Smarter software delivery and improved safety monitoring in the oil and gas sector.

Smarter software delivery and improved safety monitoring in the oil and gas sector.

Intetech, part of the Wood Group, provide safety monitoring to the oil and gas sector. Its software products are used to monitor pipeline corrosion rates and provide real-time monitoring of well integrity. They have offices located in the UK, Europe, Americas, Middle East, Indonesia and Asia Pacific.

WG Intetech were keen to get their product updates and software releases to the market faster. In order to achieve this, they needed to make their technology and business processes more efficient. WG Intetech were aware that introducing more automation to their testing processes would pay dividends; and recognised they did not have the necessary skills in-house.

“We have to become more agile in our approach. If we don’t, the consequence will be slower releases and our time to market will suffer. We have to look at our business processes and the technology available to us. The pace of technological change is always getting quicker and we needed to stay on top of this. Our team wants to use state of the art methods and technology but it is difficult to always have the right knowledge internally – sometimes you need to bring in outside people. ” – Ged Lunt, Manager of Technology

DISCOVERY:

WG Intetech invited OpenCredo to work alongside its development team, and asked that we provide a set of recommendations, to enable them to meet their efficiency goals. We evaluated both the business processes that WG Intetech had in place, as well as the technologies being deployed. The output of this work was a roadmap of proposed improvements.

DELIVERY:

Having agreed on the priority items, our consultants continued to work on-site, helping to deliver the following changes:

• Introduction of a new iterative development process. By breaking down the requirement gathering into manageable workloads, WG Intetech’s development team were able to respond faster, and adapt to re-prioritisation and evolution of the business’ needs.
• Creation of a new deployment pipeline. This provided a test environment which would support test automation and enable problems to be identified at the earliest possible opportunity.
• Deployment of testing automation. This reduced the time needed to verify that requirements are being met; and allowed for regression testing every time a new change was made.
• These changes reduced the amount of manual verification required, and helped the team identify problems. In addition, by virtue of co-working with WG Intetech, we were able to transfer knowledge and upskill their in-house technology team.

“We are more streamlined and faster – and we catch problems sooner. We can deal with problems immediately, which is crucial as the longer we leave a problem the more costly it becomes to fix. The upskilling of staff alongside the deployment of cutting edge techniques and technology, has also had a significant impact on team morale. People want to know they are working in the most efficient way. They want to be delivering things faster and know they are continuously improving” – Ged Lunt, Manager of Technology.

By establishing a more efficient development process, WG Intetech are now benefitting from a reduction in the time taken to get their products to market. Furthermore, by empowering the development teams, managers have been freed up to focus their energies and attention on other parts of the business.

“I previously had to micromanage the development process but I don’t need to do this anymore as the team is much more self-sufficient. This has allowed me to concentrate on other important things, such as medium-term planning. Instead of being continuously involved in the development process. I can take a look at what else is going on in the market and spend more time talking to customers.” – Ged Lunt, Manager of Technology

The combination of testing automation, and an iterative development process, has enabled WG Intetech to identify problems quickly. Hence they can address problems before they become major issues, which in turn saves the company time and money.

“It now takes less manual effort to get products out of the door. It means we can develop features which would have just taken too long before. In the time that it used to take us to produce three features, we are now producing four or five” – – Ged Lunt, Manager of Technology

As a result of our partnership, we were able to leave the Intetech team with:

• Improved team morale allowing managers to concentrate on core business areas
• Faster and more cost-effective development of high quality and feature-rich products
• Accelerated releases of new products and upgrades

“Having OpenCredo’s consultants shadow working in our office was a very effective way of upskilling our team. It would have been hard to implement the kind of changes if we had tried to achieve this over the phone.” – Ged Lunt, Manager of Technology