Learning from the Past, Setting the Future Up for Success –Insights from PDO's Assurance Journey to overcome Project Management Challenges

Abstract The Exploration & Production (E&P) industry is going through a transformational journey to broadly shift processes, technologies, behaviors to adapt the business to the energy transition. Petroleum Development Oman (PDO) has embarked into a transformational journey to forge its future path with a refreshed strategy and new purpose of "Building a sustainable and low carbon future" to maximize value for Oman. The PDO Upstream Petroleum Assurance (UPA) team has a pivotal role in that journey. The Upstream Petroleum Assurance (UPA) team is the custodian of PDO's Value Assurance Review process, ensuring end-to-end oversight from Exploration to Operate, focusing on compliance to Process Safety Standards, Subsurface Excellence, enhancing Capital Efficiency & Competitiveness, GHG (Green House Gas) competitiveness, facilitating robust decision-making, assurance & integration across functions. In assisting teams to maximize value, the UPA team curate a repository of valuable insights, trends, best practices, and areas for improvement. The objective of this paper is to cascade these valuable learnings, improvements in tools, processes, and assurance activities to ensure every project achieves top quartile project delivery performance. Retrospective lookback analysis & Post Investment Reviews was performed on significant number of projects matured and delivered over last few years. Review scope included both Technical and Process (Maturation & Assurance process). This paper highlights best practices and winning strategies, identifies improvement areas to achieve best in class project delivery. Key themes addressed in this paper are delivering high quality Field Development Plans (FDP), Knowledge Management (learnings from other projects), Management of Change - (Risk Assessment & Integration). To further hard-wire lessons learned & replicate successes, collaborative efforts with Data Management initiated to consolidate learnings from assurance events into a centralized tool (Learning Knowledge Base (LKB). LKB review & incorporating Lessons Learnt is mandated as part of assurance templates. Lessons Learnt sessions planned to ensure cross learnings between various assets & functions. Reviews also emphasized the opportunity to improve the Management of Change (MoC) process. This paper highlights MoC process improvements to foster compliance, cross-functional alignment to ensure changes are managed safely and more visibly. Key learnings and best practices were identified that could be a gamechanger for future projects, by improving integration, bringing process efficiency, and eliminating waste. This paper highlights best practices from PDO's front runner projects and brings awareness on potential pitfalls in front end loading with an objective to share learnings for achieving excellence in project delivery.