Who is allowed to answer

A shell plate is opened on a Tuesday and the repair runs past the value the provisional sum covers. The rate is already in the contract. What nobody at the plate can settle is the measured quantity, and who may approve it. Yacht refit project management is the business of getting that answer back before the shift ends.

What yacht refit project management actually decides

Governance is the fourth document, after the specification, the programme and the contract, and the one nobody drafts: an authority schedule of names on the owner's side, a value against each, what escalates past them, a response time against every link. The decision is carried by a numbered variation order, raised the day the plate is exposed, priced inside a stated number of working days, signed before the trade proceeds. On the critical path, a written instruction to proceed at risk keeps work moving while the argument runs behind it.

The arrangement here is one manager and one foreman, and what the project manager holds is set out with the programme. Neither settles which of the two an owner telephones. One holds the calendar, the other the metal: a stern tube clearance reading is the foreman's answer, what it does to the date is the manager's.

Decision latency, and the trades queued behind it

An unanswered question does not cost one man standing still; it costs the trades queued behind him, and because yard services accrue on the calendar rather than on the scope, that queue is charged against days.

• A finish sample is not chosen, so joinery cannot go to final coat, the cabin cannot close, the electrician cannot second-fix. One choice, three trades.
• A valve position is not confirmed, so pipework stops at the bulkhead and staging stands another week, charged whether worked in or not.
• An equipment substitution is not approved, and the order date is the date.

Recovering that time is a clause rather than a fact: an extension of time turns on written notice inside a stated period, and prolongation reaches berth, staging and supervision, not idle yard labour, which is ours.

Managing a yacht refit abroad: four arrangements

Four arrangements are common when a yard period here is run from northern Europe, each failing in its own way.

• A resident owner's representative, who past three months pays for himself against a day rate, flights and hotel. Without a written ceiling he decides at a level nobody agreed, or relays upward and moves the latency one link along.
• A visiting refit superintendent, good for what must be judged in person and no help on the Wednesday after he flew home. The failure mode is batching: a dozen decisions in a day, several badly.
• A management company holding the technical superintendency, usual above forty metres: technical authority without commercial, so anything above the ceiling reaches a family office that does not read yard reports.
• The captain and the chief engineer, to whom workmanship against a date is delegated as a matter of course. The failure is that nobody wrote the ceiling. Name what escalates: the redelivery date, a stated value, any class item.

The ceilings and the turnaround in working days are settled in the specification; what matters here is which link has no name against it.

What a weekly report has to carry

A weekly report, a photographic record and a language of record are most of the product for a team that is not resident, a test set out before. Every line has to be checkable by somebody who was not there.

• Progress against the programme line it belongs to. "Frame 42 to 48, insert plate fitted and welded out Thursday", not "steelwork progressing".
• The variation register, each order by number and status, with the running total against every provisional sum.
• Open questions, each with the date asked and the name it waits on.
• Photographs carrying a date and a compartment reference; without both they are decoration.

The site meeting, and the line that gets written down

A site meeting is not a progress update; the report has done that. It settles the coming week in front of the people who must act, the owner's authority among them: weekly while work is active, fortnightly through a long-lead wait, daily whenever a compartment is open. The yard writes the minute, issues it inside a working day, gives the owner's side two days to correct it, and then it stands.

The floor of a Tuzla shipyard is worked in Turkish; the record is not. Verbal agreements at the vessel go wrong in a particular way: they are usually correct. A representative and a foreman agree at a bulkhead that the run goes outboard of the frame, and both are right; six weeks later the joinery has been built to the version that was written down. So a decision taken at the vessel is written the same day: a dated line, the compartment, two names.

Hold points, and the ones a surveyor has to witness

A hold point stops work until somebody inspects or approves, and owners run two kinds together. The owner's are structure before it is closed, a pressure test before insulation goes back, and the substrate before the first coat, read by an independent NACE or FROSIO coating inspector, or by the paint manufacturer's representative whose sign-off conditions the warranty. It is where the dew point log, taken hourly and handed over, becomes evidence somebody has read.

The second kind is witnessed by class or flag: tank tightness testing, thickness measurement, non-destructive testing of new steel, shaft and rudder clearances, sea valves closed and secured. What class asks of a yard is its own subject; what matters here is that these are booked rather than summoned, and that twenty-four hours is not notice. So the clause states who attends, what notice the yard owes, and when the yard may proceed on its own record.

What a yard cannot be, and what to ask for at the start

A yard cannot be the owner's technical representative and should not try. We price the work, build it and hand over the evidence for it, and cannot then judge whether a variation we raised was emergent. The conflict is structural, which is why an independent representative is worth funding on anything beyond a short maintenance period. When the instruction does not come, the find is recorded, photographed and priced, that item stops and the rest of the programme runs on.

What to ask for before she arrives:

• The two names, who covers each of them, and an authority schedule on both sides: value, escalation, response time.
• The reporting format as a sample before signature, and the variation order procedure and register format on agreed numbering.
• The hold point list, split into the owner's and the surveyor's, with notice against each.

A record is what makes any of it enforceable, and it cannot be reconstructed once the trades have moved to the next hull.

Written at the yard in Tuzla. The reporting, meeting and hold point arrangements described here are the ones we ask for and the ones we work to.