Creativity and Performance: A Case Study in a Highly Regulated and Constrained Domain

Abstract

The outage of an energy production plant for maintenance is a complex domain submitted to numerous stakes and constraints: productivity, safety, security and environmental protection. Outage projects have to manage a set of events of various natures: technical, organizational or human hazards and changes in regulation. Obviously, the Socio-Organizational and Human (SOH) dimensions are essential to overtake these difficulties, and to reach and maintain the performance of the outage projects at an acceptable cost (human, social, financial). For several years, the outage projects did not reach the expected performance. Concluding that the organization would have reached its limits, the operator launched a 3 years R&D project in 2015. This project aimed at enlightening the mechanisms and SOH characteristics that contribute to reach and maintain the targeted performance. First, the R&D project developed an “effective organization” model for an outage. Second, an approach were designed to perform a diagnosis of the organization, using the model as a framework for analysis. This paper first describes the approach and the main lessons learnt from the field studies, focusing on collective creativity that is needed to manage hazard events even in a highly regulated and constrained domain. Then, the paper will present lessons from applying the approach to a production plant. Finally the paper will outline the limitations of both model and approach and the issues to be addressed to transmit the approach to the operator.