Go Team!
“As the world grows faster and more interdependent, we need to figure out ways to scale the fluidity of teams across entire organizations: groups with thousands of members that span continents” General S McChrystal
collaboration
kəlabəˈreɪʃn/
noun
- the action of working with someone to produce something.
Collaboration is one of those words, it gets flung around nearly as much as the other “ions” innovation and disruption. But there’s a reason buzzwords are buzzing.
When you build an engineering asset, like an oil facility, power plant etc. I’m going to throw it out there that this is not something that you do alone, either as an individual or organisation. You need a team and you need to work with that team. So guess what, you’re collaborating.
For the engineering sector and Oil and Gas in particular there is a huge wealth of good information that collaboration is the key to improving any number of important metrics; efficiency, margins, HSE the list goes on. You needn’t just take my word for it either…
As I’ve talked about before the more complex your engineering project is, the higher the chances are that it’s going to have problems and a big part of this is due to collaborating, or lack of. The irony of this is that engineers are typically great at collaborating. The design process is all about making smart compromises between small, highly skilled teams to solve what are in reality difficult and complex problems.
The key to this is that the knowledge is tied up in these small teams and the mechanisms, culture and tools are lacking to share the information locked up in these small teams visible across entire projects and organisations.
Things are changing though…
I’ve been involved with the CFIHOS standard for a number of years now. It’s actually pretty amazing to see how this all came about. CFIHOS (Capital Facilities Information Handover Specification) is all about standardising the information handover for every project for everyone.
The genesis of CFIHOS was Shell (yes that Shell) basically deciding to share their engineering information standard with the world and allow people to build on it.
The CFIHOS team give their time to the standard to build and improve upon it. The team comprises of some of the largest operators and engineering contractors in the world, these are busy people, trust me. The whole thing is about as grass roots as anything in the sector gets but with genuine backing.
The really cool thing is that all of these companies have chosen to collaborate, which is a pretty amazing culture shift.
The need for this to happen is pretty stark, better collaboration means you get better things out, I can link to any number of great articles and white papers about it but it really does.
The lesson from CFIHOS is that the culture in engineering projects is starting to change, companies are starting to change.
By working together your project is going to get better information, by making that information transparent you’re going to reap all the rewards that I outlined earlier in the article, which has got to be worth a buzzword or two.
