The industry is enamored with the asset team concept. But is it really being applied?
As I worked on the time-lapse seismic overview for this month's issue (see "Is it finally time for time-lapse?" p. 36), I found myself hearing over and over about an issue that seems to be of great concern to those who would like to see this technology become more routinely used in the oil patch. The concerns were not about repeatability of surface surveys or robustness of downhole sensors or overwhelming amounts of data, though these things are certainly challenges. The concerns were about the potential communication gaps between the geophysicists who acquire and process the data and the engineers who need to make timely decisions based on it.
I've written in the past about petrophysicists and geophysicists and their need to communicate information about rock properties. Others have written about the need for synergies between the geologist and the geophysicist. If these "explorationists" ever learn to speak the same language, that's only half the battle - they then have to find some way to convey their message to a whole host of engineers responsible for drilling, completing and producing the wells that they've helped to place and analyze.
I think the inability of some companies, and some employees within those companies, to truly embrace the asset team concept is one of the oil industry's dirty little secrets. There seems to be a generic acceptance that most companies are using this approach, that the old "silo" workflow is ancient history, but anecdotally I hear grumblings from operators and criticism from service companies that the promise of the team approach is not fully being realized. And when one examines what a true asset team is expected to deliver, perhaps that's not particularly surprising.
There is, after all, more to building a team than throwing a group of people together and telling them to get started on a project. Learning new things takes time, whether it's a new software application or a new workflow approach, and unfortunately many companies are more likely to offer training on the former than the latter. Expecting geologists and production engineers to figure out on their own how to talk to each other, when their paths traditionally have rarely crossed, is a rather tall order.
So how can teams work more effectively together? Realizing that magazine editors have little experience in team situations (most of us prefer the ivory tower approach), I turned to an expert, Dan Tearpock, chairman and chief executive officer of Subsurface Consultants & Associates LLC (SCA) in Houston, Texas. SCA offers training courses and consulting on methodologies for finding and developing oil and gas, and Tearpock teaches a 2-day course on how to organize, manage and function as a multidisciplinary, synergistic team.
Tearpock knows from personal experience how easy it is for management to glom onto a good idea without thinking it through ahead of time. "When I was with an oil company, management called us together and said, 'OK, as of today you're a team,'" he said. "They did it once and expected us to act as teams from then on."
Compounding that problem was the fact that most of these disciplines were used to working alone, then handing off the finished product. Left to their own devices, members of an asset team are likely to continue working in a disparate, noncollaborative way, perhaps having periodic meetings to assess their progress. This, Tearpock said, is the wrong approach.
He suggested, rather, that a team is a group of people with common goals, objectives and deliverables. It therefore behooves them to come up with a plan of action that takes into account the contributions of each member. "In a synergistic way, each team member knows what they're going to be getting from another member, and they know when they need to hand their work off to the next person," Tearpock said. "And they sit and talk every day."
In order to do that, they really need to work fairly closely to each other. Tearpock suggested that the team occupy a common room rather than separate offices. "This way they talk to each other every day and every minute of the day that they need to," he said. "They almost eliminate the need for meetings because they're talking all the time."
This runs counter to the way many employees are used to working. He cited an example of a geologist who found a fault while correlating logs in a field unlikely to contain such a fault. Rather than consult with the geophysicist to see if a similar fault appeared on the seismic lines, he planned to wait until their weekly meeting to mention it. The geologist was encouraged to stop what he was doing and confer with the geophysicist, who within a few minutes confirmed that the fault also showed up in the seismic data.
"This way the geologist could continue with his correlation work with the confidence that the fault was there," Tearpock said. "Otherwise he might have waited for a whole week, or maybe even changed his interpretation over concerns that such a fault couldn't have existed in this field."
While Tearpock stresses communication in his course, he admitted a 2-day class can't change patterns that are in a large sense dependent on an employee's personality. But it's important for team members to learn to listen to each other, he said. "When someone says something and you're not sure of what they've said, you need to repeat it back, paraphrase it, to see if you're getting the right message," he said. "Otherwise a team member can spend thousands of dollars and days of work doing something that's not what the other team member wanted."
Finally, it's important for team members to feel that they have some ownership of the project, which can only happen if they're given the authority to make their own decisions and the autonomy to function without constant oversight. Given the industry's traditional hierarchical structure, this is probably a difficult departure for many companies. But without a sense of ownership, team members are unlikely to truly embrace the asset team concept.
For more information about SCA, visit www.scacompanies.com.

Comments