Governance & Operations

2013 taught me to stand inside Angola LNG's operational environment. 2014 taught me to move through it, with structure and with responsibility I hadn't earned yet but was about to. I went deeper into ITIL change management, weekly Change Advisory Board reviews, peer reviews on scripts and configuration drift, evidence-based control tracking. Somewhere in there, a quiet reframe took hold: change approvals weren't delays, they were protection. Documentation wasn't bureaucracy, it was traceability.

Safety walkdowns pulled me closer to the frontline than any dashboard could. A locked-out SAP account wasn't "an IT issue" out there. It was a safety and productivity risk to someone standing on the plant floor. Without knowing it, I was also taking my first steps toward architecture: password standards, access-management routines, application lifecycle documentation that read, in hindsight, exactly like early architecture artifacts — definitions, principles, guardrails, alignment mechanisms nobody called architecture yet.

Then, somewhere mid-year, something shifted. I stopped seeing isolated incidents and started seeing patterns: the same root cause showing up under a different name, the same configuration drift, the same access issue resurfacing on a schedule. Instead of just fixing what was in front of me, I started asking why does this keep happening? That question, asked quietly and repeatedly, was the birth of an architecture lens I wouldn't have a name for until years later.

2014 in one sentence: 2013 made me capable. 2014 made me disciplined.