Prior to joining Stratos, LLC, Ted Coonan worked at Shell Oil Company in a variety of manufacturing assignments for 33 years. During his last 6 years at Shell, Ted served as an internal consultant providing support to various Shell operations. He developed special expertise in the areas of turnaround effectiveness, unit reliability, and operational effectiveness. Ted developed a Turnaround Effectiveness workshop that helped site management develop a strategic scope of work with related turnaround procedures and practices. These workshops are structured learning events that utilize cross-functional teams to challenge traditional approaches through gaining greater clarity on such key areas as unit performance premises, risk management, and intended consequences. The output is a greatly enhanced turnaround implementation plan. Typical Turnaround Effectiveness workshops have resulted in cost savings of $500,000 to $1,500,000 in return for an investment of $20,000 to $30,000.

Ted’s Project Risk Assessment work focuses on achieving clarity around the risks inherent in a capital project or technical support activity in comparison to the risk tolerance of the impacted business and/or sponsoring managers. These assessments provide a structured process that allows project engineers to engage in a reflective dialogue around project or venture premises and the risks presented to those premises by underlying design decisions. The assessment is qualitative rather than quantitative in scope, facilitating its use by technologists not skilled in statistical methods.

Ted’s approach to Unit Reliability Studies utilizes a structured review process that enables a plant’s staff and/or that of an allied location to conduct a preliminary assessment. Outside consulting support is then provided in areas such as RAM (reliability/availability/maintainability) analysis, root cause analysis, and risk analysis as indicated by the preliminary assessment.

Ted is also experienced in the area of Transition Management.  His consulting approach there focuses on the critical human aspects of transitions to new organizations and technologies. Another area of Ted’s expertise is fact-based, structured “Look-Backs” that provide detailed critiques of turnarounds and similar projects with emphasis on critical, fact-based performance factors versus the traditional "what we did well, what we didn't do well" techniques.

Prior to becoming a Shell internal consultant, Ted worked for 28 years in Shell operations management, manufacturing support, and engineering support. He served as operations manager over a variety of chemical and refinery processes for approximately 20 years at six different manufacturing locations. For two of these assignments, he served as transition manager responsible for the consolidation of operating departments through the mechanism of process control upgrades and control room consolidations. Ted also provided staff level support in the integration of business and manufacturing strategy for several business ventures and provided mechanical engineering support to plant projects and maintenance activities.

Ted Coonan received both his Bachelor and Master’s degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Notre Dame. He is a co-author of “Manage Plant Modernization Projects ‘Humanistically’” – Hydrocarbon Processing, May 1993 – Strobhar & Coonan.