South Pacific Oil (SPO) is a fuel supply company based in the Solomon Islands. They are a small to medium sized business with approximately 100 employees. SPO purchased Shell Pacific’s business and assets in the Solomons, in 2006.
Objective
SPO had very few policies and procedures in place when we began working with them. They had inherited some Standard Operating Procedures from Shell when they purchased the company, but these were dated and – in many cases – no longer applicable. The Board also lacked the appropriate industry experience and overall maturity as a group, to develop policy themselves.
With time a factor, they decided to engage Change Factory to identify and assess policy gaps for the whole of SPO, and create draft policies for review and approval. We were also asked to develop process and procedure documentation after adverse audit findings.
Scope
In consultation with the Board and Senior Managers, we were tasked with writing policy and process documents for the whole of SPO’s operations. With our industry experience, we were able to offer appropriately detailed expertise in matters of risk and issues.
Approach
We first sought to analyse the major risks to SPO, in the context of reputation, assets, people and environment. From this data, we identified policy gaps and made recommendations to close them. We then agreed on how we would go about developing the policies and processes and what they would look like. We developed a template that complemented existing procedures and standards, and ensured we had agreement on language, style and delivery format.
Because we were the authors of the policy, it was SPO’s role to evaluate and audit our work. They used our analysis model to check the deliverables for:
- Alignment with SPO vision/mission
- Encompassing of risk and risk mitigation
- Alignment to operational process groups
- Clear line of sight to strategic goals
- Transparent and plain language.
Outcomes
We identified 35 policies that needed to be written and are in the process of developing these. SPO have full control over the content, priority of work, as well as evaluation methods for checking the policy value.
We use an agreed template and approach to writing and reviewing SPO policy, so they can be assured of receiving a coherent and consistent set of documents.
To date, we have completed process documentation for a total of 125 processes, with approximately another 450 processes remaining.
