Project Management in the Oil and Gas Industry

participants.
8.4.1.5 Expert 
Interviews
We can use an expert in these types of projects. It’s preferable that the 
expert works for the company because then he or she would have informa-
tion about the project in addition to being able to easily imagine the project 
constrains and potential risk. 
For instance, if the procurement employee in your company is not com-
petent, he will feel that, but if the expert is from outside the company, you 
will be afraid to transfer him information about the competence of the pro-
curement in your company or be afraid to tell him that the management has 
hesitated to make decision or that the paper work takes a lot of time inside 
the company. Another major benefit of using experts from within your 
company is that it will be free of charge, whereas external experts will cost.
Before the interview, you should collect all the data about the project 
and present it clearly to the expert to let him advise on the most probable 
risks in the project.

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Project Management in the Oil and Gas Industry
In addition, the goals of the interview must be clearly understood. 
During the interview, the information from the expert must be recorded. If 
more than one expert is used, the output information from the interviews 
should be consolidated and circulated to the other experts.
8.4.1.6 Root Cause Identification
This method is used in conjunction with the brainstorming technique and 
other similar meetings, as the facilitator should be able to define the root 
cause in any item.
This method is based on root cause analysis (RCA). The main target 
of the RCA is to answer the questions of what, how, and particularly why 
something could go wrong in the project. 
This method researches deeply into the event probability and conse-
quence in addition to the main cause that let this event happen.
For example, assume that there is a delay in performing a job off-
shore due to weather. This method needs to define the way to obtain the 
weather forecast. For another example, assume the potential risk is that 
spare parts will be delivered late on the offshore platforms. As we investi-
gate why this happened, we find that there was a high wind speed and the 
transfer of the parts was delayed for five days. The root cause of the prob-
lem is not the high wind speed, but rather that ordering the mechanical 
spare parts should be done early enough to allow for the likelihood of 
bad weather.
8.4.1.7 Checklists
Checklists have gained popularity in recent years because of the ease of 
communicating through computers and the ease of sharing informa-
tion through databases. Every company has established checklists based 
on their experience and examples of some of the risks are presented in 
section 8.2. The checklist is a concrete thinking method, but when predict-
ing risk, it needs a freethinking method.
8.4.1.8 Documentation 
Reviews
This method depends on reviewing lessons learned from previous proj-
ects. Take care to close out reports for the projects which contain lessons 
learned for more than twenty years after the ISO effectively started in the 
companies and that their staff follow PMP principal in the projects. In addi-
tion, your company should have performed this type of project beforehand 
many times and the company should have a strong database containing 

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The History of Graphene 301
learned lessons from projects. In any account, it is very important as it 
is zero-cost. If you have a small project, you can start the risk assessment 
meeting that is described above.
Other methods can be used in defining the risk, but they are not as 
practically used as the SWOT analysis method, which is a diagram method 
that depends on providing a flowchart that shows the sequence of events 
that take place within a given time.
The analogy method is part of the document review, as this method 
depends on obtaining the risk management plan of other projects that 
were similar and an analogy can be formed. By comparing two or more 
projects, you can find similar characteristics for each project and, from 
that, we will have an overview of the risks of the new project.