Oil & Gas Job Vacancy BP - Operations Director

About BP

      Our business is the exploration, production, refining, trading and distribution of energy. This is what we do, and we do it on a truly global scale. With a workforce of 80,000 employees, BP operates with business activities and customers in more than 80 countries across six continents. Every day, we serve millions of customers around the world. We are continually looking for talented, committed and ambitious people to help us shape the face of energy for the future.

      Safe, reliable operations in BP - including both personal safety and process safety - is of critical importance to the group and are BP's number one priority. The purpose of the Safety and Operational Risk Function (S&OR) is to drive improvements in operational safety, health, environmental performance, security (including crisis management) and integrity management across BP's day-to-day operations. Implemented through operational leadership, S&OR's task is to create throughout the company a sustainable framework and supporting systems to underpin performance improvement, ensure sufficient capability and verify compliance.

Job title : Operations Director
Req ID : 19549BR
Job category : Operations
Sub-category : Operations & Maintenance
Countries (State/Region) : United States - Texas
Location : Houston

Role synopsis

• The S&OR Operations Team manages and delivers highly effective support and risk mitigation recommendations for Operations across the Group by delivering a broad range of critical Coaching and Interventions in the following areas. The potential risks to BP are significant (e.g. Texas City / Macondo) and effective actions of this team will significantly reduce those operational risks:

• To provide effective communications and operational expertise to Group Operations Leaders ranging from BUL and VP levels to entity levels.

• To provide deeply competent operational expertise to facilitate a common approach to OMS/CI implementation and conformance across sites, assets, sectors and segments. He/she will provide oversight, guidance, consultation, advice, challenge and support for Ops Line Leadership in specific areas requiring deep operations insight and perspective.

• To be involved in highly effective and key programmed coaching activities within an entity on pre-defined topics (e.g. leadership, CoW, MoC and other OMS topics) dependant upon individual specialist skills and knowledge. The programmed coaching locations will be determined by the new risk process controlled by the risk team in S&OR and agreed with the deployed S&OR teams.

• To identify highly effective OMS implementation techniques so others in the operating community can see what ‘good’ looks like (written and visual), improve their processes to reduce operational risks and move towards safe, compliant and reliable operations..

• To work closely with and deeply influence Segment, Division and Regional Operating Authorities (OA) and be a key part of the Group wide OA network.

• To provide support and participation in the S&OR Leadership educational programmes – Operations Academy, Managing Operations and Operating Essentials – support both in terms of providing key technical content in the development and during implementation/execution of the programmes.

• To assist in providing highly effective key guidelines / guidance / insights / training needed for the line or S&OR embedded leaders to make informed judgements about the quality of operating via OMS conformance, application of CI and systematic management.

• To ensure that they understand and be deeply competent in Group Defined and Group Recommended Practices and how to provide advice on operationalising these practices.

• To provide key interactions and build effective working relationships with senior operations leaders, operations leaders and front line personnel, globally and cross-segment.

• To assist in providing key support in pragmatic planning, coordination and execution of short, medium and longer term (3 years) facility improvement plans.

• To create ideas and solutions to complex unique scenarios at a strategic level in collaboration with Senior Operational Leaders and build for them pragmatic solutions to complex situations / issues.

• To be capable of influencing and guiding operational leaders (while not exerting control) to improve the operational risk profiles of their operations. At the same time being able to deal with the ambiguities of working across organizational and global cultures.

• To respond effectively and successfully guide organizations toward reduced risks to avoid the potential for significant loss of life and billions of dollars in assets at risk from major accidents (e.g. Texas City and Macondo Incidents).

• To accomplish this through recommending process and risk mitigation processes rather than only through installation of new processes.

Role reports to the Eastern or Western Hemisphere Operations Vice President, who reports to the Group Head of Operations, who reports to the EVP of S&OR, who reports to the BP CEO.

The S&OR Central Operations team consists of Operations VPs & Operations Directors. The team is supplemented by Operations and Continuous Improvement Consultants.

Key accountabilities : The Post Holder will

1.  Have an understanding of ‘what good operating looks like and play a pivotal role in how to practically apply’ across Group Operations:

• Be involved in the key activity of educating operations Senior through Entity Leadership on what good looks like.

• Establish themselves as a key interface in interpreting the ‘what's’ into practically applying the hows’ of OMS for entity understanding.

• Be highly recognised internally as having deep operations experience and the ability to influence operations leaders to reduce the significant risks that exist within their operations.

• Ensures that there is a significant positive business impact of improvement activities. 

2. Be essential in helping accelerate OMS conformance

• Support the development of a ‘natural’ sequence for achieving conformance with OMS.

•  Provide direct oversight to confirm OMS conformance plans, progress, and CI utilization, are timely and sustained. Work with S&OR Embedded Leaders to intervene where necessary.

• Look for opportunities to build common approaches, procedures and processes and implement across similar operating entities to avoid duplication of effort (e.g. CoW)

• Identify highly effective OMS implementation techniques so others in the operating community can see what ‘good’ looks like (written and visual).

• Assist in providing guidelines / guidance / insights / training needed for the line or S&OR embedded leaders to make informed judgements about the quality of operating.

• The role will be a key interface to other service suppliers and 3rd parties to oversee end-to-end problem and request support management activities affecting operational risk reduction.

3. Understand the concept of systematic management and provide fundamental guidance:

• Ensure a common vision of ‘systematic management’ is understood and in place. Collaborate with S&OR Embedded Leaders to intervene where appropriate.

• Support integration of the PIC into the annual planning process and coach leaders in its sustainable application.

• Support the development of a ‘systematic management toolkit’ (3 time horizon planning, prioritization techniques, techniques to achieve ‘systematic and in control’ conformance to OMS, management review, and self verification techniques).

• Translates identified risk and operational gaps into programmatic support programs

4. Understand the importance of CI and provide key direction:

• Provide high level CI support to operations leaders in effective techniques for pragmatic implementation of CI thinking and problems solving processes. Work with S&OR Embedded Leaders to intervene where appropriate.

• Support entity continuous improvement approaches in collaboration with the CI Director.

• Continuously improves the effectiveness of their own influence across the Group.

5. Understand the critical importance of program coaching and deliver through influence versus control:

• Be involved in program coaching within entities on a range of critical OMS topics

• Build effective relationships for the long term with S&OR Embedded and Line Leaders at all levels of the organizations (Segment, Division, Region and Entity).

• Provides coaching at all levels of those organisations through the demonstration of practical/pragmatic knowledge and how to apply risk mitigating actions at the operational level.

• The role will be a key interface to S&OR Embedded Leaders, as well chairing significant incident investigations as requested.

The key challenges to this role are:
• Acceptance of intervention
• Functional oversight acceptance by the Line.
• Understanding & commitment of Ops leaders to systematic management concepts.
• Pushing against the natural grain in BP.
• Leaders have been rewarded for short term delivery, this will take time to change.
• The ability to simplify complex concepts so the organization can adopt them in a pragmatic manner.
•Ability to deal with ambiguity inherent in influencing across the BP Group.

Essential Education : Engineering Degree or equivalent

Essential experience and job requirements :

Will have been a senior Operations leader with a track record of extensive experience managing change and delivering safe, responsible and reliable operations. Preferably functioned as a site leader or entity operations manager and needs to be seen as a role model operations leader among those she/he is guiding and supporting. Extensive foundational operations experience that will allow effective coaching at all levels of an operations organization (Senior Management to the shop floor).

The person holding this role must be seen as a deeply competent operator with broad “on the ground” experience over many years. Deep understanding of systematic management, operating discipline, OMS (Group Operating Management system) and Continuous Improvement.

Experienced working in International Businesses and varying cultures (both in other countries and companies). In addition, working across multiple organizations in the Oil/Gas/Chemicals or equivalent industries to influence change is a key factor. Experience with matrix management structures is a preferable.

Working knowledge of BP systems, processes and procedures is preferable.

This role must bring strong influence skills, professional credibility, a collaborative and results oriented bias and considerable patience.

Disclaimer :

If you are selected for the position, your employment will be contingent upon submission to and successful completion of a post-offer/pre-placement drug and alcohol screening as well as pre-placement verification of the information and qualifications provided during the selection process.

Removal Time : 23:59 (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)
Removal Date : 05-Jun-2011

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