Oil and gas engineering consultancy Optimus has experienced strong demand for its safety services this year and sees this clamour continuing well into 2013, creating an ideal opportunity to develop its client base.
Head of safety, Jerry Lane, is confident of being able to add to the company’s current 10-strong team of experienced safety professionals, even though there is strong competition for the available talent pool.
“It’s a very tight market and we have seen high and sustained demand for our services throughout the year and growth is set to continue in 2013,” says Lane.
“But then it’s the nature of the market that we’ve been seeing very high demand for technical expertise in both process engineering and process safety and that’s led to plenty of repeat business for Optimus in the UK and beyond.”
Lane says there is a host of issues that remain a huge concern to the industry: currently topical are helicopter safety, accidental hydrocarbon releases, ageing infrastructure, quality of leadership and workforce involvement to select but a few.
He places leadership at the top of the list. Get that right and much else then logically falls into place.
“It’s been a finding of virtually every incident investigation over the last 10-20 years that leadership, management and supervision of work are root causes of major incidents.
“What we need to see now is people getting to grips and learning some of these lessons and applying them in practice, rather than simply lurching from one crisis to another.”
Another opportunity regularly encountered by the Optimus team is the lack of joined-up thinking with regard to integrity management, field life extension, safety-critical elements, inspection and maintenance, control of major accident hazards . . . the list goes on.
Lane believes silo management, the usual divide and rule when it comes to managing disciplines, has a lot to do with many of the issues that his specialists encounter in their day-to-day work.
“There’s perhaps a disconnect between the top-down nature of the safety case regime and the bottom-up derivation of a lot of the integrity management schemes. So they don’t always meet in the middle. There are relatively few people that are in a position to see the big picture across all of the engineering disciplines.
“It’s directly analogous to the whole capex-opex debate and the tension between integrity management with the constant downward pressure on budgets and the sustained demand for improved standards of safety,” adds Lane.
“There’s always this concern in the industry as to how this gets resolved in terms of integrity management and whether solutions are optimal in terms of appropriate safety or are simply cynically manipulated in favour of other business priorities.”
Another worry that occupies minds at Optimus is basic standards of hazard management. There’s constant erosion of standards and corporate knowledge and nothing can be taken for granted these days.
Lane says the many changes that have occurred within the industry in recent years continue to make risk management a challenge.
Basically, this means that with people moving on there is a loss of knowledge and expertise from the industry.
The fresh blood coming in will require further coaching and development to achieve an appropriate level of confidence to become future leaders in hazard and risk management thinking.
This also means that oil company and contractor management can no longer take for granted that the engineering standards that were in place in previous years are still available today and will be there in the future.
This, in turn, leads to deceptively simple problems like a general lack of hazard awareness when it comes to major projects and support for operations on board offshore installations which may now have gone beyond their original design lives.
“Optimus has been asked on various occasions by different operators to help them deliver improved standards of hazard awareness among their discipline and safety engineers,” says Lane.
“We have provided them with new ways of thinking about some of these issues, which help to equip young engineers and improve the general level of awareness of hazard and risk management in the industry. That’s something in which we take considerable pride and have offered to help others in their drive for continuous improvement.”
Looking forward, Lane says the industry needs to reconcile the mis-match between senior management expectations of safety studies and day-to-day practice of creating real-world solutions, which are often only as good as the state of the design and the team in the room at the time.
That brings us back to the whole question of leadership. “It requires generalists with a broad understanding of how this business ticks to make sure that there is a clear connection between what’s happening day-to-day in operations and on major projects and what’s going on in the boardroom,” says Lane.
“It’s about making sure we develop pragmatic engineering solutions which are capable of standing up to scrutiny and will pass a reality check, rather than some people being content to distance themselves from difficult problems and not necessarily being prepared to roll their sleeves up.
“Sometimes it means speaking plain truth to power, which may not always make our lives easy. A generation on from Piper Alpha, we need to constantly remind everyone of the cost of getting it wrong.”