Getting mobilisation right on major renewables projects

Every major renewables programme has a mobilisation plan. Very few have one that reflects what actually has to happen to get a named individual from accepted offer to productive work on site or offshore. The plan usually stops at contract signature, and the gap between that and a person turning a spanner is where the schedule quietly bleeds.

This matters more in renewables than in most sectors, because so much of the work is weather-dependent, vessel-dependent and campaign-based. A week lost mobilising a commissioning technician is not a week lost. It can be a missed weather window, a vessel day at full rate with an incomplete team, or a turbine that misses its handover slot and takes a berth in the following campaign.

Mobilisation is a process with a critical path

Treat mobilisation as a mini-project and it becomes tractable. For an offshore wind scope, the chain typically runs through offer, contract, right to work, medical, survival and safety training, client and site induction, competence verification, PPE and equipment issue, travel and accommodation, then vessel or heliport allocation. Each link has its own lead time and several have hard dependencies.

• Offshore medicals and fitness-to-work assessments — appointment availability drives this, not the candidate
• GWO modules and refreshers, and BOSIET or FOET with CA-EBS where the transfer method requires it
• MIST or client-equivalent safety induction
• Chester step or equivalent fitness testing where the client mandates it
• Competence verification against the client’s own matrix, which is rarely the same as yours
• Vessel berth or heliport allocation, which is finite and booked well ahead

The individual items are unremarkable. The problem is that they are usually run in series, started late, and owned by nobody in particular. Run in parallel with a named owner and a tracked date each, the same chain compresses dramatically.

The four failures that cost the most time

Across the programmes we support, the same four things account for most avoidable delay.

Certification assumed rather than verified. A CV says GWO current. The certificate expired six weeks ago, or covers three modules where the scope needs four. Verifying at shortlist rather than at mobilisation costs nothing and removes the surprise entirely.

Medicals booked after contract. There is no reason to wait. Once an offer is accepted, the medical can be booked in parallel with contract issue. This alone routinely saves two to three weeks.

Client induction treated as a formality. On large programmes, induction slots are scheduled, capped and sometimes fortnightly. Missing one is not a day lost, it is a cycle lost.

Logistics disconnected from resourcing. The team that hires and the team that books berths, flights and accommodation are frequently in different organisations with different systems. When they are not talking, people are mobilised to a location with no bed and no seat on the transfer.

On a campaign-based scope, mobilisation delay does not compound arithmetically. It compounds against the weather window — which is why a fortnight lost in the office can cost a month on the water.

Build the pool before you need it

The single biggest lever is starting earlier than feels necessary. Long before a scope is confirmed, you can identify the population, verify tickets, understand availability windows and know who would need what to be deployable. When sanction lands, you are releasing people against a date rather than beginning a search.

This is where returning workers are worth a great deal. Someone who has already worked your scope has current inductions, a known competence record, established travel arrangements and no learning curve on your procedures. Keeping that population warm between campaigns — genuinely warm, with real contact and honest forward visibility, not an annual newsletter — is cheaper than re-sourcing every season.

What to put in place

• A mobilisation tracker with one row per person and one column per gating item, visible to client and supplier alike.
• Named ownership of each gate, with escalation when a date slips rather than when it is missed.
• Certification verified at shortlist stage, with expiry dates recorded and monitored against the deployment window.
• Medicals and training booked in parallel with contracting, not after it.
• Induction slots block-booked against the resource plan rather than requested individually.
• Logistics represented in the same weekly call as resourcing, so berths and beds move with people.
• A standing review after each campaign asking, honestly, where the days went.

None of this is sophisticated. It is administrative discipline applied early, by someone whose job it explicitly is. On a major renewables programme that discipline is worth more than almost any other resourcing intervention — because the people are usually available. Getting them deployable on time is the hard part.