Low Capital Investment Approach to Foster Organizational Change Towards a Continuous Improvement Culture.

Abstract

Abstract This research paper represents an organizational change initiative that can be implemented with minimum capital investment. Lean six sigma cultural change initiative was proposed to one of the world's largest Oil and Gas (O&G) producing company specifically in gas processing facilities construction projects department within the company's project management business line. The organizational structural change initiative aimed at enhancing personnel's performance efficiency in executing projects in order to achieve cost savings and/or avoidance up to 10 %. Gas construction projects department execute mega projects with an estimated total budget of $5 billion US dollars of new projects at the planning phase and currently have over 250 employees. A top-bottom cultural change approach was conducted in order to create a buy-in and secure management approval. The team capitalized on their extensive project management and execution experiences combined with lean six sigma training and previous successful continuous improvement implementations positive outcomes to develop a persuasion method. The proposed change depends, 1) changing the norm to become a continuous improvement nor, 2) spreading the use of simple analytical tools that will assist all employees to self-improve their daily tasks execution performance on a continuous base. Once the department manager buy-in is secured, a series of focused workshops are to be conducted in order to introduce the root cause analysis, 5-Whys, fishbone diagrams, and pareto 80/20 rule principal in order to communicate to employees (technical and non-technical) how to eliminate defects and minimize variances with the purpose of enhancing efficiency and effective utilization of resources. The primary exploration of data in this paper is to demonstrate how the authors are able to initiate simple analytical lean tools approach into the employees' mindset thinking approach in order to adapt lean transformation initiative. The team efforts of steering the department into executing mega projects with lean mindset approach is ongoing and active as the transformation is in its ground phase of spreading the culture and setting up the department norm. Nevertheless, the change champion has identified with the project controls division head the new mega projects which are tabled for execution on an expedited mode and initiated introduction of lean into the projects current phase; Front End Loading (FEL) and contracting strategy selection. Hence, the champion contributed into development of different contracting strategies options. These options are cored around enhancing the contract awarding cycle period by up to 50% reduction in consumed time. This is conducted parallel to the continuous efforts of educating the employees on the use of simple root cause analysis tools and continuous improvement approach. This paper represents a new approach of implementing lean thinking mindset in executing mega oil and gas construction projects. The authors go beyond systematically reorganizing the department documentation only but imbedding low cost analytical tools and changing the cultural mindset towards continuous improvement culture and mentality.