Case Study: Building Visibility, Discipline, and Operational Confidence for Oil and Gas Engineering Teams
Client: Santos Ltd
The Opportunity
Like many organisations managing complex operating assets, Santos' engineering function faces the classic challenge of a resource-constrained environment with competing demands. The problem Skyo was brought in to address was around prioritisation and work demand. Technical queries, operational events, management of change requests, and assurance reviews all of which are legitimate, important, and arriving at pace have been unmanageable to track which cause friction in their delivery.
The team recognised an opportunity: could they move from making ad-hoc trade-offs based on incomplete information to making strategic decisions based on visibility of actual work demand and available capacity? We believed the answer to be a resounding “yes”!
Planned and unplanned requests for engineering support come from multiple areas and multiple assets resulting in highly reactive engineering
The Solution
We know that visibility alone changes nothing. What matters is creating the conditions for teams to fundamentally change how they work together and make decisions, that is, instil a behavioural change and a support system for success. The Skyo Digital team built a task capture system and put a process around it which surfaces all information through two key dashboards – one for team leads to understand team performance and the other for management to understand the performance of engineering more holistically. But this is only the support system, not the change itself.
The real transformation is the enablement of key new activities including regular touch points, reviews, conversations about urgency vs importance, and actually logging what’s coming into the team, ensuring the teams are equipped to manage workload and demonstrate to requestors where their requests sit within Santos’ overall priorities. These activities, the mindset, and the communications represent the behavioural change.
Significant improvement in engineering response and delivery through new process, comms, task tracking, visibility of work, and aligning engineering to KPIs
The Real Impact
Operational Improvement
Daily and weekly visibility of work in progress and emerging constraints
Improved identification and resolution of blockers
Clear accountability for priorities and timelines
Enhanced service delivery and team confidence
Measurable improvement in throughput and predictability
Behavioural Change
Teams have gone from telling people what they are doing to showing them, continuously
Decision-makers shifted from intuition-based trade-offs to data-informed decisions
Engineering is establishing itself as a predictable, reliable service partner
Work is prioritised based on value alignment rather than urgency alone
Cultural Shift
From informal escalation to transparent prioritisation
From siloed teams to coordinated function
From asset-focused to enterprise-focused decision-making
Why This Matters
Good behaviours create successful transformation. The system we’ve implemented is deliberately lightweight and embedded in how the team actually works ensuring the tool doesn’t become the lever for change, but that it catalyses the behavioural change towards success.
What's Next: AI-Powered Intelligence
The next phase will introduce AI to further reduce friction. Instead of manually logging tasks, AI will learn to capture work from emails and other communications to return even more time to engineering decisions that matter.
Using AI to intelligently categorise requests for engineering approval into work demand management and prioritisation process
We are very proud to be part of Santos’ engineering transformation by enabling them to deliver with visibility, discipline, and confidence. The next phase will make that even more powerful.
