Meet Jill

• Location: Louisiana Refining Complex - Convent, LA
• University: Tulane University, New Orleans, LA
• Studied: Mechanical Engineering (minor in Business)
• Joined Shell: June 1999

I had worked for a consulting engineering firm that was doing contract work for Shell when I was in college. From that experience, I learned that Shell was highly regarded and well respected in the industry. Then, I did an internship with Shell E&P where I found that I liked the team-oriented environment, felt welcome and discovered that the company cared a lot about its employees, especially in terms of development and training opportunities.

Once I came out of school, my history with Shell combined with the local opportunity was very attractive in that I had the benefit of several Shell locations in the local area that I could gain experience from without having to move too far.

I just started a new role, but worked as a rotating equipment engineer providing support to the Convent refinery for my first three years.

In my new role, I am a causal learning practitioner in a newly formed group for the Louisiana Refining Complex (LRC) called Reliability Services where I facilitate Level 3 investigations, which are root cause analyses at the LRC, and learn, apply and teach data collection and analysis techniques to support Reliability Focus Teams.

I basically support the Reliability Focus Teams in how to define and identify reliability threats to their operating units, as well as develop methods/techniques to provide the necessary support/solutions to deal with them.

The role of causal learning examines cause and effect relationships, and looks at the how we create the present and future processes, management systems and human behaviors that affect our performance. Currently, I'm just starting to kick off a chartering exercise for a root cause analysis study.

The sponsors of this work are different managers, from across the refinery, who are interested in learning more about how these relationships have created the performance we see on a particular operating system. They want to know what is happening and why, so that once they know the causes of the performance, they can decide how best to determine what we can do to change it.

My job is about thinking, learning, and asking questions: what happened, why, how and how do people contribute to and create situations. I enjoy doing that and it's not a typical role.