Critical Disruptions: Major Repairs Under Pressure | 009

Maartje van Krieken: Hi, thanks for tuning in. I'm glad you're here again. Today we are going to address the tools and tactics, or the first aid kit for doing emergency repairs and fixes. Emergency repairs or fixes definitely add to business chaos, or can be a business emergency all by themselves. Sometimes, if you have a few of those, albem, albeit small, or you've had some disrupting other business processes, they can be a compounding factor. Sometimes they are the cause that everything starts to fail. And in my case, I've experienced a lot of them in the form of a little mini business emergency within an organization of a department or a department. So I have fond memories. I dare to say fond because there were everybody was save and sound but font, memories of a time that I was part of a subsea projects team for offshore assets in the North Sea, and I didn't have kids yet, so I had a husband who had also a busy job, and so we both worked quite a lot, meaning that more So than maybe some of my colleagues with families and other priorities, I was often still in the office on a Friday afternoon catching up on stuff, or using the last few hours of the week to work on some personal development and training stuff, for which I generally during the week maybe didn't have as much time. And so at some point, 4pm on a Friday afternoon, the office was empty. Ish, there was a call, a call from offshore, that a riser had failed. A riser is, in this case, kind of a flexible pipe, bit like these harmonica type hoses, but then still made of metal that went from a connection on the platform down into the water, connecting to something else in the seabed. So they called out a riser. It's effectively a flexible piece of pipe, somewhat flexible piece of pipe that, yeah, had failed. It's also not just any ordinary piece of pipe. It's kind of fancier than that. So, you know, it's a problem. It puts everything, it brings everything to a grinding halt. And so by virtue of being the supply chain person who was president present in the office, it became my project. And it's safe to say I had a few more of those from picking up the calls late on a Friday afternoon, which somehow is the time that things happened. And these are some of the projects from which I learned the most. I learned so much about what works and what doesn't work. I also learned how in these moments, trying to make something work is so much. Is often so much better than waiting, waiting for somebody else to show up with the answers, or waiting to see if somehow you get more clarity from sitting around or Yeah, waiting for the procedures to work when they're clearly not working and no progress is being made. So what is it that I think in these emergency repairs and fixes helps is important and useful? You might say, well, you know, here she is with another oilfield example. The same script actually also applies if you have a failure of your communication system. I also remember a case working with a a call center that was working of various channels of communication with its clients, right phone and text and etc, and the whole text system going down, that can happen too. And for a helpline that's supposed to be accessible, 24/7 a crisis line, it's kind of important and a major issue. Equally, if you have a cybersecurity attack, and you need fixes there. I think much of this, the script applies. So although some of my examples might be out of your world, I think some of the steps to go through are still the same.

So where would I start? I would start with safety first, we're in an emergency room. Here in this podcast, we don't want to bring more people into an emergency room. If you have physical damage, then it's always important to find out if, if that creates an unsafe situation or has already. Created an unsafe situation, maybe already injured or hurt people, right? And if that's the case, then yeah, emergencies, the relevant emergency services need to get involved ASAP. If an unsafe situation is created, then the first priority be, should be to isolate things, isolate power connections, isolate whatever is creating the unsafety that must be a dinglish word, sorry for that, or it could be so, like in the case of a crisis line. Indeed, if you are not reachable, is there a way to divert the communication or to pick up the message. So if it's your text system, for instance, is there a way to intercept incoming text messages, or at least get a message back out to these people? Is there some kind of patch that can be made so at least these messages get picked up? Because, yeah, you don't want to create the situation that, because people weren't able to reach you, unsafe situations occurred. So safety first, that's the priority of where, where you need to patch things up. And then the second thing to allow you to move faster would be for me to document, document everything. And I don't mean writing 100 page thing. I mean, take pictures, right? Take pictures. Take screenshots, at least, jot down or verbally record what's going on, what you're seeing and what you're finding, if you're going to try and get out of a situation as fast as possible. Later on, by those who are dealing with insurance or who are dealing with after action reviews and everything else, somebody's going to have opinions about what you didn't do right around, why did you not document that? Why? Unless safety is on the line, that should not be the first priority, right if you're trying to do this repair or this this intervention, then it's impacting your business, and you need to get back to normal operations, and so do the best you can in the moment, try and capture as much as possible, so that there's information for people to go after. Maybe start recording every meeting and stuff you have on the subject, so that you can file it somewhere away, and somebody can go through the whole lot later, but think about documenting what's there in the moment, and documenting what the steps you're taking after. It just helps you and many others if you if you plug that in straight away. It's also helpful, usually, to document things, because the the next thing that happens is that you need to figure out who needs to be involved. And sometimes in your organization, you might have a structure or departments who do repairs or fixes, or who are taking care of these interventions, etc.

But my question would be, are they indeed geared up for this situation also, or is there a certain specialist that needs to be involved? Or is there a third party resource that needs to be involved? Is there somebody from the government or from a from a safety or emergency situation organization that would be helpful to at least have tapped into the situation? Do you need a lawyer, at least sitting in and listening, or a PR person, or whatever it is, it might be helpful. And if it's it's usually obvious if, if that's needed, right, right, straight away. Sometimes you find out later that you need a certain level of specialty, but it's usually no situation pretty clear that you maybe need somebody else there. Also don't forget if you are working on something that is an interface with somebody else's systems or somebody else's kit, or a supplier, or there's some supply chain interfaces there. Bring them in. Bring them in early. Ask for a practical oriented rep, not a commercial person, but a practical oriented rep who can be there and and help figure out and if there is then things that you're not comfortable discussing in front of them. I'm sure that at the beginning or the end of meetings, you can ask them to sign off a little early or work around it a little bit, but it's far more helpful if they're on the table straight away than if they need to hear everything secondhand. So who needs to be involved and is there anything special that needs to happen in terms of decision making? Is there something around decision making that needs to be different than your usual. So does a quality or a safety person need to see things before you start moving? Do you want verification? So if we, if you remember the the cyber issue that stopped all the airlines from flying in? July, mid July, the thing there was, of course, that there was this seemingly innocent patch that was implemented that created major issues, right? So if you're doing a fix, then in the in the interest of speed, don't forget to put some checks and balances in place. And that's what I mean with who needs to be involved in decisions, or who needs to be involved in the go no go moments, and is that somebody different or extra than what's the norm? If you're good, you're good, but just think about what's weird or different about this one, and what might be useful to have in there. Then I think from the school of hard knocks, it's important to take a little bit of extra time to make sure that you figure out what you really need or what's really broken. Right? If you think it's your standard it operating system, but it's actually a security system at the back of it, and you don't realize, because you start running with the one thing, and you're lining up all these parties to to work the main operating system and dive into that, and only then to find out it's actually a one door. Further, you have mobilized a lot of resources on the wrong thing. And this happens right because in the example of the riser repair, which it was Friday afternoon, and we thought we were quick. And so what happened is that we thought we located a replacement really quickly.

So we thought we had located something that was the exact same thing from a, I think, from a sister platform. So sometimes they built these things in pairs, or they built them according to similar designs. And so money and effort was spent in retrieving this spare and getting a ship, so an offshore installation vessel, which is expensive, right? And it's and you pay for if you want one rerouted, then you need one in the weekend, and you need one to take on a job with that much time pressure. And so we started running and moving, only to realize that the two were not alike at all. And so we didn't find out until the thing was well on its way too offshore. So that's a little tricky and expensive, and it's not entirely possible to always prevent this, but especially if things are going through layers of communication, it's worth doing some verification. So in our case, we should have this is all pre social media and video conferencing, but we should have figured out a way to take more pictures and measurements of what this thing was, right? It was this. Were the drawings and the paperwork we had of what was installed. Was that was, was that was indeed out there is, Was that correct? Was there some weird modifications done to it? Do we? Were we sure that we had all that right? Another example that I have of that is that this was during construction time on an on an offshore platform in eastern Russia, and it had a special design for the drill floor. So this is an active operating space, and, yeah, it's very cold there, so the whole platform was insulated, which had been a tricky thing from the start, because there weren't examples out there, so that none of that had been straightforward. And there was a design made with doors for the drill floor to make sure that was insulated enough and things wouldn't freeze there. And so as they started working, they were the platform was also still finished being finished in other parts, and it was very quickly becoming clear that things were freezing on the drove floor, right? And so the conversation immediately became like, oh, the door doors are defective. We need to go back to the design contractor. They need to make design changes, and then we need to speed order, whatever it is we need to implement the design changes. And so we were seeing this, you humongous scope in front of us, also very expensive and time consuming. And I can't take any credit for this one, one of my much more seasoned colleagues, actually, you know, got on a call, got them to send some pictures, started to have conversations with people offshore, started to look through the reports and stuff to actually check what was going on and what really the problem was, and when it was happening and when it was not happening. And the ultimate conclusion was that the design was probably all right, but that you're working with drillers who are not used to having doors, who have to move in and out of a space that. Probably smaller than normal, because everything had been wrapped up for installation. So they had to move in what's already not a great space, in and out to retrieve stuff from elsewhere all day. And so they propped open the doors, not all the time, but frequently, because they were annoying, and they were hard to keep open and hard to get, hard to get open, and they were impeding this the speed with which they were able to operate. So this is still at the very early days of the life cycle of that platform, right? And so the end result was that the floor did not need a complete redesign, but it did need a better solution for the doors.

Ultimately, they went with some very fancy version of the flaps that you maybe see in a Costco or in a very large supermarket where they have a cool zone and you walk through these flap doors. So that was ultimately the solution that was picked for something like it, which or to replace what was there, which was much quicker to deliver. Also we the relationship with the design contractor wasn't all that pretty by that stage. I mean, we'd been working on this frontier project where everything was new and different, and everybody had been under insane pressure. So yeah, the thing was behind schedule. We'd run into all the issues that on paper, loot gate great, but in practice, weren't really working, and everybody was looking at everybody to blame everybody. And so this is not a healthy relationship. And if we would have put a redesign with that contractor, then that would have burned a whole lot of hours, and God knows when, when there would finally been the conclusion that that was not the thing we should be looking for, and that a redesign wasn't actually needed, or we would have gotten a redesign on something that wouldn't have resolved the issue of the doors, right? So take a little bit of extra time to make sure that you know which problem or which part needs fixing and and validate some Yeah, I'm not saying you need to have it 100% figured out, but you you know, like, if you're going to do maintenance on the car, you you do need to at least know where in the engine you need to start looking, or if it's not something related to the axles or the tires right get get somewhere in the right direction. And if you're if you can pinpoint it for 80% and if more precision doesn't change who needs to be involved in the conversation, then I think you can start working the issue, but make sure that you know enough to know who needs to be involved and where you're going to start working. Then I would say work also with what and who you can get. Many organizations have on contract, the parties that have provided these systems, or, you know, that have built them, or you have a maintenance contract of some sort, or a service contract, so you should be able to bring these people in, yeah, but, but work with who's close, particularly if almost all of your team is meeting in person and working this in person, see if they have a rep that's local, right? And that may not be the A Team person, or that might be a more junior person, but if that person can be in your meetings and can have backup from a more senior person from their headquarters somewhere else in the world, do that, right? So that you at least have somebody in the room who hears all of it.

Also, if you if you need a ad hoc resource, then I think openness and transparency with your contractors and your suppliers is very important, right? So I think the only way to go in the early days is a reimbursable arrangement. You pay people for the time that they help and work you, and you should have those rates somewhere on the back of your contracts, and then be transparent on what you're trying to work as an example, again, in the offshore construction environment, if you've done work on pipelines in the North Sea, then they need to get recovered. So most of them have rocks dumped over the top of them, so that the trawlers and stuff can't get stuck behind the pipes and pull things apart and for other disturbances. So it helps, and sometimes it helps also to weigh them down. If you've done a repair, or if you've, you know, had a troll or combined do some damage, and you managed to sort of fix it, or verify that it's fine, and you need that patch recovered, then there's actually specialized companies who come out and do the rock dumping for you. So these rock dumping contractors, you know, work on projects by the boatload. And so if you've done a small repair, you don't need a boatload. So you can come up with a whole engineering design and saying, I need this size rocks, and I need this that and the other, what you're much better off doing is calling, in my case, Leo. I always worked with Leo, who was over 40 years my. Senior and had spent his life doing this. So I would call Leo, and I would say, okay, the guy saying we need this, said what I really know about is that it's about a section this big, and this is where it is. And half the time he actually had a good idea of what was already put around it. You would need some information. Was in the line and a bit of other stuff. And he would say, Marjorie, leave it with me. And he would call me back. And he would call me back, and he said, Okay. I said, I have this out. I have these ships out. This one is coming back of a job, and it has some left. This one is going out on a job, and that's not quite a whole boatload. So I can do this one or that one. I think this one is better for what you need. And you'd give me a price, and you could go and jump up and down. The price is probably not the best price in the world, but the price was also not ridiculous, because they want a relationship. They want a relationship. They want to continue doing this work for us. And so they want proper conversation for a bit of a detour and helping you out, but it's not going to cost you the world, right? And and then corresponding with somebody in a manner where you're like, Oh, this is my spec. Give me your price. I don't want to pay this price. That would have been so slow and not helpful on a partial piece of work, right? And there's plenty of Leos out there on any and all of these scopes call them, say what you need, ask them what they can do, and they'll tell you also, if they can't do anything. And this is really ridiculous, then Leo also has a competitor with another guy in the office, or a girl who might not be called Leo, who you can ask the same question, right? And I bet that if you have called one or two, that things will work, but you need a certain level of let's just get it done and not beat around the bush in in and get stuck in the commercial side of it, because you're doing this, because it's impacting your operations.

And so time is money, and playing that game out, it's also setting a tone for the relationship, right? If people believe that they're going to be fairly reimbursed for the work they're doing and doing for you, and it's reflected a little in there, also that it is an emergency and it's kind of extra ambient, they will also deliver extra and beyond. If they believe that it's become this whole commercial game, then that's also what they will feel from their organization, and they'll be like, Oh, do I need to book this hour? Is this what I'm allowed to do? Did we agree to do this work? If they get told by their organization, we get paid for every hour that you're working, so just write your hours. Then they're going to work from what they know and what they can help you with, right? So that will set the tone. Then I think what's important is to consider doing a it can be quick, but do a do the repair exercise on paper. So before you do the work, put everybody around the room and talk through what's going to happen. I think it's a useful exercise on many things that you're executing for the first time, or that's unusual, but particularly in these repair jobs, if you put the different people who, who, who have a piece of the puzzle and the expertise of what needs to happen here around the table and say, Okay, this is how we're going to execute it. This is how we're going to implement it, and more is better, I think, in this conversation, provided people contribute based on what they know and what's helpful and and not opinion. So if they would do something slightly different, but the expert in the room chooses approach a, and they would prefer to choose approach a B, but it's probably both fine, yeah, you don't want people to come up with 17 alternatives every time, but you do want people to speak up and say, Actually, did we consider this? Or is this included in here? Or what about this party? Or, yeah, I could see how that works from your side, but in our end, that then creates issues here, or it means I have to shut down this which I hadn't planned on shutting down, or whatever it is, right?

So work through the exercise on paper. Say this is how we're going to do it. So you have a chance to capture what could go wrong, what interfaces need, managing what the knock on effects might be, and you can also manage the safety aspects, because and what then happens is that you actually have a lot of information to work your communications plan off, yeah, so then you can make sure that the people who need to know know about the pieces of their plan, know how it how and when it's going to impact them. And so, yeah, I find these exercises typically very useful, and they catch quite a lot of last minute things. And again, it comes back to the verification, right? If you, if you're an implementing repair, does do the safety people need to be involved? Does somebody needs to verify before the go, no go moment, or the press of the button? And that switches it on, that all the bolds are screwed tight, or that all that everything's been checked right? And then the other question, and maybe not the last question, but almost the last question is, once you've done the the work and you've you've done the repair, I think you need to have some kind of after action review, even if things went very well, or maybe, yeah, just as much as things when things went very well, as when there's things that went wrong, and there are going to be things that go wrong, but doing an after action review and actually figuring out what are the things you did that were good and that are not already part of your business processes and procedures. How can you build those in what did you learn about the people involved? Were there people who stepped up to the plate, who maybe deserve more responsibility or more accountability or a different chance? What did you learn about your infrastructure and your assets that needs fixing long term, right? So I would go quite deep. I don't know if deep is the right word again, I would make sure that you look at the full life cycle of it, so not just on what caused, um, caused the instant, but also all all the stuff that you learned in fixing it, and all the insights that came from that and and fix kind of figure out on the different topics, right? What is the top five things that you would change or that would be useful for a change? I wouldn't go after every little thing, because it's not realistic that you'll implement all of it. So if you fleshed out the biggest ticket items, I think you're good to go. And I do hope that in that work, you also figure out who is your person, who's going to answer the 4pm Friday calls, who is, who is that person? And do you have these people, or do you need to do some work to designate people for that right that cyber update, or that software update that led to the cyber issues, cyber security issues that impeded the airlines from flying happened also overnight and in the or in the middle of the night because it was overnight update. So outside of hours, almost every repair job or incident I've been involved with has also happened at unfortunate times, because that's usually also why they get to happen, because it's a low man, low man's time sometimes, or there is repairs, jobs done after hours, outside hours, not to disrupt anything, and they're going wrong. So it's not unlikely that when things go wrong, it happens at weird times of the day. Do you have somebody that can pick up the phone at 4pm on a Friday and that then knows what to do?

So that's it. What I had for today, in summary, safety first document, take a little extra time to figure out what's really wrong. Are you? Are you really at the real issue, or at the surface? Who needs to be involved? Who needs to be this decision making these change. Do you need any specialists there? And give them a seat at the table. Be open and transparent. Work with what you can get. Work with your suppliers. Don't get stuck on the commercial arrangements. Do it as a partner, as a joint team, as much as practically possible, and make sure that you capture the learnings from it. And I think I skipped over do the exercise on paper, because, yeah, that will help in making sure that you're all on the same page and all thinking about the same challenge, and everybody can contribute from their own expertise. Thank you for tuning in today. I hope few of you need these trick tips and tricks, but if you do, I hope that it's helps. I know there are some nuggets in here that are definitely deployable and practical in so many different situations, and I look forward to hearing you or seeing you again next week. Thank you.