Why is it so difficult to achieve 100% compliance for our documentation?

In our recent gathering of SKG 16.3 Process Technology Community of Practice (COP), I volunteered to share on two topics. This time, I chose something different from the usual technical sharing, & instead more of a management sharing. The topics were on Documentation (i.e. Process Safety Information, PSI) and GHG: How we can steer our process technologists towards NZCE 2050 from perspective of upstream operating assets. 

My first paper was "Our Epic PSI Journey at SKA: Why can’t we achieve 100% PSI compliance? Apa la yang susah sangat?"

So, what's so difficult to achieve 100% in documentation? 

It's easy to jump to conclusions and judge certain for "not doing your basic job", but as leaders, we need to hold our judgment and seek to understand. Take a closer, deeper look and understand what are the systemic issues that led us here. 

These are some things we learnt:

 

1. Rollover / Acquiring new assets from other operators - Other operators have different standards in documentation. That's just the nature of upstream businesses. When we acquire new assets, we need to be mindful about the documentation we deem "mandatory" and mindfully challenge "do we really need this?", or else we shoot ourselves in the foot in non-compliance.

2. Perfectionism: A Double-edged sword - Sometimes, having too high standards of completion can also harm documentation completeness and accessibility. For example, just because a project being is short of 1% completion (i.e. punchlist), it holds back the rest of the 99% from being readily accessible to others in times of need, e.g. investigations. 

3. Formality - is "document update" embedded in the formal business workflows? 

As human beings, we cannot just rely on "common sense" or "considered as understood" to actually get things done.

Just because it's "common sense" to exercise, doesn't mean everyone actually does it, right? 😉

If something needs to be done, it needs to be specific and defined. Example: During maintenance modification, is "drawing update" part of the completion checklist? 

4. Clarity in roles and responsibilities - Are the Document Owners aware of the responsibilities and the implications? Do they have the resources to actually do it?

At the end of the day, most important was to focus on the SOLUTION: Collaboration. 

We engaged our leaders, briefing them of the situation, and proposed to bring all the responsible departments under one working group (like a Task Force) - where we engage them, surface out the challenges together and iron out the discrepancies. We make clear scope segregation of "what is my scope" vs. what is not, and compartmentalize those efforts by different workstreams, to ensure our efforts don't overlap. 

We then brainstorm coming up with common resources for us to track and execute together with a unified deadline goal, instead of going by ourselves. 

This is how we Move Forward Together (MFT)!