How I brought a shared field-planning platform to launch

Why teams needed a shared planning environment

Field-development specialists lacked a common workspace. Plans, discussions, approvals, and documents were spread across the tools employees already used for communication and storage. Day-to-day tasks got done, but there was no shared record of decisions. Information could be lost, and that, together with poor coordination, led to financial costs.

No off-the-shelf solution met the company's requirements for personal-data protection, approved technologies, and vendor availability. The platform was therefore built around internal workflows. I discuss choosing between an off-the-shelf service and custom development in a separate article.

Who owned delivery and adoption

At the Digital Transformation Center, I took over from the manager who had started the project but had to leave. I was responsible for project delivery and coordinating vendors throughout development. The company's business product owner was responsible for adoption within departments: persuading employees to use the platform and changing established workflows.

This division mattered. Launching the software alone would not deliver value. That depended on specialists actually planning together and agreeing on decisions in the new environment.

Why launch was only part of the work

At the same center, I led delivery of a web system for selecting the optimal field-development option. It automatically identified the best option, saving specialists time. Its value was immediately clear to users, so employees were motivated to use it.

The collaborative planning platform faced a different challenge. Departments already had established processes, and now discussions, approvals, and documents needed to move into a new system. The main difficulty was organizational rather than technical: adoption changed how people worked together.

The business product owner worked with departments, explained the value of the change, and incorporated the platform into their processes. I continued to lead delivery and coordinate the vendors.

Replacing the delivery vendor mid-project

The vendor change was the most difficult part of development. IBM was the original delivery vendor, but after it withdrew from the Russian market, the remaining work had to move to another contractor.

I organized the project handover. Despite the mid-development change, work continued and the platform reached production launch.

Results and economic assessment

Calculating the platform's economic impact was harder than evaluating the tool for selecting an optimal field-development option. The assessment was nevertheless completed. Its figures are confidential company information.

After the production launch, departments joined the platform and began using it. The business product owner continued to lead adoption.

Other projects at the Digital Transformation Center

I also led development of an industrial safety training simulator, a product for digitizing geological core samples, and a map-digitization product using computer vision.

The maps had accumulated in different formats, so the first step was to determine which could reasonably be processed this way. A machine-learning contractor was selected. A prototype was tested on different map types to estimate the volume suitable for digitization. Once funding was secured, the team trained the models and digitized the agreed set of maps for which the approach had been judged practical.