Holdfast Training Services Trial Blog

Quick post this week.

Everything has pretty much fallen by the wayside for two of my Clair scopes. The first is the Clair coolers replacement project which, as you know, is about 90% complete offshore and is on the TAR critical path. The mechanical window for the TAR is 27 Sept (3 days later that originally planned due to delays) at which point all process and safety systems are required to be buttoned up and ready for pre-commissioning testing such as low pressure nitrogen leak testing. The last two of my closing spools were sitting on the quayside as of COP last Friday and their boat should be leaving today. This leaves a very tight window for their installation and I have all of my fingers and toes crossed that they are going to fit first time. Should they be out then I have 2 spools sitting at the fabricators partly made up, but the lead time to have them off-shore would still be about a week. So, if the final closing spools don’t fit I will still be delaying the TAR completion at a cost of around £3.5M a day. I am really hoping this doesn’t happen, as you might imagine.

Further to this, I have fusible loop modifications which need to be installed by 20 Sept in preparation for testing by my contractor. With 4 days to go I am not confident that we are going to be ready although the off-shore team have been aware that this needs completing for over a week. Then there is the corrosion coupon being fitted to one of the process lines which again I am awaiting a progress report on. It seems that Stuart jumped ship at the right time and my days are generally filled with trouble shooting the issues that remain with this project. 

By far and away the most pressing is the fact that the TAR plan has not incorporated any of the E&I scope (about 600hrs in total). I discovered this early last week, basically the WGPSN plan over estimated the job card hours and quite early on the TAR team mugged off the WGPSN plan in favor of their own baselined plan with more accurate job duration forecast. The fallout from this is that they have only concentrated on the jobs directly under their noses, removing the old coolers and pipework and fitting the new, as is their wont. It seems most people were aware that there existed a discrepancy between the plans and that the TAR team were riding on a wave of false security, but nobody thought to action it until early last week. With the TAR plan re-baselined to include the new E&I scope the project went from 5 points ahead of schedule to 5 points behind. I am hoping that with off-shore input to include what in the E&I scope has actually been completed we will come a little closer to the ‘S’ curve, but I am confident that we are going to remain behind it until the close now. It just goes to show how important accurate  planning is and how damaging having two plans can be. 

The other scope featuring on my plate at the moment is the installation of additional bracing to the Clair production manifold. I am inside the 12w gate now and following some fancy footwork I have managed to narrowly avoid being red-flagged. However I still don’t have a workable plan to get this executed off shore. My issue is that to install the new steel I need to replace 8 temperature transmitters with longer assemblies. To this the instruments must be removed and the pipework can’t be flowed while this is done. The project does not have the clout to warrant an outage and so I have to fit it in to a planned outage. There is one planned for December and I am making progress, but I have a feeling it is going to be a messy execute which is not ideal. The wells are taken down based on the requirement dictated by the controls team off-shore and the process engineers offshore, so there is no defined plan of which well will be down and when. My feeling is that I am going to have a team off-shore who will be sitting around waiting for the right well to be off-line to do their work over a period of 2 or 3 weeks. If this is the case then my justification for running the project is weakened I might get bumped out of my slot. At this stage, the more robust I can make the plan, the more likely it will get through the next gate. What would be hand would be a JRE  to handle the material and workforce coordination, but I am still waiting for confirmation on who this is.

In other news…

I ran the Great North Run on Sunday and was narrowly beaten by Mo Farah finishing with a time of 2 hrs 3 mins (me not him). Not the fastest time in the world, but then I’ve never been the fastest runner in the world. I was just chuffed to finish so close to the 2hr mark considering how sporadic my training has been.

Scotlands’ summer is well and truly over and we have had the heating on every morning in the last week. It’s going to be a long cold winter methinks.