The oil and gas industry has seen its fair share of challenges. The consistent calls for clean energy and the lasting impacts on supply and demand caused by the recent pandemic have served as the main sources of worry for industry leaders. Because of this, organizations in the oil and gas industry are experiencing major pressure from investors to do the impossible: maintain an ongoing increase in returns despite unpredictable industry demand and compliance requirements.
You need to find new ways to improve efficiency while continuing to invest in new types of projects that will satisfy the market without sacrificing importance. To succeed in this mission, business leaders will have to look inward for a solution, asking themselves “are our current modes of operations contributing to financial waste?” More often than not, the answer is “yes.” The key to addressing this problem is to identify the challenges that are causing the waste and to face these challenges head-on.
Internal Project Challenges of the Average Oil & Gas Organization
Many of the internal challenges oil and gas organizations experience concern the solutions they use to manage their project portfolio. Below, we’ll explore these challenges by detailing why they pose such a threat to an organization’s success.
Siloed Data
The average project-focused oil and gas organization relies on various technologies to manage their projects. Because of this, many organizations work within a fractured web of third-party platforms, homegrown solutions, and spreadsheets that silo important project data. This lack of interconnectivity causes team members to become confused as certain members might have access to a fraction of project data... but do not have the access necessary to understand the full project picture. This limited visibility causes miscommunication, hampers transitioning of project phases between teams, and causes leadership to base their strategic decisions on misinformation. Put simply, siloed data spells disaster for project-focused businesses in the oil and gas industry.
Project data is meant to live in an environment where it can work cross-functionally with other important pieces of data. You need a single source of truth that integrates fractured solutions to build a seamless environment for project data to thrive throughout the entire project lifecycle. With a single source of truth, your team will stay optimally informed, and the decisions made will lead to superior outcomes.
Lack of Automation
Many of the tools organizations use to manage their project portfolios are not automated, meaning they do not allow data to flow automatically in and out of their interfaces. Because of this, an organization’s project professionals must spend a majority of their time on the manual, administrative task of data harvesting instead of on more high-value tasks that would better serve the portfolio. This kills overall efficiency.
Because manually harvesting data is such a time-consuming task, many project teams will glean important project data well after it’s too late to take corrective action. Organizations also experience waste as project professionals are not alerted when resources or attention should be pivoted to a project with a higher rate of return.
Alternatively, an automated environment would allow project teams to spend time on more high-value tasks and equip them with the knowledge needed to make necessary changes in a timely manner. This prevents the resource waste experienced previously and puts those dollars back into the organization’s pocket.
Inability to Scale
Businesses grow so their tools should grow with them. More often, though, this is not the case. Project-focused organizations tend to implement solutions that meet a current need rather than selecting a solution that will meet both current and future needs. Because of this, when a new need arises, the solutions currently implemented will usually not have the functionality to support new processes. To fix this problem, organizations will often implement another solution to cover this need... and so the cycle continues. This cycle leads to high maintenance costs as multiple systems require more management and upkeep.
To prevent this, project-focused organizations in the oil and gas industry need a scalable solution that will offer needed support as the business grows and evolves. As the organization’s portfolio widens and new processes are implemented, it’s important that your project portfolio management solution offers the wiggle room to expand as needed.
Lack of Scoring Capability
Few solutions support project scoring. Project scoring allows organizations to assign a score to a particular project feature. The organization can then rank current and future projects based on how their features align with overall business objectives. Because many of the solutions project-focused organizations use lack the visibility and functionality needed to implement project scoring, many organizations go without it. This is detrimental to an organization as project scoring empowers project teams to select and continue work on only the projects that align best with their business goals. This means when a project team is given project scoring capabilities, it maximizes the organization’s ROI.
Meeting Project Challenges with Enterprise Project Performance
The only solution capable of meeting these challenges is. An EPP solution combines project portfolio management, project controls, and project management software into one, seamless platform. Here’s how an EPP solution meets each challenge:
- Integration – An EPP solution integrates with multiple, third-party solutions so users can continue to use the tools they rely on in a seamless environment. This provides an enterprise-wide view of project data, ensuring data is never siloed and that project stakeholders have access to the data they need, when they need it
- Automation – An EPP solution is fully automated to ensure project professionals can focus on more high-value tasks rather than administrative ones like data harvesting. It also prevents confusion caused by human error, ensuring all data is correct and reliable.
- Configuration & Scalability – An EPP solution is highly configurable. This means while the platform can be used right out of the box, organizations can implement their own coding into the system to implement business-specific work processes. This is also true as the business grows, meaning that an EPP solution can be scaled to meet the future needs of the organization.
- Project Scoring – An EPP solution features a built-in project scoring feature. This empowers leadership’s decision-making as they select the projects that best align with their business goals.
About Hexagon’s EcoSys™
Hexagon’s EPP solution, EcoSys has been trusted by oil and gas leaders for 15 years. It provides a centralized hub for all project and opportunity data, integrating key business processes throughout the project lifecycle while improving project efficiency and predictability. Learn more about EPP practices.
