Game on
Woodside has devised a fun board game with a serious aim – to promote the cause of ensuring maintenance tasks are conducted in compliance with regulations.
Game delivers crucial lessons
Boards games don’t have to be reserved for rainy days on holidays or non-television nights for the kids.
A new board game devised at Woodside has a purpose more serious than accumulating miniature plastic houses along Park Lane or avoiding snakes and climbing ladders.
It’s called Licence to Operate and it aims to advance the cause of “regulatory required maintenance”.
Regulatory required maintenance refers to maintenance activities to be carried out in order to comply with regulatory obligations specified within an Act of Parliament, a regulation or a prescribed standard.
“The aim of Licence to Operate is to generate conversations with your peers about safety and compliance,” explains Stephen Standley, the project lead for the Regulatory Maintenance Project which came up with the idea for the board game.
“You make your way through the game by answering the questions about our new regulatory required maintenance framework, and there’s even a jail like in Monopoly.”
The game takes around 90 minutes to complete and requires three players in two teams, plus a game master who is in charge of the answer book.
“It’s essentially a learning exercise because you have to get to know each of the other players and their role in regulatory maintenance.
“So it’s best played with people who have different roles within the company.”
Stephen and his team were looking at how best to communicate the importance of compliance and safety but had difficulty landing on the right formula.
Videos and presentations were created but the team wanted participants to immerse themselves in the scenarios rather than be passive spectators.
“So we thought, how about doing something more collaborative, where we can teach people to find the answer with the resources that we have created? How about making it a collaborative learning experience,” Stephen recounts.
“We were looking at an electronic game but there’s something special about the look and feel of a physical board game.
“We’re very happy with the product.”
A great deal of time was spent discussing the proposed questions with Maintenance, Engineering and regulatory compliance to ensure the answers were correct.
Then a pilot was trialled in Karratha in July and the game started to be rolled out in August among Maintenance, Operations and Engineering.
Six copies of Licence to Operate have been ordered and the idea is that eventually everybody in those three disciplines will have played it at least once.
“This was certainly one of the more engaging and effective learning experiences I have undertaken of late,” reports Karratha Gas Plant operator Damien Muller who took part in the July trial.
“The inclusion of Ops, Engineering and Maintenance in the session certainly helped with each discipline bringing their part in the process to the experience.”
Change manager Noelle Loh developed the game and is happy with the feedback.
“We hope that this experience – excuse the pun – is a game changer when it comes to learning at Woodside, as we continue to encourage people to adopt new ways of working,” Noelle says.
Read the full Q3 2019 issue of Trunkline here.
