Concept of Operations Development

What gets done

• Mission profiles. What the vessel is for, where, in what conditions, for how long, and what a normal day looks like.
• Operating limitations. Sea state, visibility, traffic density, range, endurance and the conditions under which you stop. Stated as limits, not aspirations.
• Human oversight. Who is in control at every point, what level of autonomy is in use, and how supervision actually works rather than how it is described in a brochure.
• Communications. Links, coverage, latency, degradation behaviour and the point at which loss of comms becomes loss of control.
• Contingency arrangements. What happens on failure, who decides, and what the vessel does while the decision is being made.
• Launch and recovery. Method, equipment, people, and the conditions that make it unsafe.
• Remote-control responsibilities and escalation. The chain from operator to Remote Master to the person who can stop the job.
• Review of an existing CONOPS against what an approver will actually ask.

What you get

A CONOPS that reads as a coherent operation rather than a collection of assumptions, in the form the people reviewing it expect. Where it exposes decisions the team has not made, you get those written down as decisions rather than buried.

How it runs

A fixed piece of work. Faster where the operation is already running and the document simply does not exist yet, slower where writing it reveals that two parts of the team believe different things. Both are common.