Compliance Is Fun (Said No One Ever)

If you want to plan for the outcome and reduce the risk of failure during operation, you need to work on communication. But not the way you think.

Planning a well is a very manual task today as most of the work is experience transfer, and most experience transfer is done by people reading reports. Experiences from previous wells go into planning, plans go into operations, and operations go into reports. Colleagues, meetings, documents, emails are all colored by beautiful spreadsheet art.

The benefit with processes where people are information carriers, is that it is a familiar way of working, and you can easily bring people up to speed if you need extra help on a problem.

The downside is all the problems that occur if you want to do more advanced operations. Remember licking the envelopes when sending invites to fifty people before online event management came around? Scaling up meant more people licking envelopes, more people who would need the correct address list and get their share of it. And errors would propagate and be painful and time consuming to fix.

Even though few envelopes are licked in well planning, the opportunities available with data driven workflows have the same potential as online event management. You can plan more, you can verify and double check, and you can monitor performance of your planning. More on this later.

To better understand what data driven workflows are, let’s have a look at how they are built.

1. Understand the task, it’s input and output and value drivers
2. Understand how it is done today, including all the quick fixes
3. Map the data that is consumed and generated
4. Define data quality requirements
5. Create data pipeline
6. Create workflow inputs and outputs
7. Replace a lot of old work

Already at the first step, the difference between the data driven and the manual workflows becomes evident.

Manual well plans has the following purpose:

• Show that the requirements of a well plan have been followed by having all stakeholders sign that they have checked that it is compliant
• Be a representative snapshot of the planned operations at the time the plans are signed
• Document the main kpi’s for the well, such as time and cost.

Manual well plans are documents with the following features

• Signature matrix for a dozen people
• Standardized layout for easy entry
• A few output variables like hole and casing depths
• References to standards and other documents with more details about design and operations
• Lots of text explaining how the operations can go wrong
• Stored where only limited invited people have access

Data driven well plans has the following purpose:

• Ensure the well is optimized for its intended performance
• Visualize and compare all likely scenarios
• Deliver input for operations that eliminates manual decision making during operations
• Enable easy experience transfer to other projects
• Benchmark plans to previous plans and operations

Data driven well plans are datasets with the following features

• Has a data model which enables efficient workflows and control over operations
• Structures and cleans data that is consumed and created in the workflow
• Aggregation of plans to portfolios and scenarios
• Automated learning by comparing plans to actuals
• Automated technical verifications

A general observation from the above points is that most of the work that the engineers are doing today is done outside of the actual well plan in the manual way, because the output is a document. (You can’t have twelve different geological models and twenty well designs explained in full in a document and expect anyone to sign that?) In the data driven workflow, data is flowing from application to application, and people are improving and quality assuring proposed scenarios.

To keep this article short, we will be very brief about the remaining points. We hope to share more about these in another session. Point 7 (replace a lot of old work) goes under the clever words “People will not be replaced by AI, but by people using AI”. And when you are setting the goals for the data driven workflows, you need to cater for this - how are people going to work?

The capacity of handling data and building workflows are doubling every year, so waiting means you are building up even more technical debt. Get started now on your data-driven workflows for well planning. 

Let us help you define the KPI’s so you can see what are the lowest hanging fruits for your organization!