working at or above the minimum required levels. This assurance applies equally to workforce competence as it does to alarms and other automatic control systems. The HSE Management System/HSE Case methodology that evolved into regulation from the Cullen enquiry into the Piper Alpha disaster demands that specific competences must be in place, and that management must sign off that this is so.

Assurance of competence involves identifying critical abilities and defining the standards to which they must be consistently performed, and then implementing a consistent and rigorous means of testing and validating the people who occupy roles that include critical abilities. This paper addresses with the methods that Shell Exploration and Production B.V. has developed to ensure that the competences are in place for critical occupational health, safety and environmental roles.

Introduction

A quality HSE Management System, as required by law in the North Sea sector of the oil and gas business, requires competence in the work force to provide many of the necessary controls. The challenge for management is to match the competences of personnel to the requirements of the work to be performed, and to actively plan and implement the development of competence to meet the corporate needs for the future.

Competence can be defined as the aggregate of a person's abilities in terms of awareness, knowledge and skill measured against specified standards for performing particular tasks (Figure 1). The key elements of this definition are:–the emphasis on performing work (not knowledge or skills for their own sake)–the words 'specified standards' (so that assessment can be objective and not subjective).

The definition also implies a more formal, objective process of assessing performance than most past practices and is concerned with being clear about what is being assessed and how it is assessed.

Competence in many companies has simply evolved over time but evolution is not necessarily an effective means to manage developments in the modern technical world of the oil and gas business. The impacts of the mistakes that are made as part of evolutionary learning are often a too high price to pay in terms of human injury, environmental damage or profitability of the business.

Satisfaction with existing competitive positions may lead some companies to infer that a substantial and sufficient state of competence already exists but this is not necessarily the case. The level of competence might not stand rigorous scrutiny in a court of law where 'due diligence' and 'responsible care' are significant factors to be judged.

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