Troubled by declining oil and stagnant gas production, state-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) has appointed The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) to restructure the way it manages oil and gas fields to improve on its poor track record of project delivery, a senior ONGC official said.
ONGC has missed production targets for the last five years despite the accretion to oil and gas reserves every year. As per analysts, the lower production numbers can be attributed to a large extent to project management practices adopted by the public sector giant that are not up to international standards.
BCG has been tasked by ONGC to introduce a rigorous stage-gate project management process to ensure that each stage of the life cycle of a project is conducted systematically. ?At present, these stages do not have gatekeepers to undertake a due diligence before a project moves from one stage to the next in the development cycle,? said the ONGC official.
The company?s production slippages stem from endemic project delays, with its 40 large projects costing $14 billion running 22 months late on an average. Of these, the 23 output enhancement projects aggregating 1.5 billion barrels of oil equivalent (bboe) of resources are running 23 months late.
ONGC will run pilots through two teams in Mumbai and Delhi for eight to nine projects. In three-four years, BCG will train and set up a core team of about 30-40 engineers to act as stage gate holders to ensure due diligence.
