(51c) Sistema de Gestion de Contingencias y Manejo de Crisis en el Sector Petroleo y Gas

“The objectives of this presentation are to identify and to visualize risks and issues that impact businesses, and to establish a Management System to Prevent, Respond, and Recover from an incident and/or a crisis. The presentation will show processes and tools that enhance a company resiliency, and to proactively identify businesses’ threats and opportunities.

Nowadays, communities and governments demand companies to be responsible members of society. Companies must comply with local and federal regulations, as well as international conventions. The global market also drives successful companies to a highly competitive environment. Additionally, the Oil & Gas industry is exposed to safety, environmental, and financial risks with potential challenging scenarios. If a major incident occurs, it may impact the companies’ operability, reputation, and/or earning power, as well as the entire industry sector.

There is a vast list of incidents that created tremendous impacts to large international organizations (e.g. Piper Alpha; Exxon Valdez; Macondo). To address this challenging context, most companies have systems in place to prevent undesirable events, and to identify risks and threats. However, incidents do happen, and companies must be prepared to effectively respond to them. Organizations should enhance their resiliency by applying a robust Crisis & Contingency Management System (C&CMS) to ensure right processes and tools are in place.

The C&CMS integrates three disciplines; Contingency Response, Business Continuity and Crisis Management. Each discipline further breaks into four basic pillars - Prevention, Preparedness, Response and Recovery. Prevention and Preparedness are cycling processes, like a P-D-C-A quality cycle. Response and Recovery are linear processes; they start with an event and finish sometime later. Lessons learned and identified best practices from Response and Recovery enhance Prevention and Preparedness.

In terms of Crisis Management (CM), Prevention means to identify risks-type issues that are difficult to recognize, because they are hiding beneath the surface and may grow over time emerging as an incident or crisis. CM Response means that information management is used as a coherent basis for decision-making; it also means being capable of modelling the implications of what is going on, and project current events to establish what might happen. This is called creating a Situation Awareness, and it is a deliberate, active and disciplined process. Since Information comes from stakeholders, it is essential to have a comprehensive and weighted list of stakeholders to be able to track and address them.

As a final reflection, a poorly managed response could have devastating consequences for an organization. A crisis can be avoided or minimized if issues are properly identified and managed at an early stage. Since information is a critical asset for a successful response, improving information and stakeholder management will greatly enhance the response and the resiliency of the organization.”