Monday, November 27, 2006

accountability

The question I asked in my last post wasn't strictly a rhetorical one. What confluence of factors caused us to spend 23 hours on location when 10 would have been much more reasonable? There were problems with getting the casing in the hole. The company man wasn't used to the rig since he was filling in for a sick colleague. Thus, he didn't understand how slowly the rig runs casing. Water haulers don't work at night anymore around here. (Seriously, they don't.) It's a matter of accountability.

If I'm on a job, whether I'm the principle supervisor or not, I make it a point to do the best job I can. On a very basic level, I want to provide a good job for our clients because it's the right thing to do. And I expect to be held accountable for the quality of the work I do and I am accountable in various ways. If we are unable to complete a job or we don't execute it as planned, then I don't get a bonus for the job. In a greater sense, if we are unable to consistently deliver good work for our clients then they will find someone else for their needs. While that doesn't directly impact me, it has the ability to come around and leave us with a lot less to do than we'd like.

On location, the company man is the one who is ultimately responsible for the decisions that get made regarding what to do while drilling, when to call vendors and service companies (like us), filing progress reports, checking safety compliance, etc. Given that responsibility, it would be natural to assume that the company man has certain incentives to perform well, like stay on schedule and under budget, have no accidents or environmental spills, and so forth. However, given how badly some of the company men that I interact with appear to be performing, they don't operate like they have any performance incentives. It doesn't seem like they're accountable for massive cost-overruns, spills all over location, and blowing the drilling schedule out of the water. And it's maddening for us, because while the overtime revenue is nice for us, it means we get sucked out and stuck on location for 20+ plus hours at a time.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Agree! Regardless who your clients are, one still delivers the best quality of goods and services with or without incentives. It's not only the right thing to do, it's the only thing to do. Competition will take it to the next level.

Anonymous said...

I agree with 'mere', whoever he/she/it is. (The Shadow knows.)