Improvement

17. Sixteen common pitfalls

1. Sent without confirmation. A mobilisation letter with no requirement for active confirmation, and no follow-up of those who do not reply.
2. Certificates checked against the departure date only. Expiry mid-stay is discovered on board.
3. Verbal extensions. Agreed on the platform, never documented, dispute about compensation afterwards.
4. Information in dribs and drabs. Five text messages each carrying one detail, instead of one complete, updated mobilisation letter.
5. A change without a reason. Dates move in the plan without a word about why.
6. A reserve list that does not exist. Every sickness absence becomes a scramble.
7. Course bookings in time off without agreement. Formally possible perhaps; relationally destructive.
8. Routines that depend on a person. Everything works until the coordinator is ill or leaves, because the routines live in one person's head and inbox.
9. Silence during a delay. Personnel waiting at the heliport without updates, because "we do not know anything new".
10. Two sources of truth. The spreadsheet says one date, the email another, and nobody knows which applies.
11. Silence until the job is certain. No heads-up for three weeks, then a demand to travel out tomorrow. Uncertainty that is communicated is tolerated; surprises are not.
12. Certificate renewal triggered by an assignment. The renewal only starts when the next job appears, and by then it is too late. In short-notice operations the pool should always be green.
13. Registered with us, unknown to the operator. Everything is green in your own system, but the person does not exist or is not approved in the operator's system, and is stopped at check-in.
14. Next-of-kin information that is never verified. Recorded at hiring five years ago, discovered to be out of date during an incident.
15. Agreements that never reach payroll. The extension was cleanly documented in an email but never entered the payroll basis. The employee discovers it on the payslip.
16. Documentation that exists but cannot be produced. Everything is "documented", but spread across inboxes, old spreadsheet versions and systems that only show current status. When the inspector or the client audit asks for the history of one assignment from last year with a week's deadline, an archaeological dig begins.

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18. Measure what matters

What gets measured gets better. Useful key figures for the coordination function:

• Share of mobilisation letters sent by the deadline (for planned assignments: at least 14 days before departure, for example; for short-notice assignments: within the internal standard, for example one hour after the client's confirmation)
• Share of mobilisations with active confirmation from the employee
• Share of mobilisations with verified next-of-kin information
• No-show rate and its distribution by cause
• Number of mobilisations cancelled or postponed because a certificate or offshore medical certificate (helseattest) had expired (the target is zero)
• Number of mobilisations stopped because of missing registration or approval with the operator (the target is zero)
• Share of the pool that is "green" on certificates and offshore medical certificates at any given time
• Share of plan changes notified later than 72 hours before departure
• Number of breaches or near-breaches of the working-hour and rest rules
• Payroll error rate per trip (the share of trips that trigger a pay correction)
• Distribution of short-notice trips and extensions per person (evenness as a welfare indicator)
• Employee satisfaction with coordination and communication, measured regularly with a few fixed questions

Review the figures on a fixed cadence, monthly for example, and treat every deviation as a question about routine: which hole in the process let this through, and how do we close it?