Just a short update on the Gulf Oil spill.
First of all, as mentioned in our updated post about the spill, you can watch a live feed of the leak directly at BP.com now.
Also, not related to fixing the cause, but still possibly going a long way towards repairing the symptom, Kevin Costner has been investing in a centrifuge technology to separate the water and oil, and it looks like BP is going to take Costner up on trying it in the gulf. It involves deploying up to 300 “Ocean Therapy” machines which have the capacity to spin the oily water at high speeds and separate out the oil, producing nearly pure oil on one hand, and nearly pure seawater on the other. Will it be as successful as the movie Waterworld? Is it an Oilfield of Dreams? Stay tuned.
From a project management perspective, BP is clearly in the workaround mode, and let’s all hope that this workaround…works.
Read the story here, and see a video news segment about that here.
Two and a half MMS
This is disgusting.
Here you will find a report posted today by the US Government to the web and which we bring you in the spirit of helping to understand the ‘monitor and control‘ part of project management, or really, business in general. In fact, the people in this report behave as if they were Charlie Sheen’s character (or perhaps his brother or nephew) on the US television program Two and a Half Men. And thus the post’s title.
The MMS, (Minerals Management Service) is the US Federal oversight agency responsible for controlling the oil industry. They are the ones who ‘bless’ the drilling platforms in the Gulf, for example.
It’s clear from this report (you only need to read the cover letter to get this) that governance was not properly in place.
Rather than laboring over all of the things that we need to learn from this, I would just suggest that you have a look and realize that in your projects (and in life) you must know that measurements are polluted (excuse the pun) if the people in charge of measuring are under the influence of those that they measure. This is expressed in PMI’s Code of Conduct and Professional Responsibility.
Is it any wonder that we have the mess in the Gulf of Mexico, and even (although small in comparison) today’s other spill in Alaska?
We all can do better than this.