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Oil and Gas Compliance Solutions – Creating a Plan

For the past few weeks, I’ve been talking about compliance in Energy. A growing area of concern in the industry, compliance crosses many areas of an oil and gas company – the constant set of changing requirements around safety, tax, land, legal, environmental and other compliance can feel overwhelming. Luckily, while every compliance scenario is different, there’s a way to answer common concerns with a compliance management information framework.

Ready to start thinking about systematic compliance solutions?

Achieve Compliance Strategy Buy In

  • Set a baseline to start from. In order to improve, you must assess the current situation. Establish a core set of metrics and start reporting on them now – whether it’s comfortable or not.
  • Establish and communicate compliance goals.  Once you know where you currently stand, set a realistic goal fore improvement. Want to decrease the number of contracts flagged for compliance to less than ten at all times? Want to reduce safety incidents by half? Define a goal, include metrics to determine success, and communicate that goal to those who can impact compliance.
  • Incentivize employees to reach those goals. Guide efforts the right direction by rewarding improvements in measurable results. Anyone can ‘try’ to be compliant, but in the end it’s a measurable fact. Make sure to celebrate successes in order to encourage continued improvement.

Establish a Plan of Action

  • Early Warnings – Define when and how preventative action can and should be taken. What are the signs that you might be headed toward noncompliance? How much lead time do you need to prevent a situation from occurring? With these two inputs, we can filter down to just what needs urgent attention and send custom alerts and action requests to your team.
  • Contingency Tactics – Determine how to solve the compliance issue itself. Prevent claims of negligence  by creating systematic, documented tactics for getting back on track quickly. Are you within a month of needing to take action before breaking a clause that could cause litigation? Define the actions, escalation, reporting into a workflow that will give information to the right person at the right time when time really is what counts.
  • Effect Mitigation – Create a way to deal with consequences of an issue – before you’re under fire. So you’ve had an issue, now what? Documenting best practices before a situation occurs, can help your team be ready for when it counts. We’ve seen contingencies varying from reporting on situations that may be similar in order to prevent similar results, to workflows of management escalation based on level of impact, and more.

Measure, Improve, Repeat

  • Continually measure success of your compliance program with appropriate, actionable metrics. We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again, compliance is a fact, not a feeling. Gather the relevant information, and create a culture of accountability around compliance.
  • Make data-centric decisions with the latest, best information possible. You already have the information you need to make compliance decisions, but it might be hidden in unexpected locations throughout your organization. Determine the best information to guide your decisions and ensure that it’s always up to date.
  • Focus only on what matters, by keeping results in front of you. There are a lot of moving pieces in compliance, it  can be hard to focus on what matters when you’re overwhelmed with too much information from too many reports. By first determining which results are actionable, and then paring reporting down to send the person who can take action a report to act upon only when it’s necessary, time can be spent solving real compliance issues rather than just monitoring status.

Wondering what a system might look like that takes all of these considerations into account? Request our lease compliance white paper, which delves into the essentials of compliance as an information system.

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