Delivery of performance through reduced well time while maintaining optimum wellbore quality requires a thorough understanding of the drilling environment, recognizing geological and drilling process hazards. Studying each component of the drilling system and environment in isolation prevents identifying the root cause of or fully understanding the problem, leading to less than optimal solutions and failure to deliver performance. To overcome performance barriers, we must first have an in-depth understanding of the root cause by taking a holistic approach to the analysis of the drilling environment. This organization developed a successful process within a dedicated drilling optimization group that enabled a structured approach to understanding the complete drilling environment. This successful process, founded on the continuous improvement cycle—plan, execute, analyze, and capture— delivered practices and technology recommendations to realize performance gains and significant well-time reduction. Taking lessons learned from one well and implementing these on subsequent wells delivered further performance improvements. The original drilling optimization group comprised a small team of highly disciplined engineers focused on detailed application analysis to minimize barriers to drilling performance improvement. This group's work was the foundation of drilling knowledge tools within the organization; this work led to the development of industry-leading methodologies for data analysis and best drilling practices. The performance advantages realized by the team using this process lead the organization to recognize that its wider drilling community would benefit from the use of this process to deliver consistent performance gains. The authors will describe the process and how it has been applied to the wider drilling community to meet the needs of individual engineering disciplines and groups. The challenge to distribute the holistic approach and continuous improvement philosophy from a core group to the wider organization involved raising competency standards and the provision of dedicated knowledge transfer tools, creating an enabling environment to allow proactive performance management of specific applications. Finally, the authors will present several case studies that document success with the process. Introduction The pace of new technology introduction within the oil and gas industry is ever increasing. The catalyst is the rapid expansion of China and India and the general move east and the continuous demand on reaching pays once thought to be marginal or too technically difficult to produce. Often with the development of these technologies comes increased complexity when interpreting and understanding the application. This environment requires a better trained, highly skilled workforce that is in short supply and has been for some time. Those who have some seniority in a particular discipline, typically, now are in managerial positions and may not be available for technical support. Those that are left have become very focused on their area of expertise and, as a result, a systems approach for optimization whether it is on the drilling side or production side has become almost extinct.

In today's robust hydrocarbon markets, complexity and volume of drilling and evaluation activity have grown to unprecedented levels. This is driving technology development and new application practices at a record pace. At the same time, the industry is struggling to grow the talent base to manage the increased workload. These issues have resulted in a need to track and ensure application engineer and geoscientist competency levels. To solve this challenge, the company developed a detailed process for individual competency assessment and employee development for various application disciplines. Certification is awarded in set disciplines when the necessary criteria have been met and competence has been successfully demonstrated to a technical experts' review panel. The required competencies for each discipline were developed from the expanded job functions expected of the experienced senior applications engineers and geoscientists, as well as expectations of the services provided in each discipline. From this, a competency assessment and tracking methodology was created. The methodology enables the assessment of an individual engineer's competency level so a tailored development program of training and mentoring can be developed. A formal mentoring system plays a vital role in the certification process. Assigned mentors offer valuable engineering and process guidance. The authors will describe a certification process and a methodology for competency assessment and tracking for application engineers and geoscientists. Finally, the authors will discuss how the program benefits raise the level of the company's technical expertise. Introduction Industry demands for the optimized application of drilling and evaluation technologies have led to challenges in developing and hiring application engineers and geoscientists with suitable competency levels. These challenges are attributable to the limited number of skilled industry professionals and the increased volume of drilling activity. For large companies, there is the added issue of tracking and understanding the skill level of its technical staff. These companies must ensure the knowledge of their application engineers and geoscientists is sufficient to successfully manage the industry's complex technologies. The lack of skilled application engineers and geoscientists affects oil companies and service suppliers. For oil companies, lack of optimization results in higher costs through an increased number of drilling days and/or reduced borehole quality, leading to delayed or reduced production. Service companies, as the suppliers of technical solutions, must ensure their products are used efficiently; otherwise, they run the risk of low performance and poor perception of their technologies. This, in turn, leads to rejection of services, which can be very costly when R&D for failed technologies is taken into account. The limited number of skilled industry professionals is a well-known issue. The Society for Petroleum Engineers (SPE) estimates that between 1980-1998, the industry staffing levels fell to 300,000 from 700,000. As of December 2006, the median age of all SPE members was 47. The industry is expected to experience a 44% attrition rate among petroleum engineers by 2010; more than 200,000 years of cumulative experience and knowledge will be lost in the next 10 years because of retirement. Almost half of the workforce will be new to the industry.1In an attempt to fill staffing gaps, companies are giving application engineering and geoscience disciplines expanded job functions. The complexity of solutions for optimized drilling and evaluation requires a full understanding of the technologies and the total drilling environment in which they can be applied. These professionals must have skill sets that span traditional drilling engineering and oilfield geoscience disciplines.