Managing boat projects
22 September 2013 | Port Townsend
Eric

Project management is all about managing the tradeoffs between scope (the amount of work), schedule and resources (budget) to achieve an objective. In my previous life as a project manager developing products, the objective was negotiated at the start of the project and the scope, schedule and resources were estimated. Once a project was kicked off, the focus shifted to controlling and adjusting scope, schedule and resources. This type of project management worked well for developing the second or third iteration of a type of product. You can pretty much “call your shot” and then hit the scope, schedule and resources.
I also managed another type of development that was a lot more challenging and a lot more fun. Projects with a high amount of learning, either because it’s a field new to the team or because there’s a large amount of invention are much less predictable. In this type of “discovery driven” development, the focus is much less on up front estimation, and much more on adapting to reality as it’s discovered.
The boat projects so far have been a mix of the two types of projects. Bottom paint, servicing the machinery, replacing hoses, fluids and belts are all pretty straightforward. We’ve hired some good people, and they’ve worked with me to help me come up the learning curve. We make progress on these types of projects every day, and can see the end.
The rig is more of the second type of project. Theoretically, we disassembled the rig in Annapolis, trucked it across the country with the boat, and it should be pretty straightforward to reassemble it. It was working when we took it apart. The complication is that Rover is a13 year old boat, and has been sailed extensively, mostly in the Caribbean. Rod rigging and all the stainless bits have a long life, but we’re well into the window where they need to be intensively inspected, and some pieces may need to be replaced before it goes back into service. It’s also complicated by the “opportunity” for improvements while the mast is off the boat. Back in the day, we called those opportunities “scope creep”, and they were deadly to budgets and schedules. We haven’t sailed Rover, and we haven’t sailed enough to really know what improvements are necessary or useful. It’s a learning curve, and how to set up the sails and the running rigging is an area where there are a lot of strongly held and contradictory opinions. Likely we’ll end up changing as little as possible, with a chance we’ll revisit the improvements in a year.
Chainplates are the large pieces of metal that attach the rig to the boat. They go through the deck and are through bolted to knees or bulkheads in the hull, with backing plates. They’re highly stressed and essential to holding the mast up. They’re also prone to an insidious type of corrosion, that can’t be easily detected. From my first look at the boat, it was clear that there had been some salt-water leakage through the deck and onto the chainplates. That made me suspicious, and we bought the boat knowing there might be a project lurking in the chainplates. On Friday, I removed the furniture in the boat around the chainplates on the starboard side. The good news was that it was designed for relatively easy disassembly, and I didn’t have to use a saw. The point of the exercise was actually to replace a grounding wire that was attached to one of the through bolts. The head of the bolt broke off in my hand, corroded through. The other good news is that now we don’t have any uncertainty; we’re replacing them before we go sailing. This is definitely a “discovery driven” boat project.