A decade of accreted tooling, replaced in eleven months.
Schlumberger asked for a seventeen-month BPM rebuild. Twenty-six of us delivered it in eleven, and handed it to a non-technical team to own.
slb.com had reach. It did not have a shape.
Ten years of tooling, layered onto every business surface, with no modular spine and no coherent owner.
The brief: take the accreted tooling apart, replace it with modular surfaces, hand the result to teams that can run it without engineering on call.
Vast
Years of internal tooling layered onto every business surface.
Brittle
Workflows tied to teams that had since moved or merged.
Stuck
Non-technical owners locked out of routine changes.
Six months of slack, recovered by sequencing.
Where the original plan ran phases in series, we ran scoping, design, and build with overlapping handoffs. Each phase shipped a production surface; nothing waited for a final reveal.
Scoping
Audit of legacy tooling. Three modules selected for the first cut.
Modular design
BPM patterns, location-aware templates, report and archive scaffolds.
Build, in slices
Each module shipped as a production surface, never staged together.
Handoff
Documentation, training, ownership passed to non-technical teams.
Five modules. One spine.
Workflow engine
Job creation, templating, recurring schedules, role-bound approvals.
Location-aware templates
Surfaces adapt to user region, language, and business unit on first render.
Report library
Generated, versioned, signed-off reports with audit trail.
Archive search
Federated search over decade-old artefacts, with permission walls intact.
Owner console
Non-technical surface for routine changes. No engineering ticket required.
Twenty-six people, sequenced, not stacked.
We did not ship a platform. We shipped an owner.
When a non-technical team can configure, audit, and extend an enterprise platform without engineering intervention, the platform is done. Schlumberger inherited that posture in eleven months. It is one of the largest delivery compressions in the studio's history.
A decade of accreted tooling, replaced. Eleven months. Twenty-six people. One spine.
