Based on a recently published case study in ASCE’s 'Journal of Performance of Constructed Facilities'(1), Sean Brady highlights the systemic management failings that resulted in huge financial cost and significant reputational damage to a high-profile project. In 1970, Montreal was awarded the 1976 Olympics, beating bids from Moscow and Los Angeles. World politics had been in Montreal’s favour – there were concerns that giving the games to Moscow or Los Angeles would inflame Cold War ...

It was more than 2,500 years ago that the Greek philosopher Heraclitus stated that "there is nothing permanent except change". In recent years, change management has become ubiquitous in business parlance. It appears on job descriptions and is listed as an espoused competency in most organisations. Yet why is it, that if statistics are to be believed, that most change initiatives end in failure? Companies are getting a first class honours degree in project failure, with 70 per cent the ...

Unless you are a Third World dictator, eastern European strong man or Donald Trump, the old command and control style of leadership is in its death throes. A more educated, globally connected workforce doesn’t respond well to barked instructions. There is a shift away from the old heroic view of leadership, in which a ‘gifted’ individual sets a vision for the company (or indeed country,) preaches this vision, then motivates his followers to execute it. In today’s complex business ...

How many of us can say with any degree of honesty that we worked at our optimum level of performance today? At a recent workshop for Engineers Ireland, I put that very question to the audience and, unsurprisingly, only one person raised their hand. All other attendees, by their own admission, did not achieve the level of performance that they know that they are capable of and this is not unusual. Self-awareness and responsibility are key Remarkably, this applies equally to ...

Why communicate? The public is today having a far greater influence on project development than ever before. This is evidenced by the increasing number of judicial reviews of planning decisions and the number of expert commissions set up to review projects. The reality is that early, ongoing and inclusive stakeholder engagement from the earliest stages of the project is no longer a choice but a necessity to ensure the development of future large-scale infrastructure in Ireland, ...

Configuration management is a systems engineering technique first developed in the Cold War, to control US military projects. It was conceived to prevent common project afflictions of scope creep, poor documentation, and undisciplined change to a product (the output of a project) throughout its lifecycle. At its core, it creates a comparison between product requirements, product documentation, and end product. This comparison collectively reflects the configuration of the ...