Keeping projects on track, on budget, and on time

How does your role contribute to overall project success?

I’m involved in every aspect of project planning and execution, which has a major impact on the final result. This includes all the arrangements with ports, tugs, and bunkers, as well as planning for transits, routes, vessel operations, health and safety, country regulations, and even weather conditions – the list goes on! Each project has a vast amount of information and individual tasks that all need to be managed and completed in the right order.

It’s important we capture learnings and insights from past projects to help streamline our processes. A key part of my role is using our collective knowledge and unique capabilities in offshore wind projects to inform operational decision making. For example, working with our Nautical and Engineering departments, we have the maritime expertise to identify risks early. Then we can mitigate potential problems, avoid delays, and use our assets and resources in the most efficient way.

What challenges do you face and how do you overcome them?

Time is often the biggest challenge. In wind farm development, there are many parts to manage and multiple stakeholders to appease. Every project is different, but what they all have in common is the amount of information to process, especially in the planning stage. This requires a careful balancing act and can throw timings out if we’re waiting for a response or working in an unfamiliar location.

Other issues depend on the type of project; installations are very different to repairs or maintenance, for example. When a maintenance project doesn’t have a designated port, we need to secure short-term quayside services. The port must also meet our operational needs and we have to comply with local regulations for our vessels and crews. That’s where our network of agents provides the local knowledge and support we need.

We are pretty good at this now and have cut years off the time to ‘first production’ (how long it takes a windfarm to become fully operational). We’re also improving things even further by updating our vessel’s management systems and mapping our requirements for ports.