Introduction history of oil drilling operations in

IntroductionThis essay is all about the incidentthat happened on the night of the 20th April 2010 when an oildrilling rig called Deepwater horizon was in operations in the Macondo prospectin the Gulf of Mexico and exploded due to poor management decisions which result in the death of 11 workers. It is alsoknown as one of the largest spill of oil in the history of oil drillingoperations in United States because 4 million barrels of oil flowed from the affected well over a period of 87 days (Environmental ProtectionAgency, 2017).  Identificationof Key RiskAccording to movie Deepwater Horizon (2016), there were several risks that managementoverlooked before performing the final disastrous test.

Management sent team 1home without doing cement bond log test and it was so important because it wasthe only thing in between the safety of the employees and blowout. In thatsituation compromising on cement log testmeans compromising on whole drilling infrastructure. Even after getting unsatisfactoryresults from the gauge of drill line and kill linethey performed the final test without analysing its impact on employee’ssecurity and safety. Key Risk Breakdown Structure Level 0 Level 1 Level 2 Level 3       Project Risk   Technical Performance Equipment may not be fit for purpose. Quality Available materials may be of insufficient quality Safety Safety may not be considered in design Management Project Management Miscommunication Inaccurate estimates may cause overspends etc. Organization Decision Making Making decisions without analysing its impacts.      Discussion Risk identification is oneof the most sensitive areas in the projects because it requires proper considerationfrom each and every point of view.

The main sources of the risk could be eitherinternal to the project or external to the project whereas internal factors ofthe risk may arise from people, processes, procedures, organizational culture,managerial decisions, quality of the equipment etc  (Hilson, 2003).The primary purpose of therisk management is to increase opportunities and decrease threats by keepingthe focus on objectives and goals of the project (Hillson, 1999).Since Projectmanagement is a combination of teamwork so effective communication plays an importantrole throughout the life cycle of the project but Enterprise TechnologyProjects (2016) mentioned  4 common miscommunicationmistakes and one of them is that we often think that we have done enoughcommunication within teams to completely understand the nature of the projectsand there is a true fact regarding this is that no amount of communication isever enough.When Team 2 arrived at the site, there was no proper communicationin between the Team 1 and Team 2 about cement bond log test (Deepwater Horizon, 2016). In Risk Management, before identifying general or overall risks, it ismore important to identify that what events might be risky against whichbarrier at what stage. There is no doubt that most probably same nature of the risks impacts onsame objectives which means that technical risk could influence technicalobjectives and in the long run these objectives may disturb overall goals ofthe project (Jaafari, 2001; Hillson, 2005).

In Deepwater horizon, one of theirtechnical safety officers told them that10% machinery on board is not working properly and may cause hazard during thedrilling process but that won’t help in convincing the management to stop fromperforming the last test. In some cases, performingrisk analysis or mitigation of risk requires more expenses that result in exceeding the current budget up to 20%,but the main thing is that whether the reductionin the risk worth the additional expenditure? (Morris et al., 1991). That was the main reason behind not doingcement log test in Deepwater Horizon, managementwas already late for 43 days and they were ahead of almost $50 million moreexpenditure because they were confident enough about cement log for moredrilling without testing the capability of its current state.   If you wantyour decision making to be efficient then there is a need to quantify securityand safety risks to enable risk-based assessments of the effectiveness ofprotective measures.