Waterfall Project Manager Simulation — BP (North Sea)

The scenario

Crannog Alpha is a steel-jacket production platform in the Central North Sea, 140 miles north-east of Aberdeen, installed in 1983 and operated by BP for four decades. The field is spent. The last economic barrel was lifted eighteen months ago, and the platform now runs in lighthouse mode — manned, powered, and insured purely to keep it safe while nobody produces anything from it. Every month it stays standing costs BP roughly £1.4M in running and integrity spend for zero return. Your job is to take it down. The £300M abandonment programme covers four scopes: plug and abandon the 18 wells (Well-Safe Solutions), remove the topsides and cut the jacket (Heerema Marine Contractors and its heavy-lift vessel), recover the subsea infrastructure, and monitor the site for years after the steel is gone. You own the execution coordination — a £2M PM scope stewarding a £300M campaign — inside BP's wider North Sea Late-Life Asset Management Programme. Decommissioning is not construction run backwards. Nothing you do adds capability; every pound spent is a pound the business would rather not spend, on an asset everyone has already written off. The heavy-lift vessel is booked by the season and wants a date it can hold to. OPRED wants a defensible environmental case before a single weld is cut. The trustee will not release a pound of security until a milestone is verified complete. And the people who have kept Crannog Alpha alive for forty years are not all ready to watch it lifted off. Removing is harder than building. You are about to find out why. The campaign mobilises a core BP late-life asset team of around 12 staff, Heerema's heavy-lift spread of roughly 150 marine specialists, and Well-Safe's P&A crew of about 40 engineers, with some 40 personnel held on the platform in lighthouse mode until removal. Key milestones run from the engineering design freeze and the subsea survey spread deployment, through a full lift rehearsal before the heavy-lift campaign, to the security release at close-out.

What you'll do as the project manager

• →Secure OPRED approval of the Decommissioning Programme, including any comparative assessment / OSPAR derogation case, before execution begins
• →Plug and abandon all 18 wells to regulatory standard with verified barrier integrity
• →Remove the topsides and jacket within a single committed heavy-lift weather window, minimising standby exposure
• →Release DSA security funding against verified milestones without a funding-availability gap stalling the campaign
• →Close out the asset to a monitored, regulator-accepted end state at or under the £300M baseline

Project management skills you'll build

The challenges you'll navigate

• •The heavy-lift weather window, OPRED approval, and DSA funding release must all converge before removal — any one slipping cascades into a 12-month delay
• •Incomplete 1983 as-built records mean subsea tie-ins, well-barrier condition, and topside weights may differ from documentation, surfacing late
• •BP operations want to defer/minimise spend while the contractor wants schedule certainty — an unmanaged standoff stalls every commitment
• •An OSPAR derogation case for subsea infrastructure may be challenged, forcing full recovery and re-scoping mid-campaign

Technology & stakeholders

You'll manage 6 stakeholders, including Fiona Calderwood (Asset Manager — Late-Life Assets, BP North Sea), Stuart Bremner (Offshore Installation Manager (OIM) — Crannog Alpha), Joost Reijnders (Commercial Manager, Heavy-Lift & Decommissioning — Heerema Marine Contractors), and more.

What you'll walk away with

A verified, shareable record of a completed enterprise project — plus the PMO deliverables you produced along the way (charter, project plan, SteerCo deck, closure document). It's real, demonstrable project management experience you can put on your resume and speak to in interviews.

Frequently asked questions

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