Leading the Deployment of PPM (Roundtable)

[00:00:00] Todd R. Zabelle: All right, everybody. I’m very excited about this. This is a last minute adjustment where we flipped roles, but we’re here with the Mount Rushmore, if you will, of gray beards and some don’t have hair. Others are hanging in there, and there’s a reason for that. And so with us, we have Gary, who you all know, Dave McKay, who has spent 700 years before retiring mobile and then Exxon Mobil and then Hest.

[00:00:32] Todd R. Zabelle: And then we have Will Lichtig, who’s a luminary. If you have anything related to interlocking agreements, integrated form of agreement, and so on and so forth, if you know anything about what Sutter did Will was very instrumental on all that. As a matter of fact, Will wrote the first integrated form of agreement.

[00:00:49] Todd R. Zabelle: So lots of experience up here. Cumulatively, I think we’re north of 25, 000 years amongst these three guys. And they have a lot of battle scars. McKay in general used to wear a flak jacket. When he first started, but incredible stories that that, these men have, to share. So we’re going to ask him three questions.

[00:01:09] Todd R. Zabelle: And typical is a bell style. There’s not much structure to this. We came up with this in the last minute. So let’s let’s give it a go. So I’ll tell you what the three questions are, because they need time to think about it. And then we’ll get the jam session going. How much time do we have for this?

[00:01:25] Audience Member: Not enough

[00:01:26] Todd R. Zabelle: No, thanks

[00:01:27] Will Lichtig: Thanks very much.

[00:01:29] Todd R. Zabelle: So we’re going to ask him, how did you. No, not how, why did you consider leveraging or implementing PPM and operation science, what challenges were you looking to address through its use? And what advice would you give to anyone else who’s currently involved with it or looking to implement PPM?

[00:01:52] Todd R. Zabelle: All right. So we’ll maybe each time start in one area, unless we want to change it, which we’re, we could do at AMO. So let’s start with Gary. Why did you consider doing something with PPM?

[00:02:06] Gary Fischer, PE: I’d just back up a few years now I was the architect of Chevron’s project management system. We built that system over the process, course of four years, deployed it, trained 10, 000 people, and then watched to see if it worked.

[00:02:24] Gary Fischer, PE: And unfortunately, we didn’t realize predictable projects. It still didn’t move the needle. It didn’t get us to where we thought it would, and we were, pulling the best of the best. If Chevron didn’t have A great process. We borrowed it from BP or Exxon or Shell or somebody. And we’ve thought we had accumulated and built really the state of the art project management system from concept all the way to start up a beneficial operations, fully documented, fully trained workforce, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:02:54] Gary Fischer, PE: But it didn’t give us the results we wanted, which was pretty, I don’t know. That was not a good day. We benchmarked, we saw it was terrible performance. And so I was out of desperation, out of need, out of pain. We said there’s got to be a different way. And that’s, it was just out of our poor performance. It was just unacceptable.

[00:03:17] Gary Fischer, PE: And in the oil and gas business, it’s a commodity business. You can’t just blow a bunch of money and time. The only hope you have is oil prices will go up and you’ll get saved by oil price. We had a lot of luck with that, but you can’t run a business on that basis. And I think the energy companies are still struggling with that today in predictable performance.

[00:03:39] Gary Fischer, PE: So that’s what really led us to try to find a, there’s got to be a way to do this. And that led us on the search.

[00:03:44] Todd R. Zabelle: Excellent.

[00:03:45] David McKay: Dave? Yeah, similar for me. I first encountered this whole idea in the late 90s. I was with Mobile at the time and we were embarking on drilling what the formation in the San Joaquin Valley called the diatomite.

[00:04:10] David McKay: And it involved drilling wells in incredibly close proximity to one another, tight spacing it’s called, and drilling like a thousand wells a year. And I was charged with running that to begin with and and at the time I was unconstrained by any previous knowledge of how to run a project.

[00:04:33] David McKay: I, I was a production engineer which basically a completely different part of the of the of the of the business at the time. But I came in, tried to adopt what I knew to be like CPM methodologies. I built these these massive hundred thousand line Gantt charts and had it all laid out and had tables in an office all laid out with where the little drilling rigs were going to be moving and and it it like once it started in motion, I went out to the field and saw that it was just literally chaos.

[00:05:13] David McKay: And so what motivated me was. I, was very close to I was pretty certain I would be fired if I didn’t fix this because they were literally fistfights out in the field. One, one crew would show up where another crew was supposed to be and, they would they would start arguing or they would just go somewhere else, which then they would encounter the crew that was supposed to be there.

[00:05:40] David McKay: And, it was What actually the guy who bailed me out of it initially was Glenn Ballard when I called him up and, he he called it go and see scheduling was what was actually going on. In other words, just chaos. I had this nice trailer with all this, these great charts in it, but none of it meant anything cause that wasn’t any born on resemblance to reality.

[00:06:05] David McKay: So, it was desperation and and it it, It didn’t get, it didn’t get solved overnight, but in it, but immediately with the concepts of project production management, it began to get more and more orderly. And I began to see that it was it was gonna, it was gonna work. And so carrying that idea forward to the, my time with Mobil and Aira and then on into Hess they all had their challenges, but to me it became the only way to do work.

[00:06:44] Todd R. Zabelle: Thanks. So just as a side note there was an article several years ago in The Economist. I don’t know how it got there or why it got written, but basically it proposed that companies can, should consider what ERA did back in the day, basically what Dave did working at Glenn, on a vision for the way forward for capital projects.

[00:07:07] Todd R. Zabelle: And that was quite interesting. It just appeared. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that article or not in The Economist.

[00:07:11] David McKay: No.

[00:07:12] Todd R. Zabelle: But yeah, there’s actually an article in The Economist. There’s a whole section on about what, whatever it had accomplished is very interesting. Okay, so Will.

[00:07:20] Will Lichtig: You’re going to hear similar ideas from the three of us.

[00:07:22] Will Lichtig: It sounds like I, I guess I would say we came to the conclusion that our industry is broken. The design and construction industry is broken. Projects are late. Projects are over budget. Customers are dissatisfied and we kill or injured too many people in our jobs. And so it really caused us to begin to examine how do we transform the way we think about.

[00:07:45] Will Lichtig: And therefore deliver design and construction projects. And organizationally the bolt organization has been using the last planner system since 1999. So 25 years of, last planner. We worked with SPS in the early two thousands, bringing production management, thinking to industrial projects, paper machine rebuilds.

[00:08:06] Will Lichtig: We used SPS initial versions of the software back in the, in that era as well. We actually branded it as lean stream. And if you look back on the last 25 years it’s like Churchill said about the Temperance League. They complained that he drank too much. He said, so much drunk, so much left to drink.

[00:08:29] Will Lichtig: We’ve, made a lot of progress, but we haven’t made much progress and there’s still a huge opportunity and oftentimes folks will hear me say that if you look at most general contractors today, which we’re a general contractor they’re trying to evolve to be a better dinosaur. And we’re actually trying to figure out how to evolve to be a bird because the dinosaurs are going to go extinct.

[00:08:55] Will Lichtig: And so we think that project production management is the foundation for that evolutionary process to see a new industry and transform what it means to be involved as a general contractor in the industry.

[00:09:07] Todd R. Zabelle: Excellent. Maybe we should, Gary has such a great story. It’s almost like we should probably talk about the piles, right?

[00:09:16] Todd R. Zabelle: It’s just, it’s rattling in the back of my head because it’s so powerful. We, should ask what particular challenges were you guys looking to address? Maybe some examples or what Silicon Valley, they call use cases, but that, that pile thing is really interesting too. I don’t know. Why don’t we just go back to you?

[00:09:33] Todd R. Zabelle: We’ll just work around

[00:09:34] Gary Fischer, PE: OK, I’ll tell pile story real quick. All right. So this was a project I was involved with in, in Kazakhstan a number of years ago, and we had a, real challenge of interface and interferences between the successive contractors on the project. So we came up with a strategy. We’ll just do it in big chunks.

[00:09:53] Gary Fischer, PE: Okay, we’re gonna, we’re gonna do all the site prep. And this is a site that was a kilometer long, so it was a big site. Alright, do all the site prep, drive all the piles, crop all the piles, bring in the foundation contractor, they can run the foundations, bring in the underground contractor, run all the undergrounds.

[00:10:11] Gary Fischer, PE: Just, you can see it. We’re gonna do it in big blocks, and that way we would get great prices from the individual subcontractors. Okay. And we wouldn’t have interference. We would just, we could have a terrible problem with that. So we did, we executed that project in that way. And we had, I can’t remember a thousand piles, right?

[00:10:31] Gary Fischer, PE: It was a large number of piles to drive and we got a phenomenal unit rate. We got a barn burner of a unit rate. We thought, Hey, this strategy is awesome. We’re just, we’re cooking well two years. And so we had a six month pile program. Two years later, we finally finished the piles. Years later, we finished the piles.

[00:10:56] Gary Fischer, PE: We did a little look back and said the strategy we’ve got here, is that so hot? Yeah, we got a great unit rate on the, but we overran the budget. We blew the time, big time, right? How did that happen? We got the piling ahead of the engineering, so we had to use a kind of a mat pile approach so that we could have disconnect the foundation design from the pile layouts.

[00:11:22] Gary Fischer, PE: That cost extra money. And then we couldn’t keep up, even with that, we couldn’t keep up with the piling contractor. We had to pay standby charges. We have at least 500 piles that are covered by the sand that only a few of us know about, but because the design evolved and we didn’t need that part of the plant, so we just covered it up with sand.

[00:11:46] Gary Fischer, PE: And we really waste a lot of money. We took a lot of time and again, oil and gas commodity businesses, the shorter you can make it between what you’re doing. And when you produce products is a good thing. You start the revenue stream. We did a little analysis of the project, which took an overall five years to complete.

[00:12:05] Gary Fischer, PE: We could have completed that project in three years and we’d adopted a more waved approach. Don’t started, got the site prep. You have to do the site prep, but start the piling work on one side of the site. And then move it successively across the site and then behind that at the right amount of time, cropping the piles coming across at the right amount of time, then the undergrounds are coming across.

[00:12:29] Gary Fischer, PE: You can see, we could have done the job in successive ways all the way through the completion of the project. We think we could have done it in three years at substantially reduced cost. That’s what really, one thing that really got my, as we wrestle with What is this production management thing?

[00:12:46] Gary Fischer, PE: How does it change things? And when we stopped and looked at this particular project, okay. I know what that’s a tsunami alert. I think we’re pretty safe here.

[00:13:03] Todd R. Zabelle: At least the second floor tsunami. Welcome to California. You live in California. Yeah, there you go. Okay.

[00:13:16] Gary Fischer, PE: If you’re in Hawaii, you’re a little more worried about that. Yeah. Yeah. And that just really opened our eyes on just taking a different approach and throwing out the paradigms of what it takes to optimize a project. We were just having a little conversation here in the last break about a superintendent that is driven to, trench across the entire site first before doing any other work.

[00:13:37] Gary Fischer, PE: What does that do? That delays all the other work. Was it really necessary? Yeah, you might get a better unit rate, right? But what’s the total cost to the project? And that’s what we lost sight of. What was the total cost of the project? It’s not the optimal cost of each piece. It’s how we put the pieces together to optimize the whole, just a completely different way of thinking.

[00:13:59] Gary Fischer, PE: And I’m embarrassed to even say this because it sounds stupid to sit here and tell the story. As we were convinced we had a winning strategy, but boy we lived it and we spent a lot of money and took a lot of time and lost a lot of revenue taking the approach that we took.

[00:14:18] Todd R. Zabelle: Okay.

[00:14:19] Todd R. Zabelle: Let’s go to Will and then we’ll come back to you, Dave. Is that good?

[00:14:22] Will Lichtig: Yeah. Just repeat the question so I make sure I answer the right question. Which question did you answer? I don’t have a file story. I don’t have a file story. I don’t have a file story. You do have a file story. I like it. But it’s evolving, right?

[00:14:32] Todd R. Zabelle: Okay. So what kind of challenges are you looking to address or have you looked to address through the application?

[00:14:41] Will Lichtig: Sure okay. Thanks, Todd. So again.

[00:14:44] Todd R. Zabelle: These guys have memory issues. I apologize. What? Yeah, exactly.

[00:14:48] Will Lichtig: What was the question? No. So, I think. I think where we’ve come to is initially we thought of this as an and, in other words it’s like a program and then we you remember I said we, the Bull Company started trying to apply the last planner system as a standard method of planning and production management starting in 1999.

[00:15:15] Will Lichtig: And we had just to give people an idea we had five, pilots and then we had 40 projects that were running on the system within about a year. And then we had 200 projects that we had completed in about two years using the Last Planner system. And when I joined the company in about 15 years ago, I would say that less than 20 percent of the projects were being run on the Last Planner system.

[00:15:41] Will Lichtig: So that will let you know that doing it as an and it’s this and something else was not successful. So I guess what we’ve begun to embrace as an organization is that it’s part of a transformation strategy. It is who we are. It is how we’re gonna do work. And that it’s embraced by our leadership across the organization.

[00:16:04] Will Lichtig: So John Heck will be talking this afternoon. He’s one of our general managers. All of our general managers stacked hands last year at our strategic planning and said that the Bolt project delivery system is the way that we will deliver work across our organization irrespective of geography, irrespective of market sector, irrespective of project size, it will be the way that we will do work.

[00:16:28] Will Lichtig: And so as we’ve now begun to rethink what does that mean and we’ve continued to investigate what is. Production management, we began some recent learnings again with, PPI and SPS. We’re really trying to establish that as the core of the way we think about what it means to deliver projects, not just the way that we execute projects in the field.

[00:16:52] Will Lichtig: How do we think about our supply chain? How do we, what we call design for optimal production, taking it all the way back to, the planning phases of work as a general contractor. And, we believe that it’s part of a strategy, again, as we become that bird to be more competitive than anybody else in the industry, by understanding the operations science and using that as a foundation for being able to say, faster, cheaper, better, pick three.

[00:17:22] Will Lichtig: Because that’s where we think we’ll get and, we think that, again, based on the, notions of competitive strategy, and we think we’ll make more money doing it because there’s so much waste in the current system. So I guess that’s how I describe the way our thinking about it has evolved over the last 20, 25 years.

[00:17:41] Todd R. Zabelle: That’s excellent. Reminds us, I was at a dinner with James Roberto in London a couple of weeks ago, whatever. And we’re dealing with some people, talking with some people, some very, large projects over there. And one of the guys said, we got to figure out how we’re going to get government, These are civil projects.

[00:18:00] Todd R. Zabelle: To accept this new way of thinking, I said, okay, so the new way of thinking is we’re going to focus on the work guy goes, yeah, I said, okay, so we’re going to figure out how to do engineering and making stuff and building and commission and better is a new way of thinking. He said, yeah. I was like, wow.

[00:18:19] Todd R. Zabelle: There is room for competitive advantage if you actually think about the work. And so I was talking with another guy, a contractor, mechanical guy a while back and he was like, Yeah, it’s really difficult. All the people working our company, they don’t really care about the work that they like change orders and this thing.

[00:18:32] Todd R. Zabelle: And it’s all yeah, I go. Yeah, you got like a bunch of guys that should be in Las Vegas that are running your projects because they’re more interested in that than actually the work, right? So it is interesting. There is room for competitive advantage to that. All right, Mr McKay.

[00:18:47] David McKay: Let me make sure I’m answering the question again correctly.

[00:18:50] David McKay: I think I have a pretty good idea of it.

[00:18:54] Todd R. Zabelle: What you can say anything you want to say, but if you’d like to answer the question, so you’re not being deposed, these guys have been through such a bad time, they don’t even remember the question. Usually it’s, I don’t remember. I can’t answer because I don’t remember.

[00:19:09] Todd R. Zabelle: I don’t even remember the question, but that’s a good strategy in a deposition. Yeah. Any challenges that you look to address through these. Through the concept of Operation Science PPM or anything else you think you might want to talk about that you can remember?

[00:19:21] David McKay: I like that question. I like what I’ve heard so far.

[00:19:24] David McKay: I think Gary’s experiences there are I hate to say it, but typically I, nobody starts out a project saying, boy, we’re going to start this project and it’s going to turn into a fiasco. And then some people get fired and I’ll fire some people and then maybe I’ll get fired.

[00:19:46] David McKay: Nobody ever begins a project like that. But how many of them I’ve seen in my career where the final activity is lawsuits between the owner and the contractors and a terrible over expenditure, an unmaintainable, oftentimes inoperable project that was left in place. And it, it, just seems so obvious.

[00:20:13] David McKay: But, the system that has been developed has been generating that kind of outcome. And it’s not every system because sometimes there’s just enough talent in the people that are involved that they somehow manage through it. But it wasn’t the system that helped them to do it. But there is a way of doing it using operations science.

[00:20:32] David McKay: And that’s the thing that’s I think I, I talked about more as I’ve become more as, I became more familiar with the whole underpinnings of the operations science element to this thing of This is how work gets done. And this is you can do it a couple of other ways, but it’s not going to be as successful if you don’t understand the operation science principles and don’t implement those and get those going in a way that that they actually are the, guiding system of generating the work and it, really ultimately comes down to just having a very clear idea of what it is we’re going to be doing.

[00:21:17] David McKay: And, that idea is carried clear down to the, welders and to people tying iron and the people drilling the wells. And that. They’re not making stuff up as I was describing earlier. They’re not out just finding something to do. And it Toyota calls it respect for people.

[00:21:41] David McKay: And I think that’s what it comes down to is just making it clear what somebody is supposed to do today. And then at the end of the day, did you do it? And if you didn’t do it, why? And how can we help get it so that tomorrow isn’t going to be like that? And that to me is what. When the operation science is, really working as it should be, that, that’s what the ultimate outcome is that the engineer knows what they’re supposed to be doing today and they deliver it.

[00:22:11] David McKay: The field personnel know what they’re supposed to be doing today and they deliver it. And if there is something that’s not working, we get after it and address it and make it so that tomorrow looks better and it actually works.

[00:22:27] Todd R. Zabelle: Here’s something that I learned from, Dave and James Chu uses this at least once a week.

[00:22:35] Todd R. Zabelle: Question that we learned from Dave. And at whatever level you are in the organization, Dave’s question applies. Do you know what your people should be working on today? And if there’s someone that has ever been involved in cadence, planning cadence and discipline, it’s Dave. To see. Vice president level people sitting around in a meeting, getting down to, are we doing that frack today or tomorrow?

[00:23:05] Todd R. Zabelle: And knowing the answer to that. I saw the most incredible thing up in the Bakken when I had the opportunity to go up there one time, the flow back contractor went bankrupt. These guys from Hess were unbelievable. It didn’t shake them because they had it so tight. Dave had the standard work. So well established, they just plugged in a new one.

[00:23:30] Todd R. Zabelle: It was bizarre. It’s yeah, that guy went broke and someone said, what are we gonna do? Oh, we got a new one coming. They just pick up the standard work. We keep going. So it is incredible. Just the stuff that you guys have probably forgot that you’ve accomplished. Okay, it’s Kristen.

[00:23:43] Todd R. Zabelle: What time does this end this one session? I was trying to, because we started at a different time. This is a serious question.

[00:23:50] Will Lichtig: There she is.

[00:23:52] Todd R. Zabelle: 15 minutes, OK, so we’re going to ask one more question and then we’ll open it up for some questions.

[00:23:57] Will Lichtig: Pay attention, guys.

[00:23:59] Todd R. Zabelle: Yeah. OK, I’m bringing it on. You guys ready?

[00:24:03] Todd R. Zabelle: OK. What advice would you give to anyone that’s currently deploying PPM on OS or considering it? Why don’t we start with Will.

[00:24:19] Will Lichtig: That’s a really good question, Todd. I guess a couple things come to mind. Number one is it’s hard work. It you’re, gonna be cutting against the grain of folks who have 40 years or more experience in the industry and when you come with something new, their initial reaction is are you, telling me I don’t know what I’m doing, son?

[00:24:46] Will Lichtig: And so that’s a challenge. I guess a couple other phrases that come to mind are there’s, one quote you I think it was Lyndon Johnson said, you can tell them to go to hell, but they just won’t go. There was a conversation about change management earlier on and it’s like it, remember that this is a transformation journey and you’re not going to make all the turns to the battleship simply by.

[00:25:15] Will Lichtig: Trying to begin to turn the wheel in the, wheelhouse. So it is a, longterm effort. And I guess the third one I’d say is don’t give up because it is it is relentless. I it’s I often use the phrase among our teams it, consistent pressure, relentlessly applied, consistent pressure, relentlessly applied because everyone will look.

[00:25:45] Will Lichtig: For a crack in the armature. I think that if you look back on the history of the bolt organization and where we have had our missteps over the 25 years, it’s as soon as leaders crack under the pressure of pushback that we end up succumbing to the common practice and revert back to the way we’ve always done things because it’s less conflict driven.

[00:26:09] Will Lichtig: It’s less confrontational. It’s just easier. I’m going to stop there.

[00:26:22] Todd R. Zabelle: That was excellent. I’ll just tell a quick story. I got to observe Will do exactly what he’s talking about. On a project recently where there was a guy with eight years of experience that had all the answers. And he said, we do have the schedule complete, but we haven’t finished it because we still got to do more work to it.

[00:26:40] Todd R. Zabelle: And we’ll ask the guy and I saw will, I was like, okay, here we go. And we saw we’ll lean in and said, I’m confused. It’s complete or it’s not complete. And we said, for sure, maybe. And I saw we’ll just start putting a little pressure on the person. But what happened was the people around the room started leaning in and they said, there’s an opportunity.

[00:27:01] Todd R. Zabelle: And all of a sudden. This was the concrete guy, the mechanical and electrical guy. He said, yeah, we got 15 day blocks and we need to be doing work handovers within the day. And so all of a sudden what we’ll did this jujitsu move or boomerang may not have moved that guy, but started to move a coalition around the room because they were just waiting for someone to say, This guy’s out of control and we’re all waiting to get in and just will offer that and I don’t know if they sent a posse out for the guy or took him hunting and he didn’t come back.

[00:27:35] Todd R. Zabelle: I don’t know the guy’s still there, but what’s going on? But it was amazing to see Will, Will I was he, was going, all right, why don’t we, why don’t we go with you, David? I think you’re probably, yeah

[00:27:47] David McKay: I think that was an example, I think at a, Different level, perhaps, but it’s at every level of make it clear what’s supposed to be done and then see that it gets done.

[00:27:59] David McKay: And if it doesn’t get done and understand why it’s not getting done and fix it, which means I think for leaders to affect this change and you’re facing a lot of inertia most of the time. I wish I would have known will I’d love to have had him working in our business when we were out there.

[00:28:19] David McKay: But you’re facing a lot of inertia. A lot of The old industry kind of CPM kind of management that that’s pretty deeply ingrained. And so changing that is is not easy to do. But I think, again, it it comes down to. Staying very involved. I the idea that you can stay in Houston and expect it to get done in North Dakota or in the Permian Basin is it’s just dreaming it, requires you to be at the work face and all through the kind of the leadership ranks to see that this is what my leaders, the people directly reporting to me are doing and saying and how they’re running their business.

[00:29:07] David McKay: And then this is how they’re. Leaders are working, and then this is how it looks out at the workplace. And all of that has to tie together because if there’s some kind of major disconnect and the system isn’t functioning, and you need to fix it. You need to be addressing it and face up to it. And if you’re not out there, you don’t see it.

[00:29:28] David McKay: So it does require a lot less time at the central office and there’s people that need to be worked with there. Don’t get me wrong, but it needs to be. You need to be roaming around through the system, I think, as a leader and making certain that what you think is happening is actually happening. And it generally isn’t.

[00:29:50] David McKay: The Toyota word for that is Gemba, as I’m sure many of and we had a saying amongst some of my colleagues that Gemba is incredibly humbling. You get out there and realize, Oh, my God, this is what’s happening. And if you’re not out there, then it’s happening. And it’s you’re going to see the consequences of it at some point.

[00:30:13] David McKay: But you had an opportunity to be there and see it and address it and fix it. And you didn’t do it. So good advice

[00:30:24] Gary Fischer, PE: from both of you. So what can I add to that? I think I’d start with the change starts here. Change starts with you, with me. And I, my, I think my switch got flipped when I finally got through my thick head.

[00:30:44] Gary Fischer, PE: This is actually science that underpins how things get made. The transformation of raw products into, of raw materials into finished products, and those are capital projects. Once I accepted that concept, And said, Whoa I, use science on all kinds of other things thermodynamics and heat transfer and blah, blah, blah we’re a very technical business.

[00:31:09] Gary Fischer, PE: Why wouldn’t I use science if it’s available to me to manage projects? And once I got my head around that, and then started understanding the science and the implications of that science, because it’s, happening, whether you know it or you acknowledge it or not. It’s just like gravity. You can pretend like it doesn’t exist, but go jump off a building.

[00:31:28] Gary Fischer, PE: You’re going to might be surprised, right? We were surprised a lot. We were jumping off buildings and we had no idea what the heck is going on. Why didn’t this work? Because we were trying to defy the laws of science. That system I designed was designed to build work in process, more work in process, excessive work in process means you’re going to take longer.

[00:31:52] Gary Fischer, PE: We had no idea. I had no idea that’s what we were doing. I designed a system to fail. So anyway, I’m getting off on a rabbit trail there. But it starts here with your own personal conviction. And then and, but to get there you might have to try it. Don’t overanalyze this thing. Roll up your sleeves and try it.

[00:32:15] Gary Fischer, PE: It’s like riding a bicycle. You can study it all you want. You can observe people doing it. You can say, Oh, I don’t know if they got so it didn’t look so good. But when you get on a bicycle and you actually tried yourself, you learn how to ride a bicycle. Get on the bicycle and learn how to do it. Get your hands dirty, get involved, get out in the field, work with people on the implementation and the use of it.

[00:32:39] Gary Fischer, PE: It doesn’t have to be a grand thing. Pick something and get started. There’s no perfect project. There’s no perfect phase. Find something that’s got a problem and go fix it. And you’ll be amazed at the results. And I think that building success builds success. And that’s one thing that I’m proud of the way we started deployment across Chevron.

[00:33:03] Gary Fischer, PE: Because that’s basically what we did. Say, we don’t understand this, but let’s just start doing it. We’re going to learn by doing. And the more we applied it.

[00:33:10] Todd R. Zabelle: Yeah. Go down to this 55 billion project, right?

[00:33:13] Gary Fischer, PE: Yeah. We took on a completion of a 55 billion project and had three big, excuse me, LNG trains. The first one we set a world record, poor performance on how long it took to complete an LG train.

[00:33:25] Gary Fischer, PE: We set the record train to, we were industry average train three. We set a world record for the shortest train brought on online. And I tell ya, that was a huge win. And billions of dollars of increased revenue because of that shortened time frame. Made a big difference in Chevron’s bottom line. So we took that philosophy and said, let’s just go to every project and say, where’s your problem?

[00:33:49] Gary Fischer, PE: Let’s see if we can apply this and solve your problem. And that’s how we went about deploying it across the company. Now on the downside, we were making a presentation to a key leadership team in the upstream side of the company. We showed them our success and they said, great, we’re going to mandate it.

[00:34:07] Gary Fischer, PE: In Chevron’s culture, when you mandate something, it doesn’t go over very well. Maybe that’s changed these days. No, I see the Chevron guys doing it now. When you mandate something, that’s immediate resistance just comes up everywhere. And that was not a favor. That did not help us. Then the big reorganization occurred and the people that didn’t like mandate said, let’s throw that out.

[00:34:29] Gary Fischer, PE: So they threw the baby out with the bathwater and Chevron’s not where it could have been today. So hopefully in the future, looking to Chevron guys gets reentrenched and operation science gets a stronger foothold and successes start breeding more success. Cause I think That’s one of the best ways to demonstrate it.

[00:34:50] Gary Fischer, PE: Hey, look at this. Look how great this is. Now, let’s take it over here and solve another problem.

[00:34:55] Todd R. Zabelle: All right. How much time we have left? Five minutes? Two minutes? All right. We have time for one question. I’m not going to, if someone’s got a question, I’m not going to pick the person, but all right, let’s go. We have to say Glenn.

[00:35:04] Todd R. Zabelle: All right. Let’s do it, Glenn. . Yeah, we, you just stood up. You didn’t have to stood up. Say, I’m taking charge .

[00:35:15] Audience Member: I just wanted to pick up, or maybe I over time conversation about leader standard work.

[00:35:27] Audience Member: And I wonder what progress.

[00:35:32] Will Lichtig: Funny you should ask that.

[00:35:34] Will Lichtig: The question was Glenn is familiar with conversations that we’ve had internally about leader standard work. What progress have we made in that regard? So actually, in the last couple of years, we’ve made significant progress in developing leader standard work. We’ve started with our, I’ll call it our project management, project delivery services work family.

[00:35:58] Will Lichtig: We’ve templated it. We’ve built it. Prototyped it and are now beginning to roll it out across the organization as what should an operations manager be doing daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually, and on down the line do a field engineer. Because we think if you define both the expectations of what the individuals need to be focused on and then how their one ups need to be helping them be successful in achieving those objectives.

[00:36:28] Will Lichtig: It gets everybody focused, as Dave was saying, on actually doing the work. It’s, not about reviewing reports. It’s not about reviewing. It’s actually, how can I help oversee and build capability? I think that that’s really the key here is how do you focus on building, Organizational capability.

[00:36:47] Will Lichtig: The one thing I’ll say that, all of us have probably experienced is what I’ll call the, I the IACOCA effect. When Lee IACOCA went to work for Chrysler, it transformed Chrysler into a very successful organization. And when Lee IACOCA left, it went down the tubes. And so the question also is how do you create a system of sustainability?

[00:37:07] Will Lichtig: And we believe that leader standard work is the way you create that level of sustainability so that if someone. So if somebody gets unplugged from the system continues to function. Good question.

[00:37:26] Audience Member (2): If you wan to create the world anew in their own image. And you are trying to not let that happen and I wish you good luck. No, not that I think it won’t happen or that you won’t be successful with it, but it’s again going to be possibly a challenge like everything else we do in making things better.

[00:37:46] Todd R. Zabelle: And I just offer if anybody wants to learn more about that.

[00:37:49] Todd R. Zabelle: That’s probably Dave’s middle name is leader standard work, right? You probably saw him nodding his head. We’re going to sneak one last one in over here. Yep.

[00:38:02] Audience Member (3): Okay. My name is Pedro Guerrero and I come from Peru. I would like to ask you some questions in Spanish. My friend, Pedro, will help me with the translation. In Peru we are doing things that 10 years ago I would like to ask you some questions in Spanish.

[00:38:38] Audience Member (4): So in Peru they’re doing things that they haven’t done over the last 10 years that have not previously been done, and they’re trying to innovate in terms of their construction projects.

[00:39:01] Audience Member (3): Logrando optimizaciones del ciclo de construcción en un cincuenta por ciento y reducciones del plazo de ejecución en un trece por ciento.

[00:39:10] Audience Member (4): So they’ve they’ve been working on a mega project, it’s a tunneling project and they’ve been employing PPM to help them model and they’ve been able to realize through the modeling reductions in the cycle time of up to fifty percent.

[00:39:45] Audience Member (4): The Subteraneous projects different, are different from their, obviously from their surface projects. There, there’s a lot of uncertainty. A lot of uncertainty in the subterranean projects, with a lot of high risk.

[00:40:03] Audience Member (3): I would like to know, from the perspective of the Project Production Institute and the PPM, how to address the uncertainty of the subterranean projects, taking into account the examples that the speakers have given us, of well drilling and channel excavation.

[00:40:20] Audience Member (4): He would like to, he would like to understand from your perspective how you would undertake these high risk subterraneous projects using a lot of these methods that were previously exposed through the drilling the, drilling presentation that was shared earlier. If you could share your perspective on these subterranean projects that are essentially a higher risk type project how would you undertake that?

[00:40:47] Todd R. Zabelle: Do we? I’m just getting the flag on time. Would you guys be willing to talk one on one? Is he okay with that?

[00:40:59] Todd R. Zabelle: Okay, so they’re happy to talk with you to come over and talk with him. Okay. All right. We’re good. We’re getting the hook. What?

[00:41:09] H.J. James Choo, PhD: Since I carry the microphone around, I actually have one story to tell that we experienced with Dave.

[00:41:15] Todd R. Zabelle: Just as long as you’re taking the time and not me. Exactly. It’s your time, okay?

[00:41:19] H.J. James Choo, PhD: We’re leading into the next one. Exactly. And One time, we’re actually working with Dave, and Dave actually used to say, This is how Bakken does work.

[00:41:28] H.J. James Choo, PhD: I don’t really care what you do internally in your organization to the auto supplier. If you come up to our project, this is how you do the work. Now, we’ve been actually working with the vendor for a long time. We happen to actually meet with them. For another project, because they are supporting other owners as well.

[00:41:48] H.J. James Choo, PhD: And we said, you guys are doing this for Bakken, how come you’re not doing this for this organization? And they said, we’ve never been asked. So one of the things I find out there is, that there is definitely resistance, but sometimes the fear of potential resistance is actually greater than the resistance itself.

[00:42:10] H.J. James Choo, PhD: So that’s something I wanted to share with Dave.

[00:42:13] Gary Fischer, PE: All righty. All right

[00:42:15] Todd R. Zabelle:  Thank you guys very much.