People you can Trust: Connor Boylan

In this series, we're giving you an insight into the people that make RockWave the trusted partner that keeps our clients coming back for more. They are the people you will work with on your seismic project, so it helps if you know something about them before you start. Break the ice, so to speak. Don't forget to collect your RockWaver bobble-head at the end.

1)      What was your first job and did you learn anything that you still use today?

First job at 16 was a waiter in an Indian restaurant for a couple of years. It was really good food, but we were in a small village and it was almost like too high quality a restaurant for everything else that was there - like a pretty basic Chinese and an equally basic chippy that were the majority of options. But then you had this one curry house that's probably twice the price and everything cooked from scratch.

The expectations were notoriously high, given the price. But… the timekeeping in the kitchen was always an issue. So, half my job was managing the expectations of people waiting for their orders, where they'd be told it'd be ready for 7:45 but half an hour later and they’re still waiting!

And then the chef… I'd go in to ask him how long it would be. He’d say “5 minutes” but it didn’t take me long to grasp that it would be nowhere near that. I could tell like, how far through the curry was that he was cooking, so I had to kind of balance this with keeping the impatient customers happy.

Generally, it was pretty good. If they were complaining, they'd always start it with, “we know it's not your fault, but...”

I'd like to think here (at RockWave) we're a bit better at sticking to our estimated timelines.

2) What specifically about RockWave appealed to you, and what keeps you here?

Well, when I applied to RockWave, I'd been about 8 years at a big international processing company and I'd really enjoyed it, really learned a lot, got a lot of very good experience, worked with different people, clients and different datasets. So, it was a great experience, but I think I was ready for a change.

What appealed about RockWave was I think it being much smaller. So instead of feeling like a small part for very big machine - where maybe you can have some influence quite locally, but you’re quite disconnected from what another business division is doing. You’re kind of told what's going to happen in terms of company strategy, you know, things like that. Whereas there is an appeal at RockWave that you can just regularly speak to everyone in the company. We're pretty open in discussions about strategy, what's going on, how we're doing, what we could do better. So, that personal aspect appealed - having a bigger stake, if you like, in what the company is doing, appealed - and that has all been true. So I have enjoyed that.

3) We love feedback at RockWave, have you ever had feedback from a client in your career that has really stuck with you?

Not really advice, but a comment that stuck with me.

It was a bit annoying, actually! The acquired data on the project wasn’t good at all, and the client agreed, but we spent a lot of time processing it. Two years in fact!

Unfortunately, despite our efforts, the quality wasn't great in the end, the Imaging just wasn't very good.

Then, after two years, the client just said, "Ohh well… crap in, crap out!"

I couldn’t disagree really, but still, it stuck with me!

4) When you’re working on seismic projects, what does “doing a good job” mean in practice?

There was a good example of that on my current project. We've been, we're working on a very large data set. I think it's around 5 billion traces. I think it's the most we've ever processed here. And as part of our initial data review, we found some issues is the input data related to bad navigation information.

How we react to things like this is hugely important for the project and service given to clients. We have to quickly identify…

How widespread are those problems?

How many of those 5 billion traces are affected?

What happens if we drop them?

Can we make do with the ones we have?

Armed with the full picture, you can decide with the client what the best course of action is - because it can be a big delay embarking on finding a fix for only 1% of problematic traces.

Then there was the large RVO project we delivered alongside Arup, BGS, Inosys and SolidGround. That was a great example of an integrated project and the goal was to deliver AVO compliant processed gathers to do elastic inversion on for soil properties.

What I think went well in that, was we all got together regularly for weekly meetings to communicate our side of the project - the data processing. We delivered a short fast track product that was given to the inversion company and they were able to run a seismic inversion test early on, give us feedback on how that was looking, which then guided our main processing. We were able to refine the processing directly based on the inversion results. We designed new workflows to ensure consistent behaviour of the data across full angle range. That led us to get a very good result that I’m really proud to stand behind.

5) Do you think a project like this, with lots of specialist companies teaming up together, would have delivered to the same standard 10 years ago, before video communication stepped up to the next level with MS Teams?

Probably not. Would have been a lot harder, like, to do group data reviews.

If you try to do everything by building big PowerPoints, sending by e-mail and then getting feedback on e-mail, like it's very ineffective.

Or, loads of travelling across different countries for a weekly meeting; doesn't really work either, so...

We’re probably in the midst of a big shift in how in how the industry works, because you can you could be a small company, be specialist in one aspect, but team up with other companies who are specialists in their areas but still operate as a cohesive unit – like a sort of single entity.

Pretty cool, really.

6) Can you think of any standout examples of a time outside geophysics when you experienced exceptional service.

For some reason, as I haven't thought about this for years, this popped into my head. I was Inter-railing with a friend. I think it was our last summer holiday whilst at uni, when we mainly did Eastern Europe cities, and we were on this leg through Croatia. The most rural leg we'd been on.

We're on this bus trying to get to an Airbnb that my friend had organised near Plitvice Lakes National Park.

This was a really nice national park. It has these big waterfalls and lakes and stuff. Different than all our other city spots, but it was cool.

It was weirdly cold for the time of the year on the day we arrived, and pouring rain. We were on this bus between two cities with loads of travellers and we got dropped off in what seemed like the middle of nowhere. All we could see through the rain were just fields. My mate was convinced it was the right stop, but the nearest house was a long walk away, so we start trudging along the road as the bus disappeared.

We got soaked, it was freezing. The only thing that kept me going was speaking to Scott about how much I wanted a nice warming Grappa. We’d had one earlier on our trip and it was all I could think about. I think I even said, “I'd love it if we got there and they had Grappa.”

So about half an hour later we arrived soaked and freezing. The owner, who clearly felt sorry for us, already had lined up on the table in front of us, two grappas!  He told us get them drunk, go have a shower, and we could sort out the check-in later.

So that was, truly amazing service. So appreciated.

I don't know what the takeaway from that is that we could use with RockWave… but I suppose we've got our Turbine Grease gin…  so we could offer that out on projects or something?

7) Desert Island Velocities: If you had a week of velocity picking on a desert island, what one audiobook or podcast and what one album/artist would you bring?

I don't know if I want to share my musical tastes on LinkedIn, like why does anyone care? Don't they just want to know I'll get them seismic they can trust?

Haha, tough question though. I mean, manual velocity picking?! I hate those kind of repetitive tasks. So my first thought would be to try and come up with like an automated picking flow in a tomography rather than spend a week doing it.

But in all honesty, I’m not a big music fan… hope that won’t put any of our clients off?!

But I do listen to podcasts, so I’d probably choose a sports podcasts, ‘606’ or ‘The Rest is Football’, something like that.

There is also ‘The Chipping Forecast’ on BBC that's pretty good. And then I listened to one that was really funny, Chasing Scratch. It's these two "Average Joes" who, I think they're about late 30s, decide to start a podcast when they had a handicap of about 12, then set themselves a mission of getting to scratch.

Read Connor's RockWave profile here.