By Jeroen van den Hurk – VBH Managing Director and CEO
How do you manage multiple large projects while continuously improving your working methods, keeping track of your progress and ensuring high-quality on-time delivery? How do you make sure your people are properly trained so they apply new ideas quickly and effectively?
At VBH, our operational team developed their own stage gate process from the ground up. This process allows us to deal with several projects at the same time while continually enhancing ourselves, tracking our status, coaching our people and guaranteeing timely delivery of first-rate services and products.
We feel that this approach strikes the perfect balance between flexibility and order. As a supplier of the integrated AVIT system onboard superyachts, we know the challenges of building new yachts. This immense endeavour – providing work of superb quality by many teams working alongside each other to challenging delivery schedules – is not for the faint of heart.
An added challenge is the fact that the scope of a build can change as progressive input from the owner’s team requires yards to commit to changes while construction is ongoing. This is both exciting and taxing, as it’s not always clear what the impact of changes on the work of the suppliers involved will be.
Over the years, VBH has developed a working method that allows us to adapt to the desired build process. Some projects need to be executed strictly according to contract, while others require a more flexible approach. We stay in close contact with yard and owner teams to ensure that each project is executed according to their wishes. The final product we work toward is always the same: a wonderful yacht, a happy owner and on-time delivery.
Our stage gate process was developed by our own people. We felt that this was the only way to harness the full extent of the lessons we learned from years of participating in the building of superyachts. We have literally grown with the market, and we wanted to capture all this formal and informal knowledge, including all the many small things that ultimately have a huge impact. This resulted in VBH developing its own process instead of implementing someone else’s methodology. In fact, this approach is one of our core assets, and we deploy it in all our major projects.
New project members quickly pick up on the language we use and the predefined steps and stages we go through. This is a reflection of the way we work – or better yet, of the way we work together.
As the stage gate process was created by the people in the projects themselves, it could be quickly and enthusiastically adopted across VBH. It continues to incorporate lessons learned from all our experiences. Each new project teaches us ways to fine-tune and tweak the process and makes us aware of the seemingly small things that have big effects. We are continuously charting the many reflexes our senior project managers have built based on intuition and experience. We know how important the little things are to the magic of a well-executed project.
We have learned so much from this wonderful and exciting industry over the years, and love being able to continually optimise our little part of the superyacht experience!
