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Being Agile in the Oil Field
Having worked with a number of ‘agile’ companies in the past that utilized a Scrum product building framework for software development, I came to the West Texas oil fields assuming that I was going to bring a new advancement in the company’s communication methodology - but I was dead wrong. To my amazement, oil companies have been using scrum practices for years (they just didn’t know there was a name for it).
Each morning every engineer has a rig conference call (daily scrum) where they give a brief summary of what their rig did yesterday, what they are going to do today, and what challenges they need assistance with. This is identical to what software engineers ‘invented’.
In addition to the daily scrum, each job has a strict timeline for drilling, well servicing and any other well operation, and there is a backlog for each project that is meticulously tracked by hundreds of engineers (scrum masters).
The more time I spend here the more I learn how advanced, yet simple, the processes are that these oil companies have been utilizing for nearly a century, and I’m continually impressed.
