Welcome to the Py Blyron Coi of Intercis Corporation, and we're going to talk about effective team training. Byron, welcome back to the Pipelineers podcast. Glad to be here also. So I guess before we dive in, we'll just remind everybody that Byron is a principal regulatory consultant with InterSYS Corporation and has recently retired for PHMSA after a long career and has a background in pipeline safety, control and re-management, pipeline operations, all that stuff.
And at least in my world, which is the control room world, everybody knows Byron. Well, I appreciate that. I don't like that retired word. I prefer to say I spent my time at PHMSA and now I've moved back to industry.
OK, good, noted. I'll correct accordingly. Very good. So we're going to talk about team training today.
And before we dive into the conversation, I just want to make a couple of notes. So whenever Byron and I get together to do one of these conversations, he does an exceedingly good job of kind of outlining and putting structure into the conversation. So we've got a nice outline. We're going to follow.
I want to make sure that's available in the show notes for the listeners that don't know. On the website, pipelinepodcastnetwork.com, we have show notes, which is links to resources and a transcript of the episode. So text basically that you can use to if you're trying to do research or if this supports something you're trying to do in your organization. So just be aware that this content is available there and that Byron does a really good job of organizing things.
So Byron, thanks for that. And before we dive in, I want to ask you, where does team training come from? Well, the concept of team training, I guess, team activities has been around for a long, long time. And as you can imagine, that's the concept of team is pretty important in the control room world.
And as such, having a good team vertical for regular operations and unusual circumstances, we're as well, how a team operates becomes more important to be successful. My first exposure to that is a roundly cockpit. Having a background in the Air Force, not as a pilot, but if you're in the Air Force, you learn these things, right? And there's a lot that goes on.
Anybody that's taking flying lessons, learns that a big part of that is the team training between you and ground control and flight control and all that. And in the concept of team activities became more apparent a few years ago when there was a pipeline failure in Marshall, Michigan. NTSB did a fairly extensive investigation on that failure and found a report that's available on their website. And they called out a few number of things.
And one of the recommendations they made to FIMSA at that time was to require team training to become part of the regulations. Yeah, and for the folks that haven't read that report, one of the things that clearly points out is in that control center, there were multiple roles, including the controller, a shift supervisor, and a lead detection person who's actually working shift. And part of that magnitude of the consequence probably a better way to say it, part of the contribution to that was ineffective communication and decision making within that kind of key team, particularly around the time of the event as they're trying to figure out what was going on. So as a result of that event and the NTSB recommendation, since we're team training into the RAGS in 2017 with an effective date in the early 2018.
So at a high level, what's in the rule? What are the key things that operators are being asked to do to implement team training? Well, it's peculiar how things turn out, the statement and the regulations can be a sentence or two long. And when you think about what that requires and what people would have to do, and how a pipeline company would demonstrate that their engagement and topic turns into a laundry list of things that they ought to be doing in many different ways that they can accomplish any one of them.
So it's become a fairly heavy lift for a lot of operators to have a team training program and have it being effective and touch all the bases. There are, I don't know, just about 10 FAQs on that topic alone. Yeah, so we've done, we haven't done a whole lot of work in team training, we facilitated some stuff. And I think it's one of those areas where, when you really think about how you do it well, it's a lot of people that are impacted.
Because there's a lot of people that interact with the control room, particularly during an abnormal or emergency situation. I've got this divided into four topic areas that listeners can peruse. The first of the four topics that I wanted to talk about was identifying the job titles that should be participating in the team training effort. And if you think, well, obviously, there's control room communication routinely with a lot of people just in this course of business, there are people in the control room, operations and maintenance people in the field, skated technicians behind the scenes, engineering for operational considerations, got the contracts and scheduling departments, they have their own interests.
And a lot of control rooms have some third party service providers from various forms. So it's obvious that all those kind of people are there in play to keep operations running normally in essence to avoid abnormal operating conditions and events for maybe even starting. But there's an end of group of people that can get involved in team training as well. And they're there and they're coming to play more often when everything's aren't going so right.
Had normal conditions are occurring or ever for major events been some sort of an event or failure. And these are more engineering people, emergency response, operations executives that actually want to know what's going on with the expletives. Those involved with leaks of failure events. And if there's someone who has the authority to intervene or supersede on the controllers, they'll probably step in as well.
And in the regulatory staff, because they know they're gonna be getting calls. So as you said, also, a lot of people, a lot of job positions could get involved. Yeah, I think it's interesting too, that when you think about team training, the focus, at least the operators that I've worked with, the focus has been more on the abnormal and emergency operations than on the routine. Because the routine, you kind of learn that from your day to day.
But the higher level operators actually focus on that routine and they look to put more structure around it. Things like phonetic alphabet and clear, here's what you do when you make phone calls, these are the things you say, these are things you ask for. And that structure and that habit, it actually helps when things are going more towards the abnormal direction. So it's just thinking about the number of people that are involved.
That's the only thing that would interact with the control room, both inside your company and out. Right, and as you mentioned, interact with or under normal conditions, or maybe even more important, in my opinion, the people who infrequently communicate, but when this communication happens, it's because something's going south. Right, yeah, no, I think that's a very good point. It's a very good point.
And if you take the cockpit analogy, they don't really train pilots on routine flight other than when they're getting their re-qualification or they're moving to a new airframe, but they frequently train them on that normal flight. So that they spend, you know, requirements to be in the simulator and get that abnormal flight training. Right, so we had this laundry list of job titles that would have the occasion to be communicating in and out of the control room. But there are issues with that because if an operator has made an acquisition recently and they've identified, I need technicians as someone who's on the list for team training, but in the assets that they acquired, those people don't have that job title, it's something else.
So especially after assets are acquired, make sure the range of job titles that need to be trained, you know, include all the people. And operators, they have to account for new hires when they come in, they have to be trained. A lot of people overlook, they say, well, we're going to train new hires that have a job title that fits team training. But they don't account for someone who has changed jobs within the company into a role that requires team training.
They're not a new hire, they might have been there for 20 years. But how they handle new hires and people who are transferred into those kinds of positions will be handled the same. So after you have this list of job titles that need to be trained, somebody has to go about taking those job titles and putting names behind them because you don't train a job title, you train a person. So all those persons who have got on a team training list from their job title have to be trained.
It's not just a representative sampling of somebody, it's everybody that's on the list. And according to the FAQs, each of the team training sessions that are held should include at least one controller. And if you think about it, the idea of team training is from a control room perspective. So it wouldn't be good to have a team training exercise, it just had a bunch of field people in it, nobody from the control room.
Yeah, it's a very good point. Yeah, and one of the things I've heard operators ask often when they're trying to design their programs is, well, what, because there's so much training that is required, all the OQ and other kinds of training that's required. And what I hear they're asking is, well, can we take this team training and combine it with other training? And I think the answer is, well, maybe, but the key thing you have to make sure you're doing is that you're clear that what part of that training is around the control room and meeting the team training requirements that are controlled and focused.
And there's really not that much training in an organization that's focused that way. Yeah, I know some people have done that or tried to do that, but I think it becomes more of a records nightmare to keep track of who was where and who missed the tailgate session we had last week. And three of the people were there were team trained, but there's several other people from the same district that weren't there because they wouldn't been in that particular tailgate. Right.
Yeah, it's problematic. No doubt. Team training, there's no specific time frame set in the regulations for how often someone needs trained. It just says provide training.
But the pipeline operators are expected to put something in their program to identify what the frequency or repeat sessions would be. Some people have one year. I know a lot of people use three, but the state or federal inspectors can be looking for a time frame to be established and then hold the operator to what their program calls for. For a larger company, it's almost impractical to think that they have one team training session a year to cover the 30, 40 or 50 people that might be involved in four different time zones.
So they may have repeat sessions at different times, different shifts or different parts of the country to ensure they have everybody that's been identified to participate. Yeah, you mentioned the number 50. I know of at least one operator when they did their evaluation, their number was 1,500 people. They think they needed the team training.
Because in a lot of that depends on how you operate and how people interact with the control room. But this particular operator, what I call dudes and trucks, and that's male and female people riding around the trucks doing the work that's required in the field, they were expected in this operation the way they were organized to interact directly with the control room. And that radically increased the number of people that needed to be team-tranked. Yeah, that brings up a good point, Russell.
It's important that they've identified all those people to be interfacing possibly with the control room. But the control room's trying to run their businesses well. Does a company really want or have a need for 1,500 people to be calling into the control room? I don't know what the right number is, or what the percentage of staff should be on the list, or there's no rule of thumb for that?
Well, it really goes to how the company is organized and how they operate and how they delegate authority in the field, how all that works. And responsiveness is quicker when it's closer to the work being done. So, but you make a good point because that does create a whole bunch of logistical challenges when you start having a group that large. All right, so we've identified the job titles that the people we think need to be trained in.
And we translated those job titles into specific names of people who will be participating in the training. Let's talk a little bit about the actual training events themselves. I mentioned a lot of people, it's an annual event, just because of changes in shuffles in the organization. They may only require an individual to get team training once every three years.
But they have an annual event because the shuffle of people in and out and the like. And that's okay, but they just have to, they sort of keep track and make sure everybody that should be trained is training on the frequency that they have established. As far as the content of the training, maybe you talk about soft skills first. We're wanting to advance the importance to the people getting trained about personal interaction being paramount to affect a good team event for a abnormal condition or some emergency that may be occurring.
I know a lot of folks that do teamwork or team building exercises, they play games and the like that create an interaction, explaining the benefits of collaboration. I recall one where they asked the 20 or so people that were in the session, take five minutes and figure out one of the three most important things you need when the shift goes down. And then they put everybody together and discussed it. The consolidate answer of the team was a better choice of things to keep rather than any individuals list.
Thereby demonstrating the value of the team. Maybe some problem solving exercises as well, but maybe not necessarily associated with pipeline, but reporting the importance of teamwork. The second item on the content list might be scenario discussions. So an operator can think about abnormal near missed events that have occurred recently, perhaps even an incident or an accident, talk about what happened or not trying to lay blame on anyone.
But if there's an abnormal event that they eventually got passed, well, if they hadn't gone well, even an abnormal would have turned into an emergency. So talking about those kind of things gives me the opportunity to explain what went well and why it might have gone bad if the team didn't work efficiently. A company might even use events that have occurred on other people's pipelines. They might not know the details of those events, but it might give them ideas about creating a scenario.
There's lots of material and NTSB reports could be used for build scenarios. But I warn people that if you're going to create a scenario, make one realistic. If it's too far fetched, we don't want Martians invading and taking over the pump station. You've got to lose the students.
So keep it more realistic. I know some people struggle from a serial, they invite in speakers to speak on a topic and maybe not necessarily pipeline people. I can think of the local fire chief, maybe some sort of a military representative, county disaster coordinator, or maybe even the local stadium management trying to manage a big event that's occurring at the ball field and what they do to work straight to the team effort that they have to do to get things done. And if you find a speaker outside the pipeline box, it may be keep the training more interesting to the people.
We're sitting in the classroom. Yeah, it's interesting. There's a wide, the rule doesn't really specify what you need to do. It kind of gives you some general guidelines in your left to your own devices.
And the rule's pretty clear about what they want you to accomplish, more effective team operations. But not a lot of guidance. And I've seen a lot of people really kind of struggle. And they ask all kinds of questions, well, should this be one day?
Should it be two days? Can we do it in parts? Do we need to do it all together? And I think the answer to all of that is, well, any of that can work.
It's really up to the individual operator to figure out what makes the most sense for themselves. That's for sure. And ultimately, whatever they choose to do, they have to have the congealed set of material that they're using in content, identify the right people to participate and keep records. So the more distributed the process is, the harder it's going to be for them to keep a hold of all the bits and pieces to be able to demonstrate through records that they've accomplished the task.
Well, that's actually, I want to unpack that a little bit, Byron, because every time you say records, sometimes there's all kinds of different levels of difficulties with creating records. And I think training records in particular provide kind of a very unique level of difficulty, because they're across the entirety of the organization. And knowing that this individual has been trained for the job they're doing and within the timeframes required is often non-trivial. You're right.
So if they're more consolidated, the training team training exercise is easier to be to have records. But that's not going to be practical for people who are scattered all over the countryside. That's right. That's right.
And when you add the complexity of new people coming in and all people leaving and people that have been around moving between jobs and roles and all of that, it's just a complex thing. But you are required to have those records. I think I don't know who I heard in front, but basically if there's no paperwork, then the work didn't happen. That might be depending on which inspector performs the inspection.
Well, fair enough. But you get my point. For sure. So one of the things I wanted to talk about in particular is the effectiveness reviews.
I think I would make an assertion. I'd like to hear your opinion about this, that you're going to know how good your team training is by what you're collecting from the participants around the effectiveness of what you're doing. If you're having good team training, people are going to have meaningful takeaways. You surely will.
And you should have a good participation during the training as well as a metric of their engagement. A key, I guess, to getting feedback from team training or other things you may get engaged to is you want to make it easy for the participants to provide feedback. If you don't want to finish your training and ask everybody to write a two page essay on the training, that's not going to happen. But if you've put some questions or a great scale, how did this part work?
How was this topic? That topic? So making checks and exits and good and bad provides an easy way to get feedback. It's also good to leave a spot somewhere in your feedback for people to write their candid comments that you haven't orchestrated for them.
So they've got a way to add a little color in their feedback. Often, a lot of people don't include what I call the trainer's assessment. You get feedback from all the participants, but somebody orchestrated this training. So they had an eye on the participants, how much chatter, questions that they ever asked, how often were people rolling their eyes, or maybe some of you couldn't see their eyes because their eyelids were closed on occasion.
So having a trainer's assessment along with the feedback from all the participants is a valuable piece. Someone's going to have to go over all that feedback and the notes and the like that were collected from the training and that becomes one of the records. Not the only record, but one of the records that you end up with in the end. Yeah, I guess one of my key takeaways from the things I have participated in is when it's done well, people walk away feeling like it was a good expenditure of their time because they got meaningful learning out of it.
And I think the best training combines a multitude of elements. You need some soft skill training specific to interacting with the control room. You need some contextual training, and here's some rules and guidelines to follow. But it's the exercises themselves that have the most opportunity to really provide the effective training.
Because particularly if you can do an exercise where there's a little bit of a connection between the emotion of working an event, not just the intellectual exercise of working an event because it's that emotional experience that kind of causes that training to land and stay planted. Right, there's another metric I picked up over the years is that when the training is completed, you should have provided the opportunity for the participants to communicate with each other, especially those people who may talk on a daily basis and rarely if ever see each other. Team training provides a good opportunity for that. Yeah, good opportunity to build, actually build team because you're actually in the same room, relating to people and getting to know them in a way that you wouldn't otherwise get to know them.
Yeah, that's again, I think that's a great point. You know, I would think at this point, most operators have something in place for team training because it is a requirement, they need to have it implemented. What would you in your experience say is like the best practice, some of the best practices that you've seen? What are some operators doing that you thought were noteworthy?
I wouldn't ask you to mention any names, but just kind of curious what kind of things you've seen that you thought, well, that's particularly noteworthy. Well, I think that having an individual team training or session or sessions is probably more beneficial than trying to tag it in with other meetings and like that that may be going on. Abraham having to tailgate the first Tuesday of every month and the last half hour, we're gonna claim as team training. I just don't think that provides opportunity to get involved in the topic.
And having a separate session provides more benefit, I think to everybody that participates and also creates an easier way to establish some records for occurring scenarios. I think are used extensively and I think they're valuable. As long as they're not there to figure out who's at fault, that's not the object of training, is training us to see how using the team and using the team well can avoid issues or solve problems faster. Yeah, my premise around that sort of thing Byron is it's never the individuals that are at fault.
It's always something to do with the process, the procedure, the training or the tools or the systems because people will give them the right training tool systems are gonna make good decisions. It's when you have a breakdown on one of those things that you have problems. And one of the things that good team training can do is it can reveal if you have holes or difficulties or issues that you need to address in your systems. I like what you're thinking on that.
In fact, one of the things I've notionally played with is an idea, I don't have the bandwidth or the resources to do this, but I have a good friend of mine that has built a took a piece of gaming software and built a game to provide training around cybersecurity. It's really interesting, it's very well done. And I've often wondered if we couldn't build some kind of game to support team training. We have a lot of focus in our industry on simulators that replicate the system that we operate, but I wonder if we couldn't get something meaningful by designing a game that would provide training and kind of give us a fullness of the experience.
I wouldn't see why not, it sounds like a very valuable topic for someone to figure that out. Well, maybe there's some pipeline or working in a garage and I'm playing trying to figure that out right now, you never know. And also, you don't mind, can we talk about records a little bit here? Yeah, absolutely.
Well, I could make a smart remark and say I don't really want to talk about records, but I do think it's necessary. Well, you know, if there's no records, it probably didn't happen. That's right. So after these sessions, first thing you've got, I've got a list of the kind of things that ought to be able to be presented.
If someone's challenging a company about their team training process and their off, first thing, what are the dates? When did the team training sessions occur? You know, maybe the most recent one or the one before that or the like, maybe you have multiple sessions and different parts of the country, we're trying to arrange for covering different schedules. Now for each one of those sessions, what was the agenda?
Maybe it's been the same for the last three or four different sessions, but nonetheless, what's the agenda for those individual sessions? What was the content? What was it? No, not just the January 17th.
It was the afternoon of the January 17th, one to five o'clock or something. What are the training materials that were used? You've got a couple of power points, you know, a video, someone put a scenario together that you used during the session. So maybe you've got the piece of paper that sets up the scenario, kind of, you know, those kinds of training materials that were used during the session.
We're all starting the job titles that you're trying to account for to get trained. We mentioned operations, data text engineers, IDEs, regulatory staff or others, and the actual names of the people who were in training, represent of those titles. So that might be a roster for you intended to be there, but now we want to know who was actually there. Not just who was invited, who actually participated.
So that we know that the operator knows that there's some people that were invited, but for some reason they weren't there. And then part of the record needs to demonstrate what you did to follow up on those no-shows. They need to get accounted for, maybe, you know, somehow in the next session, or maybe they're not in the same job anymore, but the record should demonstrate that the no-shows were accounted for. And then lastly, on my list here is taking actions based on those effectiveness findings that we talked about a few minutes ago.
So that set of materials should all be packaged up for each one of the team training sessions that was held. So once you have that record created, is there any other than having it to support an inspection, is there any other value or use of that record that would be warranted, or might be an example of the best practice to really get the value out of spending the effort to do the team training? Well, for sure, what actions an operator had to do to follow up on the participants, were they engaged in the effectiveness findings? Each one of those has the potential of changing the content, the sequence, or the duration of the next meeting that's gonna happen, based on the outcome of effectiveness and all the materials that were used this time or the time before.
Yeah, so, yeah, I mean, I think that's a pretty comprehensive, kind of walk down of what's necessary for team training. I think the thing that I have taken away is it's really quite valuable when it's done well. I would also say that, and this is an opinion, I don't know that I have any data to back this up, but at least in my experience, I would say the things that are done less frequently, but more deliberately and in person, tend to provide more value, because the real value comes from getting everybody in the room, doing the training, working the exercises, doing the debriefing of the exercises, and I mean, that's harder to do, it's more expensive to do, but certainly I think that it's more valuable to do. At least that would be my takeaway.
I think you had a direct conversation with the fellow that you work with on a daily basis, that maybe the team training was the first and maybe the only time you ever see this fellow, would you talk to him on the phone every day? Because he's out in the field of cranking valves and switching tanks for things that you need to have done to keep the pipeline running. Right, right, exactly. Well, this has been excellent.
Like we said at the beginning, we'll put all this together in a nice little package on the website, so if anybody's looking at their program or wants to get some thought as to, have I got it right, I need to review or improve it, you can use this and hopefully this will be a benefit. So again, Byron, thank you very much for joining us. I always appreciate your insight, you're just a wealth of knowledge on these topics. So thank you again.
Glad to get out there and talk to you again soon. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode of the Pipelineers Podcast in our conversation with Brian. Just a reminder before you go, you should register to win our customized Pipelineers Podcast at Yanny Tumbler. Simply visit pipelinepodcastnetwork.com and enter yourself in the drawing.
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I'll talk to you next week. Bye.