Talk
Design-Driven Change: Improving Statoil’s Management System
Friday, September 8
15:15 – 16:00
Conference Room
Magne Frantsen
Vice President Management System, Statoil
The case shows how Statoil, Norway’s biggest company and the world’s largest offshore energy operator, has used design methods to improve its management system. In partnership with design agency Halogen, Statoil has applied several design processes in the improvement work, including classic UX approaches, systems design, service design, interaction design, information architecture design and design of work processes.
The management system contains procedures, work processes and requirements describing how the company’s core and support processes are executed in a safe and efficient way. After several incident investigations pointed at management system complexity as a contributing factor, a project was launched to analyse and address these challenges. As a part of this, Halogen was engaged to explore if the management system was user friendly enough and whether it enabled safe and efficient execution of critical operational tasks. To properly understand the problem, designers visited a gas processing plant to map how the system was used.
The designers’ work resulted in a set of 20 improvement recommendations. Examples of recommendations are the need for more explorative work involving different parts of the organization, UX interfaces, improved user portals to find critical information more easily.
Following this, design methods have been applied to improve stakeholder management when management system changes are implemented. The most recent project has been the update of the Statoil Book in 2016 and 2017. This is the company’s core governing document and an important access point to the management system. Designers played an important part in understanding and simplifying models, contents and contexts, as well as communication and implementation..