Norwegian Petroleum Directorate

Who is the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate?

The Norwegian Petroleum Directorate is a governmental specialist directorate and administrative body. Established in 1972, they report to the Ministry of Petroleum and Energy. Their headquarters are in Stavanger, and a second office is in Harstad. The total number of employees is around 2o0.

Through efficient and responsible resource management, the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate is dedicated to maximizing the value of oil and gas activities for Norwegian society. In this work, health, safety, the environment, and other sea users are important considerations.

A team-based organization, the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate consists of around 70 teams. Each has a specific mandate and area of responsibility.

The challenges

Tracking changes, maintaining version history, and collaborating efficiently when writing reports

The Norwegian Petroleum Directorate (hereafter referred to as NPD) prepares reports on various aspects of petroleum activities. The Resource Report, published every other year, is one of the most important reports. It is typically about 60 pages long and contains a lot of data, graphs, images, and intricate layouts.

Sølvi Amundrud, Principal Engineer at NPD and a member of the Analysis Team, explains how co-authoring large, complex reports can be challenging because of their rotating team structure.

“Since we have rotating and multidisciplinary teams, the reports are almost always written by a new constellation of people every time. Multiple contributors are involved in each document.”

Previously, NPD wrote reports using Word, and they had trouble managing access, saving files, correctly referencing and cross-referencing, tracking version history, and getting formatting and layout right. There were frequent system crashes.

Basically, they had to deal with all the challenges that come with trying to create high-stakes documents with the wrong tools.

The need for a good version history system was particularly pressing:

“With so many people working on the same document, we need to be able to track changes. Word has a good system for this, but if you can’t open the right version, you can’t keep track of what changes have been made. It gets even messier when the document crashes and you can't save your work.”