The oil and gas industry developed some of the most rigorous project controls standards in the world. Not because people in the sector are especially disciplined by nature but because the financial scale of major capital programs meant organizations had strong incentives to invest in controls systems that actually worked. Sohaib Wasif Canada career runs directly through that tradition at two of the most demanding organizations in the sector.
Shell and ExxonMobil both have internal capital project controls methodologies that have been refined over decades. Working inside those organizations on real programs is an exposure that calibrates what good looks like in a way that most controls practitioners never get.
Shell: Early Career and Foundational Learning
The early career work at Shell involved contributing to upgrades and extensions of facilities. That doesn’t sound dramatic. But foundational project controls experience on facility upgrades is where you learn how scope gets defined and then drifts. How cost estimates for construction work get built and where they’re most likely to be wrong. And how the relationship between the engineering function and the controls function either works or doesn’t.
I had a conversation once with someone who’d spent fifteen years in project controls and had never worked for a company with serious internal controls standards. His benchmarks were all wrong because he’d never seen what good actually looked like. That’s the value of early exposure to organizations that take the function seriously.
ExxonMobil: Where the Standard Gets Set
Working at ExxonMobil on a multi-billion dollar infrastructure program is a different experience than working at most organizations. The controls expectations are specific and non-negotiable. Cost forecasts have to be bottom-up and reconcilable to the approved budget through a clear chain of approved changes. Schedule logic has to be maintained with actual progress data. Risk registers have to be quantified not just documented. Sohaib Wasif Canada work in that environment set a standard that has informed everything since.
THE EXXONMOBIL STANDARD is not about bureaucracy. It’s about producing cost and schedule information that is actually trustworthy enough to make real capital decisions from. That’s a different frame than producing reports that satisfy a governance requirement.
Husky Energy and Pipeline Controls
Husky Energy represented a different kind of oil and gas project controls challenge. Pipeline projects have specific controls requirements that facility construction projects don’t share. Linear productivity measurement. Geographic distribution of risk. Right-of-way access as an active schedule variable. Multiple contractor interfaces across a long footprint.
The pipeline controls experience from Husky combined with the Sohaib Wasif Calgary academic background created a specific kind of analytical capability. Understanding both the financial governance requirements that come from business training and the technical execution dynamics that come from engineering training and applying that to pipeline-specific controls problems.
The EPC Perspective From Worley
Working at Worley as a Project Controls Principal and Manager on a major gas project added something that pure owner-side experience doesn’t provide. An EPC contractor’s controls function manages both the delivery of the project and the commercial performance of the contract. Cost overruns on a lump sum contract come directly out of margin. That pressure shapes how cost and schedule data gets managed and reported.
Understanding how contractor controls functions work under that pressure is useful when you’re on the owner side evaluating contractor-provided cost and schedule data. You know what questions to ask and you know which data points are most likely to be managed optimistically.
FAQ
What makes EPC contractor project controls different from owner controls?
An EPC contractor manages the project performance and also the commercial performance of the contract simultaneously. On a lump sum contract cost overruns reduce margin directly. On a reimbursable contract the contractor may have less direct financial exposure to cost growth but still has incentive to manage schedule to avoid delay penalties. Owner-side controls focus on project performance and capital efficiency without the commercial contract overlay.
What are the specific controls challenges of oil and gas facility projects?
Scope definition quality at the start of execution is a major driver of performance. Facility projects often start construction before engineering is fully complete which means scope additions during execution are common and have to be tightly controlled. Commissioning and startup sequencing creates schedule complexity in the final phase. And equipment procurement with long lead times creates schedule risk throughout execution.
How does right of way access affect pipeline project controls?
Right-of-way access is the ability to physically enter and work on the land along the pipeline route. When access is denied or delayed due to landowner issues or regulatory conditions construction on that segment has to stop regardless of the readiness of the crew and equipment. In the schedule this creates conditional logic that’s difficult to model precisely and in the cost forecast it creates exposure that’s hard to quantify because the duration and resolution of access issues is genuinely uncertain.
