Front-End Loading for Change Management and Capability Delivery
Authors: Denney Dennis 
Published: February 2015

This article, written by Senior Technology Editor Dennis Denney, contains highlights of paper SPE 128227, ’Front- End Loading for Change Management and Capability Delivery,’ by Michael Popham, SPE, BAE Systems, prepared for the 2010 SPE Intelligent Energy Conference and Exhibition, Utrecht, Netherlands, 23-25 March. The paper has not been peer reviewed.
Digital-oilfield initiatives (DOIs) seek to improve the way we work, enabling safer efficient operation while maximizing hydrocarbon recovery. Yet, delivering change across an organization remains challenging. A new approach to front-end loading for change management and capability delivery called “visualization and experimentation” (V&E) is presented. Over the past decade, V&E has been used extensively in the defense, aerospace, and emergency-services industries. V&E uses realistic mockups of proposed capabilities to allow user-centered design and assessment of potential changes.
Introduction
It is important to understand why current methods fail to deliver against expectations. DOIs have encountered four major barriers to progress.
Global Scaling and Adoption. There is a realization that adopting DOIs across organizations is a big challenge. Centrally initiated, localized pilot projects can prove the benefits of a new concept, but wider adoption is difficult to achieve. Delivering organiza-tionwide improvement through DOIs depends on generating a strong pull from the assets and their user community for the products of centralized initiatives. If many users from across the organization are committed to a proposed change in the “select” phase, it could be game changing. Equally, by involving end users at an early stage, wasting investment in changes that have little chance of success could be avoided.
Benefits of DOIs. Often, it proves difficult to quantify the benefits that DOI-enabled improvements deliver, even for pilots that intuitively add value. It is often difficult to isolate the benefits that accrue from specific DOIs from those of other change factors. This challenge has made it difficult for central DOI teams to sell changes to assets to build robust business cases.
People, Process, Technology, and Organization (PPTO) Integration. To deliver change, operators must integrate across the PPTO. If any of these aspects is not addressed, the benefits of DOIs may not be delivered. However, while people acknowledge that all PPTO must be addressed in unison, understanding how these elements interact remains a problem.
Slow Progress. The potential benefits of DOIs are considerable, but for many organizations, delivering these gains has been slower than expected. It is recognized that the DOI transition will be a long process and must maintain senior-stakeholder support for a lengthy period. To keep that sponsorship, two key challenges must be addressed.
Communicating the DOL vision and the benefits that can be delivered to key stakeholders
Accelerating the delivery of DOIs
The full-length paper shows that these challenges are not unique to the upstream oil and gas industry, and it explores how similar problems have been observed in the defense sector. The root cause of each issue in that industry is discussed, and those same factors are investigated for the oil and gas industry.