Episode Overview
What does it take to keep a billion-dollar project running on the latest version? That's the question of this episode. Leanne Allgaier has spent her career on the owner's side of major capital projects (gas fields, pipelines and refineries, for companies like BP and Phillips 66), running document control: the discipline that makes sure every engineer, contractor and regulator has the right information at the right time. Across the hour she dismantles the file-clerk stereotype, names the “ready, fire, aim” trap that dooms late-starting doc control, makes the ROI case on the levers a project director is paid to care about, teaches you to hear the “noise” of an information system going wrong, and lands on AI, career on-ramps, and the checklists (plus pizza) that get a team through dump-truck days.
Not clerical work
Her definition carries the hour: the most updated information, easily accessible by the correct audience, at any moment, from an agreed-upon single source of truth. “Simply stated, but maybe not so easy to achieve.” ~4:05
Owner-side, asset-tested
Gas fields, pipelines and refineries: BP work up the North Slope, the BP Cherry Point refinery in Blaine, Washington, and a Phillips 66 stint at the Ferndale refinery, all named on the show. ~2:20
“It's happening now”
Natural-language search and verbalize-it reporting are already shipping in OpenText and M-Files, accelerating skilled document controllers, not replacing them. ~45:40
A written companion to the released episode, built from the verbatim episode transcript. Everything quoted below was said on the record; quotes are lightly condensed for readability (false starts, fillers and transcription glitches removed, meaning untouched), and timestamps are approximate (to the transcript's minute markers), so they may drift slightly against your player. Leanne speaks in a personal capacity. Biographical details come from her public LinkedIn profile and the episode itself. Photos: the BP Cherry Point Refinery, an asset named on the show (~2:55), from the air (2021 USDA/NOAA aerial imagery, public domain) and from the dock (2023, by Ewkada, CC BY 3.0), via Wikimedia Commons.
Episode Timeline
The conversation as it actually unfolded: nine chapters across 64 on-the-record minutes, following the show's four-act arc. The strip below maps each chapter's share of the runtime; timestamps are approximate. Click any block to jump to its chapter.
Act II is the engine room: six chapters and roughly 48 minutes on the mechanics of the craft, before the advice acts land the career path, the survival kit and a book.
The Circuitous Route
The welcome, and a career origin story that starts in newspaper production on Apple Mac IIs and ends running doc control on billion-dollar owner assets.
Doc Control 101
The definition, the life of a P&ID, why it's not an admin duty, where the function should sit, and the scope rule that keeps it from swallowing every Word doc.
Ready, Fire, Aim
Why doc control belongs in pre-planning, the blank-slate playbook, tool tiers, procedures as the agreed-upon playbook, and earning compliance with empathy.
The ROI Case
Cost, schedule, quality, risk: the failure chain from an outdated drawing to paying twice, plus how a doc control team expands and contracts across phases.
Listening for Noise
Good doc control is quiet. The noise ladder, the access trap, least privilege vs speedy access, the one document to keep at the ready, and advocacy by graphic.
Vendors & Bad Systems
Forensic science across partner boundaries, reputation as the real vendor filter, and why a badly implemented system still beats going manual.
To Mars and Back: AI
The rocket-ship question, answered from the present tense: natural-language search, verbalized reports, and accelerate-not-replace.
The Way In
Business analysis as the on-ramp, projects vs operations temperaments, and the helping-people mindset the craft actually runs on.
Pizza, Checklists & the Close
Surviving the dump-truck days: checklists as safety nets, protected heads-down blocks, The Checklist Manifesto, and where to find Leanne.
Who carried the mic
A guest-forward split, measured by word share across the full conversation (the show's intro and outro voice-over excluded).
The Guest · Leanne Allgaier
Leanne's route into document control was, in her own words, circuitous: newspaper and magazine production in the late nineties, just as print jumped from typeset to desktop publishing, then a 1998 move home to Alaska and a technical-writer job at an IT consulting firm serving oil, gas and utility clients. From there her public profile traces a quarter-century through business analysis and information management: designing the document control program for BP Exploration Alaska's Pipeline Renewal Program, coordinating regulatory training for 600-plus people at one of BP's largest natural gas fields, running project information management (document control, interface management, action tracking) on a greenfield oil project on Alaska's North Slope, and finally overseeing vital records as Document Systems Administrator at the Phillips 66 Ferndale refinery. She retired to Anchorage in January 2024, so this hour draws on the whole arc, start to finish.
“If you've got good document control, you don't hear a lot of noise. The most updated information is easily accessible by the correct audience at the correct time, with very little fuss.”Leanne Allgaier · on the show, ~26:50
Career journey
Credentials & craft
- Education
- BA, Japanese · University of Washington. Languages: Japanese (limited working proficiency).
- Top skills
- Consulting · Business Analysis · Project Management, per her LinkedIn profile.
- Systems delivered
- Learning, Work, Asset, Customer-Information and Document Management systems, implemented across oil & gas, government agencies, and water and electric utilities.
The territory
- Side of the table
- The owner's side: the party that has to live with the asset, and its records, for decades after the contractors go home.
- Named on the show
- BP work up the North Slope, the Alaska Railroad and Alaska housing among the consulting-era clients (~2:20); the BP Cherry Point refinery, Blaine, WA, and the Phillips 66 Ferndale refinery: “a great group of people” (~2:55).
- Find her
- LinkedIn: /in/leanne-allgaier-2734399. Her on-air invitation: “the best way would be on LinkedIn… and the name is German, for those who think it's French” (~1:03:50).
The Host · Orion Matthews
Orion is an award-winning programmer, entrepreneur and technology executive who has spent the last decade in the engine room of major capital projects. He founded Queryon in Washington, D.C. in 2015 with a focus on data analytics and software for the construction industry, starting with bellwether client BP, whose project-controls solutions his team deployed globally, from the North Sea to Azerbaijan to Houston. Today he's a recognized expert in PMO data analytics and project-controls reporting, serving billion-dollar portfolios for owners including BP, Santos, Balfour Beatty and Turner & Townsend, a regular speaker at major industry conferences on AI and analytics in capital projects, and the host of this show.
Why this pairing works
- Shared history
- Per both public profiles (not discussed on-air), Leanne spent 2006–2008 as a Sr. Business Analyst at Design-PT, the Anchorage software company Orion founded and later sold. The familiarity in the systems exchange (“I think it was you who actually said…” ~15:50) has history behind it.
- Shared logos
- Queryon's bellwether client was BP, whose project-controls solutions Orion's team deployed globally; Leanne ran document control on BP and Phillips 66 owner assets. They've worked the same side of the same kinds of projects.
- One source of truth
- Orion builds the analytics layer PMOs read; Leanne governs the document layer underneath it. Both crafts live or die on the same thing: information the project can trust.
Beyond the PMO
- The builder’s arc
- Founded Introspect Software out of high school; built and sold Design-PT (acquired 2015). His software has run from McMurdo Station to aircraft carriers, with write-ups in Scientific American, CNN and Maxim, and a BP Helios Award.
- The runner-and-shoe caution: picking a platform at the Nike store doesn't make you a runner: tools don't make the program. ~14:50
- “You need to couple the principle of least privilege with a principle of speedy access”: his tech-side rule for why locked-down orgs frustrate their own projects. ~29:55
- Form over function for technical disciplines: good design changes how technical work lands, even when nothing technical changed. ~36:10
- The economics rebuttal to AI job fears: when the price per unit falls, consumption rises: efficient doc control may raise demand, not cut headcount. ~48:50
- The book pull: The Checklist Manifesto. Pilots with 20,000 hours still run checklists, and surgery adopted them for a reason. ~1:01:45
The Circuitous Route
Orion's welcome frames the guest (owner-side document control, gas fields to pipelines to refineries) and promises a true 101: “we're gonna take it easy and start from a one-oh-one.” Then Leanne rewinds to the late nineties: newspaper and magazine production, right as print made the jump from typeset to desktop publishing. A move home to Alaska turned graphics into technical writing, technical writing into business-process mapping, and process mapping into the niche she would own.
“From technical writing I graduated to mapping out the business processes… and then I eventually found my niche as someone who could implement doc control programs, from both a system and a program perspective.”Leanne Allgaier · ~2:10
- The pivot point: printed media shifting “from being typeset to being produced via desktop publishing programs, on Apple Mac IIs, to be specific.” ~1:10
- 1998: the move back to Alaska, and a friend's tip that became a technical-writer job at an IT consulting firm serving oil, gas and utility clients. ~1:30
- The Alaska client list: BP up the North Slope, the railroad, Alaska housing, “those sort of clients, really kind of across the board.” ~2:25
- The Lower 48 chapter: the BP Cherry Point refinery in Blaine, Washington, and a Phillips 66 stint, “a great group of people at the refinery in Ferndale.” ~2:55
Doc Control 101
Orion names document control “crucial but often overlooked” (overlooked, he suspects, because it's misunderstood) and asks for the 101: what is it, and how is it different from clerical work? Leanne answers with the definition the rest of the hour keeps returning to, then proves the point with the life story of a single engineering drawing.
“Doc control, when it's done correctly, is to make sure that the most updated information is easily accessible by the correct audience at any moment, and it should come from an agreed-upon single source of truth. Those goals are simply stated, but maybe not so easy to achieve.”Leanne Allgaier · ~4:05
The P&ID test
A piping and instrumentation drawing exists to reflect conditions in the field: cycles of reviews, changes and approvals just to get the facility built, then decades (“or even centuries”) of re-verification as the field changes. Multiply by thousands of documents and the versions to track become innumerable. That's not filing. ~4:40
Where it should sit
On projects, she's seen it most effective under project services, reporting to the project services manager, with access to everyone in a document's lifecycle. On the operations side, she reported to the pipeline technical authority, who owned the regulatory relationship with the Department of Transportation. ~7:05
- Why it's not an admin duty: “An admin already has a full-time job… this task is really best left to specialized doc controllers that understand the lifecycle and how to manage it.” ~6:10
- The org-chart answer, qualified honestly: it varies (sometimes IT, sometimes engineering), but project services is where she's seen it work. ~7:00
- The scope rule: version control decides. Engineering documents and formally distributed procedures go in the system; meeting minutes (“static content that happened on a static date”) can live on a SharePoint or shared drive with minimal risk. ~9:30
Ready, Fire, Aim
The timing argument, delivered from experience. Doc control belongs in pre-planning, before the deluge, because that's the only moment you can still learn the document types, the audiences and the access model before you have to serve them. Leanne has lived the alternative, and she has a name for it. From there: the blank-slate playbook, the tool tiers, the procedures that hold it all together, and the delicate art of earning compliance when someone's yelling about money.
“I've been on projects where doc control was introduced well into execute. We call this the ready-fire-aim approach: you're creating the structure for your program and simultaneously managing a lot of documents, under a time crunch. It is not ideal. It introduces risk, and in the end it costs way more than if you would have introduced it early on.”Leanne Allgaier · ~11:40
The blank-slate playbook
First, the document types: engineering documents mean concurrent engineering to manage. Then, who needs access: inside the firewall, or external contractors (with IT in the room). Only then the tool: a shared drive or SharePoint means process-heavy, manual, more people; an enterprise system (Documentum, now OpenText; Aconex; PIMS; Omega 365) lets you automate the agreed process. ~12:20
Then write it down
“You're making these decisions, agreeing upon processes, then you write them down in a procedure and you train your users.” Procedures list the consequences of shortcuts, arm doc controllers against deadline pressure, and (because they're controlled documents themselves) evolve in a formalized, communicated way. ~14:20
- Orion's runner-and-shoe caution: leadership making a shopping list of “Documentum, PIMS: pick one” is standing in the Nike store thinking the shoe makes the runner. ~14:50
- Leanne hands the line back: “I think it was you who actually said: the tool is only as good as the discipline of its operators. And that's very true.” ~15:50
- What procedures are for: “This is the agreed-upon playbook. This is what ensures that we're all singing from the same sheet of music”, with the risks of not following it written down, so a pressured doc controller has something to point to. ~16:15
- Carrot and stick, answered with empathy: “Humor helps… but really what it is, is saying: I'm not here to make your life more difficult. We're on the same team. Let's work together.” And laying out the A-B-C risks without turning it into a catastrophe speech. ~18:20
The ROI Case
Orion keeps her on the spot: make the case to a project director for a substantial, project-life investment in a function most write off as a cost with no upside. Leanne's answer runs the four levers (cost, schedule, quality, risk) through a single failure chain, then the conversation prices the team itself: how big, how it flexes, and where the people go when the project becomes an operating asset.
“Document control has a direct effect on all of it (cost, schedule, quality, risk), and the consequences can be highly visible when the practices aren't followed… Doc control really delivers your return on investment, even though it may not be immediately obvious to you.”Leanne Allgaier · ~20:25
The failure chain
An outdated drawing goes out → a module gets built to the wrong spec → “now we're behind on the schedule and we're paying twice to have the same thing done.” And if the wrong-material bolts stay in? Quality becomes risk: “a structure or piece of equipment could fail, and you could involve injury, or even death, to field personnel.” ~20:45
Sizing the team
It depends on the tool (manual means more people) and the phase: a recent project fabricating in Canada and Malaysia meant enormous submission volume (“a lot of in and out”), then a taper as the project closes. Flexibility is the design goal, and yes (Orion asks; she confirms), consultants help balance the curve. ~22:40
- The expand-and-contract pattern: as modules go operational, doc controllers move to the operations side, where the SOPs and engineering drawings now live, and field discrepancies drive updates. ~24:40
- Orion's synthesis, confirmed on-air: a one-time setup investment in pre-planning, a define-phase surge for the influx, then a balanced taper toward handover. ~25:30
- The bloopers-reel moment: a sentence collapses mid-flight, Orion declares “I'm leaving that in, that was too good,” and Leanne laughs it onto the record. The episode's warmest twenty seconds. ~24:20
Listening for Noise
How does a project director (or an engineer who just suspects “this is not working for me”) audit doc control without being a doc controller? Leanne's answer: listen. Good document control is quiet. Bad document control complains: first that documents can't be found, then that access is missing, and loudest of all when something gets built from an outdated drawing. The longest chapter of the episode is the diagnostic toolkit: the noise ladder, the access trap, the one artifact to keep at the ready, and the graphics that finally get management to act.
“If you've got good document control, you don't hear a lot of noise… The more noise you have, the more it is an indicator that document control is not going in a great direction.”Leanne Allgaier · ~26:50
Troubleshooting the quiet way
Can't-find complaints: verify the documents sit in the proper hierarchy with the correct attributes, then work out whether it's the system or operator error: users who don't know the metadata that would surface what they need. Access complaints: re-align on who's supposed to have access; projects are dynamic, and contractor sets change mid-stream. ~27:15
Orion's corollary: least privilege needs speed
His tech-side rule: the more you lock down access, the faster you must be able to grant it. Orgs that only get better at locking down breed frustration and workarounds. Leanne's answer belongs on a wall: “Make your security permissions as nimble and dynamic as your workforce.” ~29:55
- The loudest noise: outdated drawings become an unusable build, “this is where your project director is really gonna notice.” The fix routes back through procedures and the single source of truth. ~29:10
- “Verify that everyone's pulling from the agreed-upon single source of truth, and not from an outdated folder they have squirreled away on their C drive.” ~29:40
- The at-the-ready artifact for a quick audit: work process flows. Different documents have different lifecycles; a flow makes that visible. It's her number-one tool for showing management what doc control does and why the headcount exists. ~32:30
- Advocacy under leadership change: one graphic beat months of explaining, “this is where we're at; if we make this change, this will happen… and your metrics will look like this.” Management has bandwidth for about three things; “don't do death by PowerPoint.” ~34:40
Vendors, Reputation & Bad Systems
Major projects are executed across vendors, partners, divisions and owners, and a partner's doc control becomes your problem the moment they distribute an outdated revision, or ask you to run their reports for them. This chapter covers the forensic reality of multi-party information, how vendor doc control actually gets weighed (reputation, not prescription), and the salvage question: badly implemented system, or no system at all?
“Sometimes I feel like a forensic scientist on some of the projects I've worked on, finding out how something happened. That's time you don't need: figuring out a problem created by somebody else.”Leanne Allgaier · ~37:40
Reputation is the contract
Can you write good doc control into vendor contracts? “I don't know that you can be that prescriptive.” Cost weighs heavy, but mostly it's reputation (“here in Alaska, people know all the players”), plus familiarity with the vendor's systems (“oh, this organization uses Aconex, we've worked with it”). Doc control weighs in on RFQs when it's asked. ~39:00
Take the bad system
Given a badly implemented Documentum or Aconex versus bare SharePoint, she'd leverage the bad system: “any automation that I can leverage will put me in a better position than having to do everything manually.” Circulating a document to twelve reviewers by hand doesn't scale: “the time is overwhelming.” ~41:10
- The dependency you don't want: vendors who don't track their own submissions “rely on me to run reports for them to say: this is what you sent me.” ~38:10
- The cautionary tale: a shared-drive start was feasible under 200 documents, then “quickly grew out of control”, and the missing data standardization and inconsistent document numbers bit hardest at migration time. “That really bit us.” ~42:30
- On naming standards: “It's funny. I find a lot of naming conventions are based on the inadequacies of a system,” equipment names stuffed into titles because the attribute had nowhere else to live. In Alaska, shared project history keeps naming views aligned; published industry standards fill the rest. ~43:55
To Mars and Back: AI
“Strap in. I think we're gonna take a rocket ship and go to Mars.” Orion frames the AI question with his own enterprise observation (lots of talk, little action, big systems moving slow) and asks how the tidal wave hits doc control in five to ten years. Leanne moves the timeline on him: it's not five years out. Then the jobs question, answered without hedging.
“I'm seeing it have more and more impact, and not five years down the road. It's happening now… It's a subject worthy of its own podcast.”Leanne Allgaier · ~45:40
Two wins already shipping
Seen in OpenText and M-Files, which are building AI into their products: natural-language search (no SQL, no pre-populated dropdown templates, just “I'm looking for a document that is this, this and this”) and on-the-fly summarization and reporting: “you can just verbalize it, and there's your canned report.” ~46:00
The jobs answer
“AI is going to accelerate, but not replace, and certainly not for many, many years. There are just so many nuances, and until all of those nuances are verbalized and recorded, you're still gonna need the human perspective.” ~48:00
- Orion's economics rebuttal to the doom scenario: as the price per unit of a good falls, consumption rises: if doc control gets super efficient and highly useful, “I think you would actually see demand increase.” ~48:50
- What gets easier, in the host's recap: search, summarization, and basic metrics and reporting: the exact pain points the noise chapter diagnosed. ~49:20
The Way In
Back from Mars, “landing at a university.” Having just dispelled the no-career-here myth, Orion asks how a student or career-changer actually gets in. Leanne's answer is unusually concrete: the on-ramp is business analysis (mapping processes and determining requirements) because it opens doc control and half a dozen adjacent fields at once. Then the self-assessment: who thrives in project doc control, who belongs in operations, and why both are legitimate answers.
“Anybody wanting to get into document control should really start with business analysis… Once you understand how to map processes and determine requirements, you're setting yourself up for a number of positions: it's a really good foundation, and you're not just limited to document control.”Leanne Allgaier · ~51:10
Projects: fly it while you build it
“You're flying this airplane at the same time you're building it… I thrive on change, and that's what made document control interesting for me.” For people who like standing programs up from the bottom, watching how they run, and refining them, project doc control is the niche. ~53:30
Operations: the groove
Brownfield facilities run on stable, repetitive process: “I will take this stack of 300 documents and process them, with the correct naming… that's their jam.” Same craft, different temperament; the trick is knowing which one you are. ~54:30
- The field grew up around her: as a business analyst years ago, “they never understood what I did, and now it's an everyday conversation… a definitely accepted field.” ~50:30
- Certifications exist (usually under the overarching project-management umbrella), though she names none: “I'm not familiar with that space; I really have come up a different path.” ~51:25
- Why the foundation matters now: more programs, more applications, more technology than ever, “but in order to drive to the correct technology, you really need to be able to understand your processes, and how to make these tools work for you.” ~52:20
- The people side: shorthand with some users, hand-holding for others, gratitude either way, “you really have to have a helping-people mindset,” and North Slope work satisfies the social ones. ~55:30
Pizza, Checklists & the Close
The stress chapter. Orion names what he's watched from the outside (doc control teams staffed right until a demand wave crashes over them, too sharp to hire for, no time to train even if you could) and asks how she manages the moments you just have to bear down and push through. Leanne's survival kit is disarmingly simple. Then a book gets raised, contact info gets shared, and the hour lands warm.
“Sometimes somebody figuratively backs up a dump truck and gives you a thousand documents in one submission. Something that I have found, besides pizza, that gets me through these times: checklists.”Leanne Allgaier · ~58:45
The checklist as safety net
Her procedures end in a literal checklist, the detailed process summarized into checkable boxes: “Yep, I did it… wait a minute, I didn't do that.” Under overwhelm, it's confidence you're doing everything and a reminder when you're not. ~59:30
Protect the long block
Her team pattern for the crush: three doc controllers devoted to heads-down work for four hours of the day, one designated for ad-hoc questions and escalations. Orion ties it to switching costs: you can't have focused time while answering the phones. ~1:00:40
- Orion's book pull: The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande, on why pilots with 20,000 hours still run checklists, how aviation's habit reached surgery, and why “humans are very bad at estimating how much they need a checklist.” His verdict: “I am in love with checklists.” ~1:01:45
- Where to find Leanne: LinkedIn, “and the name is German, for those who think it's French.” She promises replies: “whether I can help you or not… I will get back to you.” ~1:03:50
- Orion's exit note: “I feel much more inspired about what a cool profession it is.” ~1:04:10
In the Checklist Manifesto riff, the aviation and medical particulars (daily flight counts, surgical-outcome comparisons) are recalled from memory on-air (Orion says so himself, including on the author's name). Take them as directional color rather than sourced statistics; the book itself is the primary source.
The Big Ideas
Four ideas carry the episode. Sketched here the way a document control room would whiteboard them.
Strip the episode to one drawing and it's this: a major project generates documents from everywhere, and exactly one function stands between that firehose and the people betting billions, and lives, on the contents.
controllifecycle · version control · access
correct audience, any momentcost, schedule, quality (and safety) protected
The systems question, drawn as a bridge. Every serious project buys a document platform; the episode's point is that the platform only works when the operating discipline on the other side holds up its end.
What the tool gives you
- A controlled repository
- Automated review & distribution workflows
- Search, reporting & audit trail
- Documentum/OpenText · Aconex · PIMS · M-Files · Omega 365 · SharePoint
make the runner”
What only discipline gives you
- Defined document lifecycles
- Version & revision integrity
- Procedures written down, and trained
- A single source of truth people trust
The ROI question, drawn as the four levers Leanne names on-air. “Admin cost” is the wrong frame: each quadrant is a place where controlled documents either save money or quietly burn it.
Rework is paying twice for the same work: the classic price of building from a superseded revision.
“You've just built a module, but you didn't build it correctly; now we're behind on the schedule.” Hours hunting the current version count too.
Version control is quality control: the field builds exactly what engineering last approved, nothing older.
Wrong-material bolts from an outdated drawing: “a structure or piece of equipment could fail, and you could involve injury or even death.”
Her diagnostic, drawn as an escalation. Document control health is audible: the quieter the project, the healthier the information, and each rung up the ladder is a louder, costlier signal.
The most updated information reaches the correct audience with very little fuss. No news is the KPI.
Search complaints. Check hierarchy, attributes and metadata, then work out whether it's the system or operator error.
Access complaints. Re-align on who should have access; contractor churn makes this a moving target on any dynamic project.
The loudest noise: rework, cost, schedule; “this is where your project director is really gonna notice.”
Bookshelf & Links
Everything named in the episode, plus where to find the people and the show.
Raised on the show
- The book
- The Checklist Manifesto · Atul Gawande. Raised by Orion off the back of Leanne's checklist habit (~1:01:45): “a great read for anyone that loves checklists… I am in love with checklists.”
- AI in doc control
- OpenText and M-Files: the two platforms Leanne has seen “developing AI in their products”: natural-language search and verbalize-it reporting (~45:55).
- The wider stack
- Aconex, Documentum (now owned by OpenText), PIMS, SharePoint and Omega 365: the document systems named across the hour (~13:50 and throughout).
- The assets
- BP North Slope work, the Alaska Railroad and Alaska housing clients; BP Cherry Point Refinery (Blaine, WA); Phillips 66 Ferndale Refinery (~2:20–3:10).
The episode
- Listen
- Episode page (Podbean) · Apple Podcasts · Spotify
- The guest
- Leanne Allgaier on LinkedIn
- The host
- Orion Matthews on LinkedIn · Queryon
- The show
- themajorprojectpodcast.com: new conversations from the people building projects over US$1 billion.
- The Bookshelf
- The Major Project Bookshelf: every recommendation from every episode, with the reasoning in the speakers’ own words.
Banner photographs of the BP Cherry Point Refinery, Whatcom County, Washington, an asset named in the episode (~2:55): aerial view (2021), USDA/NOAA National Agriculture Imagery Program, public domain as a work of the U.S. federal government; and the tanker Alaskan Explorer at the refinery dock (2023) by Ewkada, licensed CC BY 3.0, both via Wikimedia Commons.
Quote Bank
The best on-the-record lines, gathered in one filterable place. “Highlight” marks the lines most worth scrubbing back for; quotes are lightly condensed and timestamps are approximate.
The Circuitous Route 0:00–3:15
- “Printed media was making a shift from being typeset to being produced via desktop publishing programs, on Apple Mac IIs, to be specific.”
- Highlight“I eventually found my niche as someone who could implement doc control programs, from both a system and a program perspective, and set up the maintenance of both once the software was implemented.”
Doc Control 101 3:15–10:30
- Highlight“Doc control, when it's done correctly, is to make sure that the most updated information is easily accessible by the correct audience at any moment, from an agreed-upon single source of truth. Simply stated, but maybe not so easy to achieve.”
- “Multiply this by the thousands of other engineering documents, and the decades, or even centuries, that a field is operated… you have innumerable versions of this document to monitor and track.”
- “An admin already has a full-time job… this task is really best left to specialized doc controllers that understand the lifecycle and how to manage it.”
- “Where I've seen it be most effective in a project structure is to have it sit under project services, reporting directly to the project services manager.”
- “It really comes down to what has to have revision control. Meeting minutes don't: they're static content that happened on a static date, and they can reside on a SharePoint or a shared drive with minimal risk.”
Ready, Fire, Aim 10:30–19:25
- Highlight“We call this the ready-fire-aim approach: you're creating the structure for your program and simultaneously managing a lot of documents, under a time crunch… It introduces risk, and in the end it costs way more than if you would have introduced it early on.”
- “Doc control should really be part of the pre-planning stages: it allows your document controllers to understand what documents will be managed, and to put the proper processes and systems in place prior to the deluge that will inevitably follow.”
- “You can leverage the power of your system to automate these processes as much as possible. And all the while, this is very important, you write them down in a procedure and you train your users.”
- Highlight“I think it was you who actually said: the tool is only as good as the discipline of its operators. And that's very true. That's why I emphasize the procedure.”
- “This is the agreed-upon playbook. This is what ensures that we're all singing from the same sheet of music.”
- “I'm not making up these rules because I don't have anything better to do and I want to ruin your day… We're on the same team. Let's work together.”
The ROI Case 19:25–26:15
- Highlight“Document control has a direct effect on all of it (cost, schedule, quality, risk), and the consequences can be highly visible when the practices aren't followed.”
- “You've just built a module, but you didn't build it correctly. Now we're behind on the schedule, and we're paying twice to have the same thing done.”
- “That's where you're introducing risk: that a structure or piece of equipment could fail, and you could involve injury or even death to field personnel.”
- “Doc control really delivers your return on investment, even though it may not be immediately obvious to you.”
- “It can expand and contract depending on the phase that you are in.”
Listening for Noise 26:15–36:45
- Highlight“If you've got good document control, you don't hear a lot of noise… The more noise you have, the more it is an indicator that document control is not going in a great direction.”
- Highlight“Verify that everyone's pulling from the agreed-upon single source of truth, and not from an outdated folder they have squirreled away on their C drive.”
- “You need to couple the principle of least privilege with a principle of speedy access… what I see a lot of orgs do is they're great at locking things down, and then they get worse at granting access.”
- “Make your security permissions as nimble and dynamic as your workforce.”
- “Work process flows… have proved invaluable for helping management understand what the people in document control are doing, why you have as many people as you do, and how things are getting done.”
- “Don't do death by PowerPoint. Really just succinct: when this happens, this problem is created. If we change this to this, it will solve that problem, and your metrics will look like this.”
Vendors & Bad Systems 36:45–44:45
- Highlight“Sometimes I feel like a forensic scientist on some of the projects I've worked on, finding out how something happened.”
- “It's imperative if you want things to run smoothly and efficiently; otherwise you're gonna get noise.”
- “Most of the time it's reputation… here in Alaska, people know all the players, essentially.”
- “Any automation that I can leverage will put me in a better position than having to do everything manually.”
- Highlight“It was feasible at the beginning of the project, when you had less than 200 documents, but it quickly grew out of control… we didn't have data standardization or integrity, document numbers that were inconsistent. That really bit us.”
- “It's funny. I find a lot of naming conventions are based on the inadequacies of a system.”
To Mars and Back: AI 44:45–49:35
- Highlight“I'm seeing it have more and more impact, and not five years down the road. It's happening now.”
- “OpenText and M-Files: they're developing AI in their products… one easy win was just making searches easier, because it allows you to use natural-language searches like you do for Google.”
- “You can just verbalize it, and there's your canned report.”
- Highlight“AI is going to accelerate, but not replace, and certainly not for many, many years… until all of those nuances are verbalized and recorded, you're still gonna need the human perspective.”
- “As the price per unit goes down, consumption goes up. I would not be surprised if the inverse of job losses happens for doc control… you would actually see demand increase.”
The Way In 49:35–57:15
- Highlight“Anybody wanting to get into document control should really start with business analysis… it's a really good foundation, and you're not just limited to document control.”
- “In order to drive to the correct technology, you really need to be able to understand your processes, and how to make these tools work for you.”
- Highlight“You're flying this airplane at the same time you're building it… I thrive on change, and that's what made document control interesting for me.”
- “I will take this stack of 300 documents and process them, with the correct naming, that's their jam. They do well with that.”
- “You really have to have a helping-people mindset… if you're a social being, that's gonna be great.”
Pizza, Checklists & the Close 57:15–1:04:30
- Highlight“Sometimes somebody figuratively backs up a dump truck and gives you a thousand documents in one submission. Something that I have found, besides pizza, that gets me through these times: checklists.”
- “It's a safety net… something that will help you feel confident that you're doing everything, and remind you when you're not. This checkbox… wait a minute, I didn't do that.”
- “For four hours of the day, these resources will be devoted specifically to this heads-down work, and there will be one person designated for answering ad-hoc questions or dealing with things that need to be escalated.”
- “Humans are very bad at estimating how much they need a checklist. There's a reason that pilots who have 20,000 hours of experience flying planes go through a checklist.”
- “The best way would be on LinkedIn… and the name is German, for those who think it's French.”