Readiness review: what to check before the vessel sails

Before a vessel leaves the quay for an offshore campaign, somebody presents a table: forty-eight items, forty-five closed, three open and all on their way to closure. 94%. The meeting lasts an hour and ends with the decision to sail.

That table answers a question – how many items are closed – which is not the one the meeting was called for. The question of a readiness review is a different one: is there anything that will not be closed before the moment it is needed? The percentage does not answer it, not even approximately.

This article is about the readiness review in the strict sense: people, documents, permits, interfaces, contingencies. Verifying equipment on the quay – calibrations, offsets, system trials – is a different check, with rules of its own, and deserves an article of its own.

Why the percentage does not measure readiness

A checklist treats every item the same way: each one is worth one box. But items do not take the same time to close. A refresher course takes a day; amending a permit from the maritime authority can take weeks, and that time does not depend on whoever is asking.

The readiness of a campaign is therefore not the average of its items. It is set by the worst item, and "worst" does not mean the most important in the abstract: it means the one that needs more time than is left. For every open item a single difference matters, the margin: the days remaining until the item is needed, minus the days needed to close it. If the margin is positive, the item is an activity to follow up. If it is negative, it is a decision to be taken now.

A percentage contains neither number.

A worked example

The figures below are illustrative – built to show the mechanism, not taken from real projects – but the structure recurs.

A geophysical campaign with 20 days of acquisition, in an area a few hours from port. The readiness review is held five days before sailing, by custom. The status presented is this:

The three open items, with the time needed to close them and the margin against sailing:

All margins are positive, and the decision to sail is consistent with the figures presented.

The problem lies among the closed items. The item "work area permit" is ticked: the permit exists, is valid, is on file. It was issued, however, on the polygon of revision B of the line plan. Seven days before the review – twelve before sailing – revision D was issued, adding six lines along a cable route variation. Four of them run partly outside the permitted polygon.

Nobody hid anything: the item had been closed before the line plan changed, and no rule reopened it. In this example, amending the permit takes fifteen days.

With the item reopened, closed items go from 45 out of 48 to 44: from 94% to 92%. Two percentage points, which nobody would notice in a presentation. The margin of the worst item, on the other hand, goes from +2 to −10 days, and that is the number that changes the decision.

What a negative margin decides

A negative margin does not automatically mean the vessel stays in port. It means the sailing decision has to state what happens to the lines that cannot yet be acquired.

In the example the four lines outside the polygon need two days of acquisition in total. If the vessel sails on the planned date, the permit amendment arrives ten days after sailing: fifteen days to obtain it, minus the five that were left before sailing. With 20 days of acquisition and two to be reserved for the four lines, these must start within 18 days of sailing so as not to lengthen the campaign. Between the expected arrival of the permit and the last useful day there are eight days.

The correct decision is therefore: sail, with a written condition. The four lines go to the end of the programme; the permit amendment has an owner and an expected date; if it has not arrived 18 days after sailing, the choice is between extending the charter and giving up the lines – and that choice is set today by whoever has the authority, not improvised on the day by whoever is on board.

It is a different decision from "sail", and nobody takes it if the table says 94%.

The fault was not in the item, but in how it was closed

The permit item had not been closed badly. It had been closed against a document that later changed, and a checklist that records only the status – open or closed – has no way of noticing.

The remedy is to record, for every closed item, against which revision of which document it was verified: "permit verified against line plan rev. B", not "permit in place". When rev. D is issued, every item that depends on the line plan reopens. In the example the item would have reopened twelve days before sailing, with a margin of −3 days instead of −10: still negative, but found seven days earlier, when there was time to chase the authority or reorder the programme on shore rather than at sea.

The objection that will come

Whoever organises the campaign will reply that bringing the review forward does not solve the problem: fifteen days before sailing, half the items cannot be closed. The crew is not yet assigned, the vessel is finishing another job, the procedures are waiting for the final version of the line plan. An early review would produce nothing but a long list of open items.

The objection is right on the facts, and it shows how the review should be run, not that it should be postponed. Fifteen days before sailing, the check is not that items are closed: it is that each one has an owner, an estimated closure time and a positive margin. An open item with ten days of margin is in order. An open item for which nobody can say how long it will take is the most useful finding a review can produce.

There are therefore two passes, with different purposes. The first, held before the remaining time drops below the longest closure time on the list, checks margins. The second, close to sailing, checks closures. Holding only one, five days before by custom, means running the second while believing the first has been run too.

What to require in the specification

• 01The closure time next to every item. Not just open or closed: how many days it takes to close and who closes it. Without that number the margin cannot be computed, and without the margin the review is counting boxes.
• 02The margin of the worst item at the top of the report. Before the percentage, or instead of it. It is the number the sailing decision rests on, and it must be the first one read by whoever was not at the meeting.
• 03Every closure tied to the revision of the document checked. A new revision of a document reopens every item that depends on it. The line plan, the programme and the personnel list are the documents that change most often in the final weeks.
• 04Two passes, with dates set by the longest closure time. The first on margins, the second on closures. Not a single meeting on a date chosen by custom.
• 05Conditional sailings written down as such. If the vessel sails with an item at negative margin, the decision states what is excluded, who closes the item, by when, and what happens if it is not closed. A condition that lives only in the meeting minutes does not reach the vessel.

The underlying point

A readiness review is not there to prove that everyone is ready. It is there to find, while there is still time to act, the item that will not close in time. A checklist at 94% says the work is almost done; it does not say whether what is missing can be finished before sailing.

Between the two there is one number per item, the margin, which almost no checklist reports and which costs very little to add. It has to be specified in advance: by the day of the review, the shape of the table has already been decided.

References

• IOGP Report 423, HSE management – guidelines for working together in a contract environment, and supplement 423-02, Guide to preparing HSE plans and Bridging documents: a bridging document is needed when all or part of the scope of work is carried out under the contractor's management system, on the basis that it meets the requirements of the client's.
• OPITO, BOSIET and FOET standards: the BOSIET certificate is valid for four years; the refresher is the one-day FOET course, to be attended while the certificate is still in date.

info@clegar.it