Integrated Upstream Planning

There's an interesting space in oil and gas called planning.

There's a relatively small contingent of people that work across the full spectrum, and a few who touch each of the planning activities. I'm one of them.

This book is a consolidation of my experience working with hundreds of companies over the last 12 years.

I've been fortunate to work with some of the greatest minds in upstream planning. This book aims to make their knowledge available to those who want it.

I've been fortunate to help companies and the people that have suffered, financially and psychologically, from mistakes in this area. This book aims to help you avoid their pitfalls and improve your company without as much pain.

In most oil & gas organizations, there is a ton of focus on improving the individual parts of planning, but the integration of the parts is in such poor shape. We've got big brains, traffic-stopping triceps, shoebox calves, but no spinal cord. It's no wonder there's unhealthy conflict between assets and corporate, between operations and economists, between engineers and executives.

This book is for people that want to solve that problem.

If you're a leader set on building a planning organization or improving planning processes, this book will frame the problem that you're facing and suggest an end-state for you to begin working toward.

If you're an employee looking to push things to be better, this book will give you a broader context to help you understand what might be driving all those not-so-helpful behaviors.

If you're early in your career, this book will get you oriented with upstream planning, how it works, and give you a perspective that could take a decade to gain through experience.

In this book, I'm going to:

• outline the layers and pillars of planning,
• lay out typical organizational and collaborative models,
• highlight the fundamentals of related data & technology,
• and introduce the planning maturity curve to set a direction for continuous improvement.

Reader Feedback

"Many upstream professionals spend their entire careers working on just a few aspects of the planning lifecycle. Matt outlines it all from birth to rebirth (it's an annual corporate tradition!). Along the way, insightful commentary and advice is given to ease the pain that legacy processes have inflicted upon the modern oil & gas professional. I'd recommend everyone read Matt's book in order to see how to begin building an effective planning process."

- David Fulford, SVP Engineering, EIV Resources

"It's clear that Matt has been in the trenches of a variety of planning wars. As I was building my vision for how our planning function should work, it gave me a frame to work in and highlighted the most important decisions that I needed to make. It only took an hour to read. So if you're looking to improve your planning process, you don't have any excuse not to pick it up."

- Darin Dunlop, SVP Engineering, Whitecap Resources