Under the current COVID scenario, stringent safety measures have to be adopted for minimizing the risk of contagion between workers. One basic measure is to keep a minimum safety distance between workers (or a maximum workers density in working-places and access-zones).

Consequently, the typical action-plan applied traditionally in shipbuilding for meeting a scheduled completion date (or a final delivery date), which is to increase human resources per work-zone to the maximum possible and to apply the maximum man-hours-per-week possible, is simply not feasible in a COVID scenario.

On the other hand, the policy of simply reducing the allocated work force is obviously neither a valid alternative. Instead, a new planning system must be developed for organizing the works in shipbuilding processes, concurrently protecting human safety and also due dates, specially for works on-board ships (i.e., outfitting and completion of new buildings, transformations or retrofitting of ships, ships’ repair, etc.)

Works on board ships are generally performed in spaces with limited volumes (specially for the case of modern, medium-sized vessels) being thus the free work-space a scarce resource. Therefore, a proper planning system must not only consider the specialized human resources as a constraint, but also the work-spaces, as their availability turns to be (due to anti-COVID safety measures) limited.

In these conditions, CCPM (or “Critical Chains Project Management”) is the right tool for developing a powerful planning network (scheduling not only scarce specialists; scarce vendors’ service-engineers and scarce surveyors, but also scarce working-zones) and manage it with sufficient “buffers” for ensuring compliance of contractual delivery dates.

INNOMARITIME can assist Clients for building planning networks and managing projects with CCPM methodology. If you need to update your planning system, please contact us.