The Future of Incident Management

The importance of preparing for, responding to, and managing incidents.

Simon Marwick talks about his journey to leading the Global Operations Command Centre in Aberdeen, the technology he uses to deliver critical incident response services, and his thoughts on the future of incident management.

From lifeguard to Afghanistan to emergency response

From a very young age, I've always been involved in helping people. I was a lifeguard as a youngster, and then I joined the army as an officer where I served several tours in Afghanistan and almost a whole tour in Iraq. I was involved at various levels up to divisional, but after seven years, I decided it was time to move on and leave the Army. 

I came across a company I liked the look of, which back then was called Altor Risk Group, which was a very focused, emergency response organisation. Their focus was very much around looking after people during an incident. I have three brothers who all work offshore, so to me emergency response sounded like a great career. 

Shortly after joining Altor Risk Group, they were bought by what is now Restrata. Over the past seven years, things have gone from strength to strength, and we've seen a huge change in incident management and emergency response. I’m pleased to say this was largely led by Restrata and the team of consultants that we have up here in Aberdeen. Despite the vast experiences that we all have, every day is a smooth day for us. But that's really one of the great things about Restrata - we’re not afraid to make mistakes and learn from them.

A day in the life at the emergency response control centre

One of the great things about my job as an emergency response specialist is that there’s no such thing as a typical day. Our emergency response centre has several rooms, the incident management, and backup incident management rooms must always be ready for action. To ensure this, each must be checked regularly to ensure everything is working correctly and ready to be used should an incident occur. The whole team gets involved in this.

However, when something goes wrong it tends to come in my direction. Whether that includes supporting our consultants with technical expertise, reviewing client plans, particularly as we bring new clients on board, or clients reviewing their plans and changing them. We need to make sure that as a team we are all up to speed and on top of our knowledge, sometimes going back to the client to question things to make sure that the response that we provide is going to be at the highest level for the people that we are supporting.

Incident frequency and response approach

Within the control room, we probably deal with four or five incidents a day. The nature of incidents can vary, but as an example, it can be somebody that requires being medevacked from a platform or a rig, and they need some support once they get onshore. 

The support that we provide could be something as simple as arranging a taxi, but it's surprising what that means to people knowing that when they get back on land they're going to be looked after all the way home, or to safety. It’s about giving people that trusted point of contact. 

Fortunately, we don't have to stand up as a full team too often for incidents. Over the last 12 months, we have mobilised teams on about eight or nine occasions, and that's to deal with issues caused by severe weather action plans. Sadly, we've dealt with our fair share of death and issues with the assets themselves, such as pipelines. Over the year, we've had to mobilise on occasion, but given the technology that we use we have the capability to do so remotely. The benefits of operating remotely are significant and provide advantages over older approaches.

Incident response – past and present approaches

If I go back to the beginning of my career with Restrata, we used to train with whiteboards and flip charts. Using the term technology to describe these tools isn’t quite correct, but it's the way that we used to do things. In the 80’s and 90’s, before computers and the internet were as readily available as they are now, whiteboards and flipcharts were a perfectly acceptable approach. Now, we train using them as a complete backup, and with the intention of hopefully never having to use them, but it does give people the fundamentals. 

I remember taking pictures of boards and flip charts, and thinking this is crazy. It was crazy because when I joined, we also had a software system. That system allowed us to input our individual actions throughout the room to ensure that there was an audit trail and a unified operating picture across the teams. It was a good system, but it was quite clunky, and you needed to be very highly trained to really get the benefits of it. 

Now jump forward to around three years ago when we migrated to a different system. This new system was quite easy for me to use as an expert, but some of our clients found it difficult because they're potentially only logging into that system once a year, and therefore can require continual training.

System-hopping between siloed data sources to respond to an incident

As a team leader, you have to be able to navigate the systems, information, and tools that allow decisions to be made. For example, this could mean moving between flight manifest, travel, and eight charge systems to get data, so I want that information at my fingertips, and I want it quickly. It's hard to do that if you have to move from one data source to another, then another, and so on. If you are forced to do that when time is critical, and where people's safety is at risk, it can be incredibly frustrating, with the consequences of lost time and potentially fatal.