Thread regarding Shell Oil layoffs

Then there’s a culture issue. Instead of making everything efficient, all Shell has encouraged everyone is to become less efficient, talk more than get things done, be influential and impress your superiors, play politics to get rid of your competitors, or people who are doing real work? get others work for you so you get promoted. All these nonsense and toxic culture. A lot of departments should be gone. They probably think Shell is an experimental platform to practice all these power games. They probably think o&g is a place where money overflows and people are dump, so climbing up is super easy for them.But it’s true everywhere. So it’s up to some new leader saviors to convert it or sink deeper.

Probably because an engineer knows little about what rock, formation and well correlation they are drilling real time...geologist plans the well so has better insight into possible issues. Add an engineer we add another layer in the loop incase there are issues drilling real time.

The WDP is way too complex these days - wells that would normally take less than a year to mature now need 18 months, even as a “franchise” well.

And why is the WDL invariably a geologist? I feel like an engineer would do just as good if not better job.

You should realize that Wael got to his position the same way and using the same tactics other GMs, VPs are currently just replicating

To CEO:
Some GMs, VPs and managers are not familiar with the real assets and what we are trying to do. All they want is to make their org bigger so they get promoted to higher positions. You need to check how these people got these positions. If they don’t grow by getting more projects and recruiting more people, they had no chance of being a GM or VP. That’s the vicious cycle.

Replying to @1ehp+1t9mzqPm. It’s very clear whoever came up with them has no idea how things actually get done. Especially the “Franchise” WDP map. Why do we take something linear and make it complicated with confusing terminology. Then you sprinkle some UK management on top who has little to no familiarity with the GOM assets so they hide behind the “process” and we end up tripping over our own feet. The digi tools always have some hope but fall far from a usable state and we abandon them and move on to the next one. DWID is the worst of them all.

Agreed we are fat. I have seen more percentages of people being fat in Shell than elsewhere. Do we have a culture of collecting these type of people?

Replying to @iaa+1t9mzqPm. I think every downstream asset that Shell has sold has made money with the new operator. Deer park was sold for $600M and the following year PEMEX made $1.3B from the refinery. I honestly believe Shell does not know how to make money with assets. Also, most refineries were shown to be in the red to lower taxes while Trading made all the money. However, the siloed approached made it look like DS was always losing money when in reality trading needed the sites to turn a huge profit.

All the various well deliver processes are insane. I have not seen the value of any of them. The ones that are actually good are selectively followed due to poor implementation by the teams / developers. Things like DWFS are certainly an upgrade over Excel sheets (LOL) but they’re “hard to use” so they’re just ignored. Always seems like there are like 2-3 different initiatives going at any time, pushed by different “influencers” and nothing changes. I echo your thoughts that a huge number of people could go and things would improve, but those who push the initiatives are protected and we continue to wallow in incompetence. Whoops

What I gather from talking to other GoM operator friends are that our cost per well is at least 20-30% more expensive. Why? Because exactly what you said, not just in wells, but other functions too. The result? What can easily make a star project in other operators will be barely break even in Shell. It makes sense to have scrutiny, but now it is just a sh-tshow of dragging each other down. I wish Shell sell its DW asset so that it will learn why other operators can make money while it cannot.

I've heard of lower PSP document, not sure if that is a done deal.

Severance --would hope that Shell would act more responsibly if there are going to be large numbers of involuntary cuts. Voluntary severance drives early retirement which may or not be good for an organization. A healthy involuntary severance is a safety net for those who may get cut.

Changing (lowering) severance payout while making actual, significant cuts is some a--hole, Exxon sh-t. It also sends the message to those left behind to work on your exit strategy and just give a 2 week notice when you line it up--the safety net is gone.

As long as they also get rid of all these pointless processes these extra managers have built that we have to deliver in addition to new wells. So many people at Shell only exist so that they can fulfil all these extra process steps whose only purpose is to make data available to some pointless central “analyst”, “program manager” or some other meaningless title.