Schlumberger is a leading global digital solutions provider, deploying groundbreaking technologies to enable performance and sustainability that are crucial for the global energy industry and their customers.

Schlumberger started on its cloud journey in 2016, resulting in the industry-leading DELFI* cognitive E&P environment, where we moved the oil and gas E&P (exploration and production) lifecycle into the cloud. The E&P industry is highly regulated, so to manage the risks associated with handling customer data, the preference was for on-premises systems.

To update these systems, typically an annual release cycle was used, with one major release, followed by a series of smaller updates. It is vitally important that studies of assets are comparable over time, so that different E&P strategies can be compared. The annual release cycle supported this well, as it provided long-term consistency. The software product development governance strategy used a fixed set of phases with stage gates between each and an agile iterative development approach within each stage. For each release, a formal ceremony with senior management was held, to review the release-ready criteria and the stage’s results prior to approving the release. This strategy worked very well.

With the move to the cloud, there is the need for continuous delivery and continuous compliance. With deployments happening on-demand, the existing governance strategy did not fit with the cloud-based ways of working. We will describe how we developed and rolled out a new software development governance strategy called season-based governance (SBG) for use by all our cloud-hosted products. SBG is a governance process that supports high alignment and high autonomy and has the notion of a set period (season), which is independent of the product release cycle to deliver value to our end users as frequently as we wish.

This is enabling us to build, deliver, and operate on-demand the cloud-hosted DELFI E&P workflows securely in all geographies.

We will cover the guiding principles, how this supports the DevOps ways of working, and how we incorporate end-user feedback at all stages of the development cycle. We are driving our software delivery and operational performance capability improvements by focusing on the DORA metrics. We will also describe the tooling ecosystem to support this, how we are upskilling the organisation and discuss the challenges of changing the organizational mindset.