| dc.description.abstract | This master’s thesis is performed in close collaboration with Aker BP – a prominent Norwegian upstream
oil and gas company. Due to an increasing number of investment projects (appx. 200 billion NOK), Aker BP
wishes to understand areas of improvement in their decision-making process, as an initiative to ‘Safeguard
the portfolio’ and ensure that strategic priorities are met through efficient and effective project decisions.
Project management theory suggests that decision-making has significant consequences on corporations
by impacting the way projects are driven within project organizations. Decision-making is a product of
strategy with the objective of meeting organizational goals and objectives. Due to its criticality, decision-making processes are built upon several (proposed) decision-making theories, models, and key aspects,
which in perspective should be well understood before taking the first steps towards improvement.
Therefore, the problem statement of this thesis focuses on building a solid conceptual foundation of the
existing system, by understanding ‘What is the overall decision-making process followed by Project
management teams during the execution stage at Aker BP?, what are the prominent key decision inputs?
and, what are the most common decision factors and decision techniques applied for taking decisions within
the company?’.
To target the problem statement in a comprehensive manner, this report implements a qualitative analysis
approach, which is based on a combination of in-depth interviews, review of company procedures,
questionnaire-based surveys, observations, and a case study from a recent decision-making process, on an
ongoing execution project at Aker BP called ‘Skarv Satellite Project (SSP)’.
The results identify that the overall decision-making process at Aker BP is a cyclic (feedback based) process,
and in general, aligned with the Portfolio safeguarding teams’ Efficient decision-making (EDM) framework.
The overall process comprises of six-steps – ‘Decision Triggering’, ‘Decision Structuring’, ‘Decision Analysis’,
‘Decision Finalization’, ‘Implementing Actions’, and ‘Decision Result and Review’. In addition, a set of key
decision inputs such as, ‘Available resources’, ‘Performance results’, ‘Future-plans’ and ‘Policies’ are also
used for formulating the decision problem. It was also identified that decision makers use a set of ‘Decision
factors’ and ‘Decision techniques’, to determine the best possible decision alternative for the business case.
Overall, this research is focused on the ‘Structure’ and ‘Analyze’ phases of the decision-making process.
The decision inputs combined with the formulated problem, and analyzed using various decision factors
and analysis techniques, are how decisions are structured and analyzed at Aker BP. The report discusses
and reflects upon these findings to substantiate areas of improvements and lessons learned from the case
study.
Although, the decision-making process at Aker BP is quite structured and in-line with Aker BP’s Efficient
Decision-making (EDM) framework, there are certain gaps due to which decision makers fall into decision
traps. This report, therefore, contributes by analyzing the existing decision-making process in detail to
identify these gaps and propose recommendations/areas of improvement that can help decision makers at
Aker BP in avoiding these traps in the future. At the same time, the scope of this analysis is limited to only
‘understanding existing processes’, which is why the improvement initiatives will not be discussed in great
detail. The final purpose of this report is to contribute academically towards the theoretical development
of project management knowledge within the field of decision-making and interest the readers in, how
stakeholders can contribute to improving Aker BP’s decision-making processes, and how learnings from
this report can be used to improve decision-making in other Business units and organizations. | |