Examining the various components of managing an offshore operation in the cables industr y reveals the true complexities of managing projects of this magnitude. Take for example the Cable & Wireless Apollo project featured in the last issue of Subtel Forum. A complex project pulled together by Katherine Edwards and her team. If you think of the elements of a project like this it becomes clear just what is involved. The check list looks large and this is just a précis of the major elements: l Source a cable supplier
Source up to four vessels l Run a seabed survey - contractor A l Perform a burial assessment contractor B l Perform a pre-lay grapnel run l Permit beach landings in France, England and the US l And finally start laying the cable A project of this size will probably have a life cycle of two and a half years. How many people will have required access to the data? How many people will have joined and left the project in this time? How much data/information transferred l
49
between the team members of this project. Think of the amount of email. Think of the attachments. Think of the massive gain in corporate knowledge if others can learn from this project. Many of these questions I can only guess at but what we do know is that this data ends up spread around a vast number of servers in a number of companies. Emails are duplicated and attachments copied time and time again. Is this knowledge passed on to the next project or is there a repeating of the learning curve? Discussions held using email are not always stored with the main project data, indeed in my experience very rarely, meaning that when reviewing historic data there was no way to understand why decisions had been made at the time. As with many major projects in all industries the cable industry adopts the standard reporting procedure of an email with attachment being sent for example with a daily report from a vessel to the operations manager who then distributes another ten or so copies of this attachment via email to interested parties. They in turn