BP – Operations Essentials

BP Operations Essentials represents over four years of exceptional investment in safety and operations training by BP. Kineo’s solution has focused on performance-changing, blended training interventions and the results show a secured global adoption on a major scale with some impressive results.

Background

In 2006, BP embarked on one of its largest global safety and operations training initiatives and this revised (2011) case study explains the four-year journey of how we got there, along with some great results – it’s even won Silver award for Best E-Learning Project Securing Widespread Adoption in the E-Learning Awards 2011 having:

Completely reset the bar for large-scale operational training in BP, at the core of which is an exceptional suite of technical and process-based e-learning
Successfully trained an audience of operational leaders working in challenging shift-based environments across the globe
Changed a training culture highly sceptical of e-learning to one that actively engages with it as a core training tool in the blend
Engaged every level of the organisation, from board to operators, to champion and participate in the training, using a range of marketing and communication methods to build a brand around the learning
Worked! – over 8000 people have completed 50,000 e-learning modules and attended 12,000 face-to-face sessions

The Challenge

BP, like all companies in the industry, has had its fair share of challenges. BP has long made investment in people and safety its top priority. Developing a world-class programme on a global scale to support this investment has been at the heart of its strategy for embedding systematic operations and was the focus of this blended learning solution.

The brief we were given saw us tackle the training of over 12,000 first- and second-level leaders; an audience that is largely shift-based and globally dispersed – the overall aim of which was to establish training in systematic ways of operating and to develop and enhance leadership in the area of safety culture.

As Urbain Bruyere, BP’s VP of Culture, Competency and Capability, and Operations Essentials Programme Director states, Kineo were chosen as the partner to develop the solution as: “In setting up the project, we wanted a partner who could think big for us. Just putting the e-learning together wasn’t enough. We needed to work with people who not only got our vision, but could take it further – help us with the whole blend and implementation strategy. That’s where Kineo came in.”

The Solution

As the project was due for widespread adoption, getting an accurate reflection of the take-up was a key success criterion for BP, and rationale for going with e-learning as the medium to reach a large population was to:

Get common terminology across the business for all the technical content
Get the audience to a common base line of knowledge when they entered the room for the face-to-face training; in other words, the essentials for the curriculum
Provide flexibility around that preparatory work so that people could complete it either on or off shift
Have good data on who had completed that preparatory work to manage attendance at the workshops

The e-learning is a blend of scenario and simulation based approaches, based on real BP sites, examples and lessons learned.

Participants reviewing a technical problem and planning a solution.
Real-life scenarios involving key individuals requesting actions and requiring input.
Technical data needing to be interpreted and risk-assessed to be able to progress through scenarios.
Tutorials on all the underpinning knowledge for each key learning area.

It was important that the learning was aligned to BP’s organisational goals, so we had to ensure there was curriculum integrity. To do this, we engaged with the top experts in the business in each of the curriculum areas as our subject matter sponsors. We also brought in the leadership team ensuring there was stakeholder engagement, testing our prototype extensively with 250 of our target audience in a range of locations, including using offshore links through surveys and focus group meetings.

We consulted the target audience extensively to build product credibility, piloting the modules and working with each site taking on the training to achieve product endorsement and to help market the product to the business.

Development of training programmes is only half the story in getting training launched and embedded. Once rolled-out, BP set up a dedicated back office team working 24/7 via BP’s WebLearn LMS to manage and evaluate the programme to ensure the training landed and stuck:

Programme and demand management – engaging stakeholders, managing logistics, bookings around face-to-face components, etc
Marketing and communication – ensuring the good news of the programme is continually refreshed and updated
Evaluation – monitoring and reporting completion, attendance, feedback and outcomes, which is presented back to the Safety and Operations Risk Leadership Team
Kirkpatrick evaluation of each module by a content-steering committee – reviewing and updating modules as part of a systematic review cycle

Gaining adoption: a multi-channel approach

We collaborated with BP on a multi-channel approach to build awareness and drive adoption. This included:

Leadership endorsement: a wide range of video interviews with subject matter experts and leaders to get their views
Audience endorsement: a pilot group of 250 of our target audience was engaged in multiple locations, and all of the e-learning was piloted at least twice in different business units and locations
Marketing to line managers: the piloting of the modules is at the heart of the marketing, as has been the engagement with the leadership teams. Beyond that, we worked with each site taking on the training to ensure that line managers were actively involved in the sponsorship and endorsement of the modules. This ranged from ensuring invitations were issued through to attendance at some of the sessions
Regular newsletters: the OE team has a dedicated communications resource which brings together all the key information for stakeholders via regular newsletters
Finding our Elvis: every major project needs one person who is the tireless champion and brings their own passion to it, and it was Urbain Bruyere for this one. With his passion for technology and communication, he pioneered a number of techniques in BP to raise the profile of the programme. This included a project blog, community of practice and regular pod- and video-casts with participants, business unit leaders and senior stakeholders, all of whom were captured endorsing the programme
Learning from the ad agencies: we didn’t discount the methods that work for marketing other initiatives, so we created a whole range of marketing materials – screen savers, banners and posters – for use with the training

The Results

By September 2011 there were already over 50,000 e-learning completions for ‘Hazard Identification and Task Risk Assessment (HITRA)’ and ‘Isolations’ and over 8,000 attendances at related workshops. This equates to exceptionally high completion rates of 96% of modules started.

User feedback from around the globe highlights the change in performance the training has helped them achieve:

“HITRA has visibly increased the rigor in our risk assessment.” – OE participant, Issuing Authority, Canada.

“Before, we were just doing what we have always done. Nobody challenged; nobody asked, 'Can we do this differently?' HITRA has really helped us think of different controls for managing risk.” – OE participant, Toledo Refinery, United States.

“HITRA is the heart of what good CoW [control of work] looks and feels like. Sites that have implemented the HITRA tools following training have seen significant improvement in CoW performance.” – Group CoW SME, UK.

“(The e-learning) showed them what they didn’t know. For the first time they could say, 'I am confident in doing risk assessment.' Three months after the HITRA programme we can see improvement in risk assessment. We will get to a place of zero or minimal incidents.” – S&OR Lead, South Africa.

We leave the final word to Urbain Bruyere who gives this review of the programme: “We’re tremendously proud [of this flagship programme] and all it has achieved. We’ve taken giant steps in proving that a global curriculum of the highest quality can be put in place, and that e-learning can and must be a key element of our approach. Our completion statistics speak for themselves. Only through exceptional quality e-learning and a world-class implementation and support strategy we were able to achieve these impressive results. We’ve gone from being a company where e-learning was a dirty word to one where it’s now accepted as a cornerstone of our capability strategy. We don’t take that agenda lightly. We had to be sure that with Operations Essentials we would hit the right mark and that the e-learning would be accepted by an operational audience, if not with a smile, at least with openness and respect. The products were one hundred percent focused on their needs and tested by them for them. In partnership with Kineo, we got that.”