Ask an operations director what keeps them awake and they will usually name equipment. Ask their integrity engineer and you may get a different answer: “There are four people who understand that equipment. Three of them will retire within three years.”

Workforce movement is not only retirement, and that is the first thing most competence discussions get wrong. People leave roles in different ways. Externally, through retirement, resignation or termination. Internally, and far more often, through promotion, reassignment, secondment and extended leave. Internal movement rarely reaches any risk register at all, because from a human resources perspective nothing was lost. The person is still in the company. From an asset perspective, the role is now held by someone else.

The industry has no standard method to evaluate threats and impacts associated to asset specific competency losses. There are competence management systems, training matrices and succession plans. What there is not, in common practice, is a way to assess, forecast and manage the effect of fluctuating competence on plant performance over time. Which means the question “how much integrity risk have we accumulated through people movement over the past five years” has, in most organisations, no answer.

What we built, and why

A leading energy company with global operations put the problem to us directly. They were pushing for higher production and greater efficiency. They were experiencing increased people movement in many directions and they recognised that this might be diminishing competence in critical roles, exposing their assets to operational, process safety and asset integrity risk. They wanted to know whether that was true, and quantify it through a robust and auditable system.

We developed a dedicated risk assessment framework, then finetuned it and consolidated by testing one of their operating plants. Our framework runs in five main steps.

1. Role criticality assessment. Identify and rank the roles that matter most to plant safety and performance, making sure every asset integrity and process safety position is properly considered rather than assumed.
2. Turnover analysis. Take the workforce data on movement, internal as well as external, and read it against those roles.
3. Risk ranking. Rank each role by the consequence of losing its accumulated competence, not by seniority or headcount.
4. KPI linkage. Connect critical roles to specific asset-level performance indicators and analyses associated impacts. This is the step that makes interconnections between asset performances and lack of competency and expertise.
5. Forecasting & Managing. Project performance degradation was assessed over time as experience and knowledge leave the system. On such premises, a global action plans has been developed, to manage any short term major threat and prevent long term business disruption.

The pilot mattered more than it sounds. It let us calibrate the model against operating reality, test assumptions and improve the analysis before committing to scale. Once validated, we ran assessments in parallel across around 80 per cent of the client's asset base, drawing on what the pilot had taught us to move faster. The client then commissioned a second phase covering their remaining global facilities.

What the data showed

There was no immediate threat to production, safety and asset integrity. That was the headline finding, however, the signals underneath it were less comfortable: a rising backlog of technical work; early indicators of loss of containment; growing variability in performance; and general workload increase for some key roles. None of these would trigger an alarm on its own. Together they described an organisation absorbing more than it could process.

The real exposure sat in the mid to long term. Substantial asset growth was planned. So was a significant number of retirements against a backdrop of thin qualified candidate pool. Left alone, the gradual reduction of competence in key roles would raise the likelihood of major safety incidents and operational failures, at the point the business was asking its assets to do more.

Marsh's analysis of the hundred largest hydrocarbon losses reaches the same place from the loss data: as experienced personnel retire, reliance on informal knowledge increases, widening the gap between documented intent and actual operating practice. Our client could now watch that gap opening in advance, rather than read about it in an investigation report.

What was done about it

The mitigation plan was deliberately practical. Transfer experienced personnel from lower-risk plants to higher-risk ones. Rebalance workloads where the analysis showed strain. Enforce structured succession planning behind the roles that ranked highest. Then, for the longer term, a competency assurance framework covering asset integrity and process safety roles, supported by a targeted training and certification programme.

The change most likely to outlast all of it is procedural. The client adopted a formal procedure to reassess competence-related risk on a regular cycle, and established KPIs to monitor attrition in critical roles continuously. Competence attrition moved from a concern raised occasionally in management review to a monitored parameter with an owner and a threshold.

The point for everyone else

Most organisations already hold all three datasets this work requires. Human resources holds movement and turnover data. Operations holds asset performance indicators. Integrity holds key roles and task criticality. They are almost never joined, and the entire value is in the join.

Asset Integrity

MES has delivered competence attrition risk assessment from framework design to implementing risk reduction measures. If this is a live question for your assets, we should talk.

Find out more