Another Schedule-Driven Project

We had an unplanned shutdown of a propane dryer skid earlier this month – several pieces of equipment, piping and instruments damaged – have another “schedule-driven” project that I am involved in, if you know what I mean.  Not the biggest incident I have been involved in but we still need to go through all the steps of incident investigation, assessment, demolition, purchase materials before you know what is damaged, develop design packages before you know what needs to be replaced, and build everything back as quick as possible – just the way some of us like it – all phases all the time.  A couple small pieces of equipment will take 6 weeks to fabricate, and we will cut back some home run cables and install some intermediate I&E junction boxes; should have it all back together in early March.  Makes the time go fast.  What is different is no need to figure out who is working this weekend, who needs a day off – everyone works every day here.  But you do need to pay attention to who is rotating in and who is rotating out, need to make sure the various action items and work move forward.

The other interesting aspect is facilitating a daily rebuild coordination meeting with Reliability, Engineering, Operations, Maintenance and HES – lots of people, various perspectives, and two languages.  My solution is to use a conference room that has two in-focus machines and two tranlators.  I facilitate and scribe the meeting in English, have a translator handle the verbal translation, and then another translator who is following my meeting notes and converting it to Russian during the meeting.  It seems to be going well with this approach; I can see that the Russian speakers are reading the notes in Russian and are bringing up issues for clarification.   It also makes the meeting go faster because people can read the agreements in either language and we do not need to meticulously translate verbally between the two languages.