đź“Ť SDP Chapter Meeting
Date: Thursday, September 24, 2026
Time: 3:00–5:00 PM
Location: Woodside Energy
1500 Post Oak Boulevard, Houston, TX
Room: Engagement Center — Level 1, next to the reception desk
Parking & Visitor Registration:
Instructions for parking and registration at Woodside’s office building will be sent by email to all visitors after their registration forms have been submitted.
From Decision to Delivery: Practical Lessons from Four Decades of Capital Projects
Join the SDP Houston Chapter for an engaging discussion with Jess McConnell, capital-project leader, advisor, and Subject Matter Expert with RLG International.
Drawing on more than four decades in the Oil & Gas industry, Jess will share practical lessons from using—and sometimes deliberately adapting—Decision Quality and Front-End Loading to address the realities of major capital projects.
What You’ll Take Away
Decision Quality is often described as a disciplined approach to making consequential choices under uncertainty. But in the real world, decisions are made amid incomplete information, competing perspectives, misaligned partners, stage-gate deadlines, and leadership teams that may already believe they know the answer.
Jess will explore how Decision Quality can serve not only as an analytical discipline, but also as a management and alignment capability.
The discussion will include:
- Resolving partner misalignment and management deadlocks
- Lessons from situations where leadership chose not to use a structured decision process
- The relationship between Decision Quality and project maturation
- Integrating DQ into capital-project management and stage-gate governance
- Connecting risks and uncertainties identified at approval to what ultimately materializes
- Making Decision Quality more practical and usable for sponsors and executives
- Avoiding the trap of turning DQ into another compliance process
About the Speaker
Jess McConnell is a capital-project leader, advisor, and Subject Matter Expert with RLG International. His career spans four decades in the Oil & Gas industry, including corporate roles with Conoco and ConocoPhillips and assignments across the United States, Canada, Venezuela, and Australia.
Jess was first exposed to formal decision and risk analysis in the mid-1990s and became a strong advocate for the process. During the same period, he became involved in the adoption of Front-End Loading practices and later coauthored an SPE paper on their application.
Today, his work focuses on integrating Decision Quality, project maturation, capital governance, assurance, execution, and artificial intelligence into practical management systems.
Jess describes himself not as a decision professional, but as a long-time practitioner, sponsor, and occasional “abuser” of both Decision Quality and Front-End Loading—using and adapting these disciplines to help management teams align, make better decisions, and advance projects with greater confidence.
đź“ť Registration Notes:
All attendees must have an SDP account and be logged in to RSVP.
SDP Members: Click RSVP. If you are not logged in to your SDP member account, you’ll be taken to the login page. If you are already logged in, you’ll be taken directly to the event page to complete your RSVP.
Non-Members: You do not need to become an SDP member to RSVP. Click RSVP and you’ll be taken to the page to create a free SDP account or log in if you already have one. Once logged in, you’ll be taken directly to the event page to complete your RSVP.