Holdfast Training Services Trial Blog

It seems like the last few weeks have been dominated by finance. Despite the fact that the Minox B Blower is now in offshore execute, my attention has been largely drawn into money matters surrounding my other projects. Minox is going well incidentally and, despite the work site being almost 300 miles away, I feel like I know what is going on…touch wood.

My money matters all seem to have come to a head at the same time, which is handy in a way, but is also a pain in the bum to a degree. My largest scope of work is a DSP that I have been writing over the last few months that argues for the reduction of a £25m engineering programme down to the size of a £5m engineering project. I have traction with all of the stakeholders and am on the verge of releasing the DSP into the wild, after that I will run a gate meeting with the stakeholders to confirm their buy in and then get them to sign on the dotted line. This has been a fairly epic piece of work that I picked up in the summer last year, pretty much the first job I worked on, so it will be great to see it come to fruition. The DSP is around 5000 words all told and with appendices is about 120 pages…not that word counts are important or anything “ahem”.

The biggest issue I have had is the continuation of the Clair Coolers project which, for one reason or another (maybe another time for this explanation), has blown through the agreed budget of £6.7m but only completed three quarters of the original scope. I hasten to add that I am not responsible for any of this overspend, but I am responsible for securing the £1.8m required to get the project back on track. Work continues, but we are on dicy ground until my new funding comes in. I am now at the stage where my Financial Memoranda has been reviewed and is pending release to the VP operations and the the big dog Trevor Garlick.

On a much smaller scale, the issue I was having last month with temperature transmitters is still ongoing. This debacle has identified that the purchase order covering the work has been closed, so I have had to work with WGPSN to deliver a new estimate for the remaining work in the project and get a new purchase order set up. These are just delays which take me closer to the 12w gate without having a rock solid work scope. I am not convinced that this project will stay in the plan at this point.

Away from the financial stuff, last week I got off to Germany to visit the fabricator Hans Leffer. These guys fabricate pressure vessels and proprietary drilling and piling technology amongst other things. It was a fantastic trip, the workshop is the size of three football pitches with a huge variety of equipment for rolling, forming, welding etc a similarly large variety of materials. While I was not allowed to actually do any welding, apparantly it is really highly skilled work and 6″ thick titanium block is really expensive, I had a good nose around. Sadly due to the comercial nature of the work, I’ve only got stock photos at this stage, but it gives a good idea.

Pressure vessels at the Leffer works

Tube sheet welding on an STHX (not me!)

Some really big bits of titanium

The inside of a medium sized separator vessel

The trip built into my thesis work well as I am analysing the performance of the heat exchangers they supplied to BP last year. It also showed me how the other half live, fancy hotel and hosted the whole time by Hans Leffer himself. I am not looking forward to a return to the frugalities of JPA!

The thesis is going well at the moment, but these posts are likely to be few and far between for the forseeable future. There just isn’t enough time in the day and something has to give!

In other news:

Corine is getting really big now with only about 6 weeks to go. The race is on to complete the thesis before trouble arrives! The Scottish weather is lovely at the moment, wall to wall rain and sleet. I tell a lie, we did have one sunny day last wee and we got out of the house for a bit, but it really is quite dreech at the moment. On the plus side it is now light in the mornings again!

And some Dilbert!