68 DESIGN PERSPECTIVE Leading the way By Daniela Herget, Cruise Quality Consult A good project manager has an essential role to play in cruise outfitting projects, guiding a team to meet overall objectives and turn great design into successful projects by ensuring work is completed on time, within budget and in a sustainable way Managing a cruise project requires a lot of background knowledge of the industry, from International Maritime Organization regulations to maintenance requirements and onboard operations. Designers who don’t have this kind of specific knowledge can end up finding out that the beautiful design they’ve created can’t be built or maintained efficiently onboard the ship, or maybe discover that their preferred materials aren’t allowed onboard in the first place. This is why project managers are essential. We work very closely with owners and designers to help them make a compliant, functional, sustainable and aesthetically pleasing design, and, depending on the designer or owner’s preference, we often write the specifications from their design renderings and drawings. A great project manager needs to be a strong leader and decision-maker, who has extraordinary organisational skills, technical expertise and effective communication skills. It’s also important to be cool under pressure and possess highly tuned stakeholder management skills. I’ve been called in several times to troubleshoot a design project with a short deadline, and it’s vital to remain calm in those situations to align the different perspectives of those involved and get the job done on time and within budget. It is important for a project manager to develop a good plan and then stick to it as much as possible. These types of cruise projects are so complex, particularly because they involve people both from the interior and technical sides, that everything needs to be planned out ahead of time and coordinated to avoid disruption. For example, my interior team can’t work in the corridors when another team is working there on the cabling in the ceilings. As the project manager, I need to make sure that everything is included in the plan. It also helps to be somewhat clairvoyant to foresee possible challenges around the corner this enables me to create contingency plans. If a change is unavoidable, effective communication to the entire project team is key! Planning is especially crucial for the approach I take on my projects, and this is demonstrated on the successful Lean Interior outfitting methodology I developed for this purpose. We took inspiration from the Lean manufacturing of a car assembly line and translated it into a cruise context. Instead of the car moving through the factory, it’s a group of workers moving through the cabins, which I call ‘the train’. These workers will have the same task in every cabin and move on to the next one approximately every 20 minutes, doing the same thing as they move through each of the cabins. Streamlining the process with highly repetitive tasks throughout the project reduces the amount of time and materials wasted while also removing a lot of stress and complication. This makes the work Photo: Daniela Herget Herget has made efforts to select more sustainable materials across her cruise projects
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