Anita Oosterbeek also active at yacht builder Oceanco

Surfing the Oceanco website evokes a world of distant horizons, the vastness of the ocean and the comfort of floating palaces. Because Oceanco builds great custom seaworthy yachts. The company receives orders from all over the world. The needs of the future owner are central to this. MPM’s Anita Oosterbeek successfully supervised an acceleration operation at Oceanco, involving several contractors. In this she applied the relay principle.

Eight days a week?

In an earlier post on our website, Anita Oosterbeek talked about the three capex projects she supervised and is still supervising for NewCold: the construction of an automated cold store in Corby (England), a similar project in Madrid and a third cold store in Bucharest. And for those who then think her work week is eight days: from October 2024 to the end of April 2025, she combined those three European projects with an exciting assignment at Dutch yacht builder Oceanco. Without shortchanging either client.

Timeline securing

What the yacht will be called, only the owner still knows. At Oceanco, every yacht under construction has only a number. Who that owner is is also irrelevant to Anita and the contractors she works with. What is relevant is that the owner must have access to the ultramodern yacht at the agreed time. The timeline drawn up for this is sacred.

Such a yacht has a number of technical rooms on board. As essential as they are small. Spaces where several contractors have to have their people working at the same time anyway. This is an almost certain reason for a delay in the construction process. In October 2024, Oceanco asked Anita Oosterbeek to help secure the timeline.

‘War room’ full of drawings

Anita: “Then when you start such an assignment, you analyze as quickly as possible what is going on. Why is it that the timeline is at risk? Then, like a doctor after many questions and investigations, you make the diagnosis and then develop an appropriate treatment. In the case of Oceanco, that became a relay process with “the bunker” as the nerve center. I facilitated the various contractors to make smaller objectives out of all the work they had to do in those small spaces of the ship. Those small objectives were the components of sprint sessions. We turned a room at Oceanco into “a war room” whose walls were all covered with drawings. We built a big sprint board with those small subprojects on it. Each subproject had a two-week time slot. The challenge was to accelerate by week and by contractor while resolving as many backlogs as possible.”

Commitment

“This only works when there is 100 percent commitment from everyone. On the large sprint board on the wall with a two-week timeline, the contractors themselves stuck yellow stickers on the day when they could complete their part of the sprint. They were not instructed to do something on day X, they committed themselves to it and passed the baton to another contractor after that day. Very quickly these short sprint sessions generated a lot of energy in everyone. Oceanco had the coordinating role. My role was that of facilitator and coach to achieve the goals. Because I was also working for the three NewCold projects, I could only be at Oceanco a few days a week. But very soon I learned that the contractors were coming in daily to stick new yellows on the timeline. That ran smoothly and brought a lot of focus and small and bigger quick wins.”

Relay principle

“Every contractor has a team he puts to work building the boat, the co-makers. Delays occur when those teams get in each other’s way or have to wait for each other. That’s what happens when you work in different silos, separate from each other. Because of the relay race, the contractors quickly let go of that silo thinking. There was interaction: ‘if you do this for me today, I’ll do that for you tomorrow.’ What I did there was keep an overview by asking control questions, among other things. Commitment and accountability ensured that we were able to accelerate. If you make good agreements about that and tailor the method to the client’s needs, this relay form is applicable to a lot of projects for a lot of clients.”

Seniority in project management

At the end of April, Anita Oosterbeek completed the commission at Oceanco. Not that the superyacht was launched then. Construction is still going on. But, because the method had become completely familiar and the contractors could do it all without her. The timeline was made reliable and imaginable.

“With her goal-oriented approach steering for clarity, clarity and commitment, Anita got a complex piece of work moving process-wise. This was certainly not without a struggle; with a professional but sometimes confrontational approach, a change in mentality and planning reliability was realized on specific work packages that did the project a great service.” Thus Deniz de Koningh, Project Director Oceanco.

MPM Business Navigators knows how to get a grip on complexity. That is why MPM employees are flown in. Anita Oosterbeek managed to do this for more than six months simultaneously at NewCold and Oceanco. Seniority in project management thus bears fruit.