Restructuring a North Sea upstream organization to align with net-zero ambitions
An organization-wide spans and layers review provided a North Sea operator a clearer way to realign roles, teams, and decision rights with an evolving net-zero portfolio.
Starting point
In late 2019, a global energy company became one of the first oil and gas majors to commit to net-zero emissions by 2050 and to shift its upstream business from volume to value. Its North Sea joint venture with another major provider needed to translate that shift into how the business was structured and led in the UK.
At the portfolio level, leadership was sharpening its view on which assets would remain core and which might be divested or decommissioned. The organization, however, still reflected a pre–net-zero era: legacy reporting lines, multiple layers between decision makers and the front line, and role definitions built for a larger, more growth-oriented portfolio.
The joint venture needed to understand whether its current structure, spans of control, and decision rights matched the upstream business it expected to run over the coming years. It also needed a practical view of what that would mean for roles and teams as the portfolio evolved, while protecting safety, regulatory compliance, and critical operational knowledge.
Approach
The operator engaged a strategy and operations team to assess the existing organization against the evolving strategy, redesign the operating model, and build a workforce transition view that leadership could act on. The team included Bhuvan Maingi, who is now at Strathen Group, acting as the on-site consultant based in Aberdeen, Scotland.
The work began with an operating model diagnostic. The team mapped the end-to-end structure of the North Sea organization, including business units, functional groups, and shared services. They documented spans and layers across key parts of the organization, identifying where there were too many levels between senior leaders and asset teams, and where spans of control were either too narrow to be efficient or too wide to be effective.
In parallel, the team worked with executives and functional leads to define design principles for the future state. These principles reflected the company’s direction of travel: focus on value over volume, disciplined capital allocation, late-life asset management, and growing expectations on emissions performance. The principles covered accountability for asset outcomes, integration between Operations and HSE, and the balance between central functions and asset-level autonomy.
Using the diagnostic and design principles, a future-state organization blueprint was developed. This included:
- Rationalized layers to reduce unnecessary hierarchy
- Clearer grouping of assets and functions to match how the future portfolio would be managed
- Re-aligned reporting lines and decision rights so accountability for safety, cost, and emissions sat with clearly identified roles
- Defined interfaces between Operations, HSE, Projects, and Commercial to reduce handoff friction
The team then translated the blueprint into a workforce transition view. Role maps showed how existing positions would move, merge, or phase out as the new structure came into place. Redeployment opportunities into priority assets and emerging low-carbon initiatives were identified, alongside redundancy hot spots where mitigation options were limited. HR and line leaders were involved throughout to ensure feasibility and compliance with local labor requirements.
Finally, the proposed structure and transition view were summarized in an executive pack and a simple implementation roadmap, setting out the key decisions, phases, and risks to manage during the change.
Rather than tweaking individual roles, leadership stepped back to ask whether the whole structure still matched the upstream business they planned to run under a net-zero strategy.
Outcome
The engagement gave the joint venture a clear, evidence-based view of how well its existing organization matched its evolving upstream strategy. Leaders could see where layers had accumulated over time, where responsibilities were blurred, and where the structure no longer reflected the future portfolio.
The org blueprint provided a concrete target state. It showed how to simplify decision making, clarify who owns what, and group teams around the assets and value streams that mattered most. Instead of debating structure role by role, executives had a coherent design anchored in agreed principles.
The workforce transition view turned that design into practical implications for people. Redeployment pathways into critical roles and priority assets became visible, helping leadership plan to retain and grow key capabilities. Potential redundancy hot spots were identified earlier, allowing more thoughtful planning and engagement with affected teams.
The operating model and spans-and-layers work became a reference point for subsequent planning cycles, informing later structure decisions and providing a method the joint venture could reuse as its portfolio and net-zero commitments continued to evolve.
For upstream leaders, the shift was recognizing that delivering net-zero is not only about portfolio and projects, but also about whether the organization’s structure and decision rights match the strategy.
This experience continues to guide how Strathen Group tackles decarbonization in heavy industry, combining emissions intensity and abatement economics with organization design so portfolio choices and people moves serve the same net-zero trajectory.
