3 ms·

Damn and here I am spending days preparing to justify my requests for a measly $2M to $5M for project spends. I should go be an oil boy.

• jofer 7y ago
  Don't wish for it too much... Getting approval for any decision is like pulling teeth. As a project manager in the oil industry you still aren't the final decision maker in most cases, and even when you are, there are decision review boards/etc. There's a _lot_ of "process" to everything in oil. It's there for a good reason, but it can get out of hand. I once spent three months getting approval to spend $20 to order some data from the US government. It was exactly the same process that you'd go through for a $10 million purchase. (Didn't help that we were re-buying our own data from 20 years ago because we'd lost it, but that's a different story.) I billed another wing of the company at $465/hr during the entire process... I billed around $50k to get approval to order a $20 DVD with a bunch of old scanned documents on it. Things can get very strange in the oil patch sometimes...