By Rod Newing

BP Amoco took a leaf out of the US Army's book to establish a "shared learning" initiative. The move followed an internal conference in 1994 at which Professor John Henderson from Boston University explained the way the US Army was benefiting from its Centre for Lessons Learned. BP and Amoco recently merged to create one of the world's leading providers of energy and petrochemicals and a small BP steering group identified "spikes of innovative practice" within the company.

"It showed that good things were going on," says Chris Collison, a consultant with BP Amoco's performance processes and learning team. "But they were not common and there was scope to spread them across the organisation. We also discovered that there is no single magic formula that we could learn from another company or a consultancy."

A small central team was established in early 1997 to act as a catalyst and evangelise the benefits throughout the group. It introduced techniques for learning before, during and after an important activity.

"We introduced simple learning processes to help teams to stop, reflect, learn and move on," says Mr Collison.

Before any big new initiative is started, the manager will draw together a group of peers in an open environment. Known as a "peer assist" group, it examines potential solutions in the exploratory phase.

During a project, a continuous learning approach is adopted, employing the US Army's 10-minute "action review". It establishes what was supposed to happen, what actually happened, why was there a difference, and what has been learned.

After the project, a half day or a day of "retrospect" focuses on successes and what could have been done better, and on key lessons to pass on.

During 1998, members of the team worked with business units. "When we revisited them to find out what effect it had on their business, we had no problem surpassing our target of $100m of added value," says Mr Collison. "The main lesson we learned is the importance of striking the right balance between capturing knowledge and connecting people.

Both of these are achieved through the corporate intranet on which 12,000 people have created their own web pages outlining their expertise and providing links to internal and external sources of information. The company has also invested in desktop video- conferencing that creates "globally available local experts".

Sharing information has been made easier by BP's $200m project to create a common operating environment using Microsoft products. A lot of oil industry work is done by third party contractors and wherever possible, they have access to the same learning systems and tools.

There are strategic tasks that the company repeats within its organisation, such as business restructuring, planned refinery maintenance shut-downs and establishing new business infrastructure. The intranet supports these by capturing such high level information as project plans and budgets, outputs from team events and retrospectives.

The company now makes explicit links to its performance processes. For example, in each stage in approving and monitoring capital projects the project manager must demonstrate learning. Since the merger, the company is twice its original size; effectively a new organisation in which people do not know each other. "We are focusing on connecting people and the intranet is playing a key role in helping the organisation to get to know itself," says Mr Collison. "Fortunately, both companies were already using the same models for learning."

The central team worked with a broader community of 200-300 people in the businesses who did most of the work and the central team is now being devolved back to the business units.

"Shared learning is central to the future of the organisation," concludes Mr Collison. "When people are already working as hard as they can, they need to find a way to work smarter. If we create an organisation where people actively want to learn before they start something, and are keen to ensure the lessons they have learned are passed on, then we are well prepared for the future."

Knowledge
Management

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BP Amoco


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