Personnel safety is an important concern on oil platforms. In emergencies, personnel have to muster at their designated muster zones or lifeboats before being evacuated. Lifeboat captains and safety personnel ensure that this operation runs smoothly. Today’s routines involve using paper lists and radio communication to ensure that everyone is safely evacuated, a solution that takes a long time to complete and is quite prone to human mistake. The purpose of this project was to streamline the evacuation process by creating a mobile application that gives lifeboat captains and safety personnel shared and automated control over the mustering status. The application can reduce the time it takes to get control over personnel on board (POB), potentially saving lives of injured personnel. For example, a wave struck the platform “COSL Innovator” on 30 December 2015. One person died from the incident, and four were injured. The Petroleum Safety Authority’s (PSA) report of the incident shows that it took about 40 minutes to gain control over POB. POB control could have completed faster with an application like Mobile Mustering, potentially saving lives of injured personnel.

The project was conducted for Identec Solutions, where I took on the role as project manager and developer. Identec Solutions is a personnel safety solution provider for harsh environments, like oilrigs, mines and tunnels. The application we developed in this project is called Mobile Mustering and it integrates with Identec Solutions’ RFID-based personnel safety system. The Identec Solutions Personnel Safety system provides real-time zonal tracking with fully automated mustering. In the context of this project, the personnel safety system is used to keep track of where and how many people are on oilrigs.

The project is divided into an analysis and design phase and a development phase. In addition, a preliminary study was performed before the project started. To be able to react quickly to changing requirements and priorities, we used the Kanban method. Kanban made us focus on improving our workflow and getting rid of obstacles. In addition, we used Tuckman’s stages of group development to find specific team-related issues we could improve on.

Existing customers of Identec Solutions were involved in the project through workshops, verification meetings and review meetings. In addition to involving customers in reviews and workshops, we made a quality plan and involved other Identec employees with knowledge about the problem domain and customer processes to validate requirements and the application itself. We used the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to make sure we made a product that the customer would find useful and easy to use.

The outcome of the project was successful and we managed to create the foundation of a solid new Mobile Mustering product that Identec’s customers has started to show an interest in. The project also introduced methods that Identec can use to identify additional improvements to the development workflow and the team’s performance. Using Kanban was a good choice in this project, because of rapid changes in the backlog. However, it does not have any specific processes to follow. My experience is that to benefit from using Kanban, it requires that the development team actively paritcipates in improving the development processes.