Solving Oil Exploration Prioritisation with Portfolio Managementglobal oil exploration company

This Oil and Gas exploration company wanted to use portfolio management to help it prioritise and select the most advantageous set of investment to execute that would deliver the organisation’s exploration strategic objectives.

The client faced the challenge of implementing a tool to support a new set of organisational processes around

• demand management of exploration initiatives
• defining a prioritisation and selection model

Our Approach

We ran a series of familiarisation sessions to ensure that all stakeholders were engaged and had a high-level understanding of the reasons for embarking on a portfolio management initiative, showing the benefits and best practice.

We then ran a series of workshops to gather requirements as to what staff, contractors and management thought was best practice, and what it was the new “tool” had to deliver.

The Solution

We drafted the new “ways of working” attributing some of the new ways to groups within the current organisation. This greatly assisted with buy-in. We showed how the “knowledge functionality”, and categories would help to provide the detail required by the business to support this change to ways of working.

We architected a high level solution design, and then broke the implementation down into phases. OPPM or Oracle Primavera Portfolio Management was installed, configured and implemented using a phased approach with workstreams for

• Idea collection, classification and review
• Investment Business case
• Prioritisation, Selection and Strategic Alignment Models
• Governance and Gated Approvals
• Investment update and review
• Financial Model
• Strategic Review & Key Performance Indicators
• Scenario planning

Training

During implementation, we adopted a hierarchical Train the Trainer approach for the majority of users. The client and HPS jointly trained the trainers, who subsequently trained the super-users. HPS trained the IT and support function so they could make configuration changes and and when required.

This company was finally able to

• view the range of exploration alternatives
• drill down into the detail – business case
• identify and manage inter-dependencies
• rank, prioritise and select initiatives based on an agreed common prioritisation model that included
  • strategic alignment
  • risk
  • cost
  • environment

We also assisted this client to develop new and more robust practices that enhance the quality and clarity of investment data which supported better decision making.

We implemented training on a role-based process and ways of working basis within the application that covered both internal investment management users and the technical services management team that was critical in securing the ongoing support function.