Context

Our Customer is a joint venture oil and gas enterprise set up with a view to develop a group of oilfields. The company runs from 30 to 50 active projects simultaneously, each with a set of core challenges: diversity of project participants with distributed functions and responsibilities interacting via various information channels; complex documentation that is created during each project stage. The projects include building clusters of wells, assuring operational asset integrity, developing infrastructure and other activities.

Rayyan Technology was chosen to deliver a system that would minimize the scope of manual work with Excel files, cut the amount of mistakes and additional costs, and standardize the overall process to make the document workflow convenient and efficient.

Solution

To achieve the goals stated above, it was decided to develop a system that would:

• formalize the communication paths between the project participants
• provide a convenient way to process project documentation
• assure control and monitoring of project statuses and milestones
• reduce the quantity of manual operations

PCAP Automation system stands for Project Control and Assurance Plans and is designed for managing projects that involve the development of complex deliverables with cross-discipline technical documentation. The primary mission of the system is to ensure control over the creation and approval of the deliverables during the project lifecycle.

PCAP Projects Overview

PCAP system provides users with a separate website that is automatically created for each new project in the system. Information about all projects is accumulated on the home page of PCAP Automation.

All project websites have similar structure and retain following information grouped into separate tabs:

• Details: project name and goal, key project information, team, documents and tasks, as well as an opportunity to email team, get PCAP in Excel and give feedback
• PCAP: this tab gives access to project control and assurance plans of the project and documents attached
• Documents: this tab retains documents related to the project and is available for users with appropriate permissions
• Issues: demonstrates project-related issues
• Risks: shows project risks

Project lifecycle in the PCAP system begins when a Project Manager fills in a card with a set of project properties: name, goal, short description, sponsor, holder, manager, etc.

Each project website has a PCAP matrix tab that contains the information on project documentation: which project the document is related to, who works on which document, what stage the document is at as far as its approval is concerned.

The matrix shows project stages (1), project deliverables(document type) (2), responsibility defined for a deliverable (3), role (an abbreviation R, A, C or I, which defines action to be taken during the PCAP Process, followed by a digit to denote authority level of the DA. For example, “R2”, where “R” means “Responsible” and “2” stands for the authority level) (4), discipline (an area of technical or business knowledge) (5), DA (Discipline Authority, user responsible for the Role and the Discipline in the PCAP) (6), document saved in a project library (7).

DA Manual

DA Manual stands for Discipline Authorities Manual and represents a separate tab in the PCAP system that contains a list of PCAP process participants with their respective authority levels. They are divided into groups (for instance, Engineering, IT, etc.) and the project managers can choose the users from the list to assign certain documents to them for processing according to their competency level.

Workflow History

Workflow History retains basic information about the approval process for each document including the list of document-related tasks and history of events. It can be used to track the execution of the PCAP Process, manage tasks, watch comments provided during the flow, trace the bottlenecks that hamper the project document approval,etc.

Project Managers, PCAP Administrator and users responsible for the current document have the right to restart the workflow if needed if the PCAP Process is not yet completed providing the comments with a reason for restarting.

System Users

The portal has tyhe following user roles division:

• business users — watch the execution process of all the projects and access project websites with read-only permissions
• technical authorities — create/upload documents into the system, complete tasks in the PCAP Process assigned to them
• document control users — create/upload documents into the system, complete tasks in the PCAP Process assigned to Document Control, view “My Tasks” list with tasks assigned to DC, and work with project risks/issues
• project managers — create new projects, edit properties of existing ones, manage PCAP Process for documents, request changes if needed, complete all tasks in the PCAP Process
• PCAP administrators — publish PCAP, delete projects, set up DA Manual, change PCAP settings after publishing, modify the documents after approval, set up site content
• project support team — collect and process the user feedback provided in the PCAP system
• power users — manage permissions

The documents processed by users within the system go through certain stages to be approved. This process of the document workflow is displayed in the Process State field and can contain such values as upcoming (when the document is being prepared), review, sent for more information, approval, draft version, finalized.

System Workflow Management

The standard PCAP workflow editing process allows to configure a list of deliverables for each stage and a list of responsibilities which includes defining disciplines, roles, and persons responsible for those roles from DA Manual; run a check to make sure the process of document approval does not contain crucial errors; correct errors, if any; publish PCAP to make it ready for usage.

Results

The system developed by Rayyan Technology helps manage projects in the oil & gas production which include building clusters of wells, assuring operational asset integrity, developing infrastructure and other projects presupposing complex technical documentation development that includes work of various departments.

The main purpose of the system is to provide control over creating, coordinating and approving documents during the project life cycle. With the help of the newly developed product, the Customer can minimize the number of errors in the documentation, get rid of time delays and cut costs determined by the complexity of projects, thus focusing on successful delivery of their core business plans.