Project Management

• The Key Issues Involved
• Project Planning
• Monitoring Progress
• Project Team Management
• Problem Solving
• Professional Yacht Owners Management
• The Pocket Guide to Successful Projects
• Ask an Expert
• Contact Us

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Project Management The Key Issues Involved

Projects are a fact of Yacht Building organisational life.  Traditional functional management processes are increasingly insufficient as a means of responding to the pace of change in the increasingly size and complexity of Yachts on the market. 

However, project management differs from conventional functional management in a number of ways, presenting a project manager with a number of distinct challenges :

Planning - By their nature new and ever bigger Yacht projects often involve taking organisations into unfamiliar territory.  As a result, planning is of paramount importance if a Yacht Building company is to gain any form of control over events.  The various tasks that need to be completed in order to deliver the goal of the Super Yacht need to be understood in detail along with the resources they will require.  In addition, sources of risk and uncertainty need to be determined with contingency plans developed.

Control - However detailed the planning and however rigorous the risk analysis, when the plan is implemented, the complexity involved means that events are likely to differ from what was originally forecast.  Systems need to be in place to rapidly identify any such variance so that corrective action can be taken in time to keep the project on course.

Team Formation - A Yacht project plan naturally needs people to implement it.  One way in which project management differs from traditional functional management is that the team involved is typically brought together solely for the purpose building a New Super Yacht and is then disbanded afterwards.  They may never have worked together before and will often come from different parts of the business.  Ensuring that the team contains the right people who work together effectively and who are committed to the project is critical for success.

Problem Solving - Once a project is underway, the majority of a project manager’s time is likely to be spent dealing with problems.  The ability to identify problems early, determine how to address them and take timely decisive action is an indispensable aspect of successful project management.

Project management differs from conventional functional management in a number of ways, presenting a project manager with a number of distinct challenges.

Project management is thus a complex business requiring the project manager to attend to both ‘hard’ technical factors such as planning methodologies and ‘softer’ people ones such as team building and motivation.
Williamson-Consulting offers its clients the benefit of its long experience of managing and running successful projects to provide them with a trusted partner to support them in dealing with these issues effectively so that their projects stay on track and achieve their goals.