The submarine cable industry has in recent years experienced a shift whereby legacy Project Management Offices (PMOs) of many Cable Owners have been reduced from a fully integrated, standalone implementation capability to ad-hoc performance oversight activities, requiring the increased utilization of external, subcontracted representatives at key phases of a system’s design, manufacture, and installation execution.
Representatives are increasingly utilized by prospective Cable Owners to deliver quality assurance to the in-factory and onsite management of submarine cable projects, ensuring specifications, schedules, and safety objectives are suitably realized; the aim of which is to ensure that projects are effectively managed in the field by professional, experienced, and accountable personnel, integrated within a project management delivery service.
As such, the submarine cable industry has not developed the tools nor codified the standard policies for representation during submarine cable implementation.
Topics that need to be explored by the industry include:
1. What is the minimum reporting details prospective Cable Owners require?
2. What technologies are available or need to be developed to deliver effectively and expeditiously such reporting?
3. How can decision-making from the field be better communicated, accomplished and managed?
4. How is data handled and protected for future referral and archival retrieval?
This paper identifies the implementation areas requiring development and available procedures
and technologies to remedy, as well as suggests policies that the submarine cable industry in
general and SubOptic Association in particular should consider adopting.
