Holdfast Training Services Trial Blog

It’s now the start of my third week at BP and although I’ve not really got into the detail of what I will be doing and be responsible for, I thought I would summarise what I have done to date and offer an anecdote or two. A separate post will follow on BP, the contract and my role, in due course.

Safety, Safety, Safety

It’s a bit of an eye opener, exactly how safety conscious BP, and indeed the wider oil & gas industry are. I have had to do two inductions as you might expect, one for each of the buildings I will be working in. The Wood Group PSN induction was a fairly straight forward video, which lasted 15 mins or so, the BP induction lasted a little under an hour, at the end of which I received the guides shown below. The main document (top right) has 23 pages, each of which either presents critical information, directs you to read one of the other documents or asks you to carry our further reading / action, which all require a signature; this is then followed up by the second part of the induction process.

A bit over the top for an office environment? My opinion is not. (you may be surprised by that). What it does, is make you understand just how seriously they take your health & safety and drum this into you from the start, reinforcing the company values of ‘No accidents, No harm to people, No damage to the environment’. (try sitting at Costa in the Union Square shopping centre in Aberdeen; you’ll easily be able to identify those in the industry – they are the ones who walk up the stairs on the left and hold the hand rail)

The place where H&S is absolutely vital is of course off shore on one of the installations. To that end, last week, I completed the Basic Offshore Safety Induction & Emergency Training (BOSIET), Compressed Air Emergency Breathing Apparatus Course (CA-EBA) and the Minimum Industry Safety Training (MIST). The BOSIET Cse was probably the most interesting as it goes through the different types of offshore installation, how to survive in water and in a life raft, firefighting, basic first aid and of course the heli dunking; good value.  MIST had some value and added to training already completed at the RSME and previously. (Offshore regulations, Fire, Risk matrix, permit to work etc)

Process, Process, Process

BP appears to have a very defined and slick process for everything they do; the most obvious is their Management of Change (MoC) process. This is supported by an online application which groups together information and documentation for any individual project from the screening phase all the way through to hand over, with great usable features including automatic email updates, assignment of responsibilities and go/no go gates.

They also appear to be very swept up in dealing with Information Management (IM) using their Intranet sites to good effect; I certainly spent a lot of time in my first week reading the various areas and has been useful whilst writing AER1.

Notice that I used the word ‘appear’ in both those paragraphs; I’m sure time will tell if it is as good as it looks or if it will be comparable to JPA, SPOC, MOSS et al.

Money, Money, Money

It’s eye watering looking at the costs of what seem to be simple projects. I will make this a separate post in the future, once it is fully understood as it’s deserving of its own blog.

In other news

Aberdeen is a great city – Would certainly consider living here

Charlotte is still pregnant (27 weeks) and don’t I know it!

Still waiting to move into new house (in London) and preparing for our DIY(ish) ‘Grand Design’

For future BP attach-mentees: I am preparing a 3-4 pager ‘Get you in’ Admin Instr to summarise the last few months of admin points, similar to the AUS document, but clearly a lot simpler. This will be stored on the RMSE servers. Additional documents (initial actions and HO/TO notes) will then be available on arrival which have been passed on from previous courses.