On a drilling campaign, safety is a system, not paperwork

Summary

When safety checks, purchasing and progress live in separate spreadsheets and email threads, leaders hear about problems last and checks are signed after the fact. We recommend one system for all three, in which each phase of work waits until its checks are signed.

The problem

On a drilling campaign, delay is counted in rig days. A rig that waits for a part, a permit or a signature still costs money every hour, and its crew still has to be kept safe while it waits.

Yet many campaigns are still coordinated with office tools. Purchasing is tracked in one spreadsheet, the safety register in another, and progress in daily emails and WhatsApp groups. Each record is right for the person who keeps it. None of them shows the whole campaign.

Problems reach leaders late. A delayed component or a hazard on site passes through several people before it reaches someone who can act. By then the rig may have stood idle for days.

Safety turns into paperwork. When checks live in documents rather than in the work itself, they tend to be completed afterwards, for the inspection, instead of before the step they are meant to protect.

Nobody can show what happened. After an incident, or a dispute with a supplier, the record has to be rebuilt from inboxes and chat threads, and the people who remember it may have rotated off site.

What was done

The approach below comes from our work with a client in oil and gas. It treats safety, purchasing and reporting as one process, and follows the Praxis Method.

1. See how the campaign really runs. We map who reports what, to whom and when, from the rig floor to purchasing to head office. Most delays start where information changes hands.

2. Design the checks into the steps. Each phase of work gets its own list of safety, commercial and compliance conditions, and a role responsible for signing each one. Where a check matters most, the ticket needs a second signature.

3. Build one record of the campaign. Rig status, purchase requests and safety tickets sit in one system. The daily drilling report is produced from what was recorded during the day, not typed up at night from memory.

4. Make each phase wait for its checks. The next phase cannot be opened in the system until its conditions are signed, and each signature is recorded with its time and the role of the person who gave it.

5. Stay until it holds. We train supervisors on site and at head office, follow the first weeks of use, and adjust the checklists wherever the field shows they are wrong.

The result

Leaders see rig status, open purchase requests and outstanding safety checks on the day they change, and every sign-off shows when it was given and by which role.