Holdfast Training Services Trial Blog

Week 2: 11th – 13th April 2012

A short week with Bank Holiday Monday and Tuesday off (Liz’s birthday) to make up for Good Friday.  The office is still very quiet but I have at least got a project firmly on my list, and that will start moving with time.  Which leads me to some observations…

Pace of life here is slow.  There is little sense of urgency anywhere, with most people thinning out around 4 pm – although admittedly they may get here before my usual 8am start.  This may be a symptom of the Easter holidays (fair enough), or maybe just that contractors receive a daily rate and can get away with it…

Meetings tend to “go on”.  I had 2 meetings on Thursday, both on Ish’s projects which will become mine as he is away for Phase 4 and departs after Phase 5.  The first was a weekly update meeting on the Low Pressure Booster Compressor (LPBC) stack change around on Magnus.  13 people were around the table and the meeting lasted over an hour, most of which was a heads up on the tail-chasing that is project management – who’s done what, where sew-and-sew is with the other etc.  OK, there were a few people ‘doubling up’ (myself included) but lots of the meeting was re-hashing old conversations and could have been done ‘in the margins’.  – I’d better add that it wasn’t Ish that chaired the meeting, but one of the WGPSN Job Responsible Engineers (JREs) – effectively Ish’s oppo. 

The second meeting was quite an impromptu chat with Tim Eley, the Business Developer for Linjebygg Offshore (LJB) who specialise in alternative crane solutions.  He was bought in to offer a third solution to Ish’s big crane-change project on Magnus that has been put on hold, and may offer a better solution than the current plan which is to use a Heavy Lifting Vessel (HLV) (<$1m per day), and boy did he go on!  He made some good suggestions and suggested a way forward, but then bored us by covering the same ground again and giving us more (irrelevant but impressive) examples of LBO’s previous jobs.  If I was Ish I would have cut the meeting short after 30 mins rather than letting him go on for over an hour, but maybe I’m missing something…

Other things

Townhalls.  I like these.  These are BP’s open briefings, held at all levels, where teams are encouraged to get together for the lead and a guest presenter to bring people up to speed on what is going on.  I attended my first of the fortnightly Engineering Services Townhalls on Thursday, presented by Tom Macartney (Team Leader) with a second speaker from another department.  Although I didn’t stay for the whole meeting, it was good to get fed the information from the top, and he was open to comments from the floor (of which there were a few).  The main part for me was the ‘blueprinting’, or standardisation of the different divisions (ours being the North Sea (NS)) so as to catch the ‘best practice’ – one of the buzzwords I liked as Ops Offr at Minley, sharing Best Practice with 1 RSME and Holdfast.  For us, this means a few additions to the NS Engineering Services Team but there were no real surprises; probably because it was Tom that helper write the Global blueprint!

Jobs – my role.  It is now confirmed that I will be the SPA for the bearing inspection platforms on Bruce, so next week I’ll be chatting to the Senior Structural Engineer, Colin Wilson, to discuss exactly what this might entail before having a free-for-all meeting with the main stakeholders and SMEs.  Looking at the internal BP SOR, it was Colin who instigated the job so I’m sure he’ll have some suggestions! 

After a few hours of IT support, I finally got onto the computer modelling programme so can now see Bruce in 3D and yes, these rigs are complex beasties (Fig. 1)!  It’s so easy to simplify something in your head, but as soon as you look at what exactly is going on, it gets a lot more interesting!  I’m now really looking forward to meeting with Colin on Monday to discuss how to tackle this, and I’ll let you know how it goes.  Clearly what I really need is a recce, so hopefully I’ll be getting onto site soon – but not until I’ve done a week’s worth of courses – with any luck these will be the week after next.  Watch this space!

Figure 1. Screenshot of image of one the bridge linkages on Bruce. From what I hear, the hydrocarbon pipes going 1/3 up the height of the bridge are around the same height of a person.

Figure 1.  Screenshot of image of one the bridge linkages on Bruce.  From what I hear, the hydrocarbon pipes going 1/3 up the height of the bridge are around the same height of a person.