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Multidisciplinary teams in exploration and production

Their value and future Part 2—Financially successful and unsuccessful teams

Sneider Exploration, Houston, Texas, U.S.

Corresponding author: irtrms@neosoft.com

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

A large E&P company was dissatisfied with its financial performance compared with a group of peer companies. The finding and development costs in particular were unsatisfactory. The board of directors invited management consultants to discuss ways to improve. I was invited to discuss why I thought Canadian Hunter Exploration (a new, small company that I worked with) was so financially successful. I asserted that it was because the company was organized into multidisciplinary teams (MDTs) with very few middle managers and lots of financial authority at the working level.

My discussions with the board soon focused on a question: "How can you really prove that MDTs are more effective and profitable?" I suggested that the best way to determine which organization was best for their company was a "pilot test," much like what they would do to determine if a new recovery process was economically viable.

The pilot test consisted of forming a small E&P company with MDTs that would compete against one of the company's E&P divisions on an equal basis.

The board agreed to a three- to five-year test and hired a president (a former company VP) to form the new company and organize it into integrated, multidisciplinary teams.

	The test

 
The new small company (about 35 professionals and support staff) competed in the Gulf Coast Basin with the company's much larger traditional exploration and production division (about 175 professionals and support staff). The age distribution and experience of the staffs (Figure 1), and the budgets, technical databases, and economic/risk criteria for . . . [Full Text of this Article]