A research poster from the School of Underlying Conditions follows a drilling contractor's crews after a change of shift pattern removed their handover, and records which parts of it they kept.
Fourteen months at one drilling contractor show crews performing a routine their new roster no longer contains
A routine can be taken off a roster and stay on a rig. So reports The Handover Nobody Rostered: Persistence of an Abolished Routine after a Change of Shift Pattern at a Drilling Contractor, a research poster by Ragnhild Uzoma, Associate Professor and Lead, Basement Relations Group, with Dr Vigdis Emenike, Senior Lecturer, and Dr Brynjar Obiora, Senior Research Fellow, all of the School of Underlying Conditions.
A handover lasts about as long as a mug of tea, which may be the sturdiest unit of time this School has yet worked in. We expect to be using it again.
— Associate Professor Ragnhild Uzoma, Lead, Basement Relations Group
The poster aligns longitudinal observation with the organisational-routines literature across 212 crossovers and 41 interviews at a single contractor whose move to staggered rotation left no shift to hand over. It resolves the old handover into seven elements and follows each through six rounds of fieldwork. The spoken elements held at around nine crossovers in ten, the signed ones fell away once a digital log took over their paperwork, and by the final round most of what remained was being performed somewhere other than the rig.
The University counts the poster among the quieter dividends of having a school that already knew its way to a drill site. Dr Emenike said the three authors had “gone out to watch a change and come back having mostly watched what stayed”.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.1b9dr1.