About
Mark

Outside university I continued to work at NE, with my roles moving to estimating, job cost and control, invoicing and business administration.

After graduating and a little push for my father’s partner away from NE my interests lead me to Australia’s Mining Industry working directly for a mining owner immediately contributing as a project engineer on the establishment of a large open cut mining operation. In parallel, I continued my professional studies completing a mining degree with UNSW.

It was evident to the mining operations management team that I had sound leadership, business and management skills for young graduate and was given responsibility for delivering several multi-discipline projects with capital budgets of some US$10m.

The projects got bigger and I transitioned quickly from project engineer to project manager. Looking back, I worked very hard but knowing what I know now, I was unworthy like ‘Thor’. I did not develop and critique the project plan, identify the risks, implement controls or produce effective reports.

Skipping along the projects got bigger and what I was doing to create a structured approach was building my own suit of PM management tools. I think it was the roots of the family engineering business that took me from managing projects to managing the operations of engineering businesses that delivered projects.

I was good at achieving both and for the next decade, found my passion in large GM turnaround roles in Tier 1 major contractor companies, overseeing and delivering multiple principal contractor packages.

My business turnaround and project recovery skills were significantly enhanced by meeting and being schooled by Bill Conway, the former CEO of Nashua Corporation who in the 1980s applied Deming’s 14 principles of quality to create transformative tools and systems for continuous improvement. His work was credited with turning the US industry around at that time. I found a natural alignment with Bill and applied his approach of total quality management. Which involved, identifying, quantifying and eliminating errors, mistakes, inefficiencies, lost opportunities and waste of human talent in all we do.

During this decade of my career, my qualities and skills led to working for Robert and Jay Pritzker of the Marmon group based in Chicago. It was a business development role to assist grow their $Billion mining division to the next level. This role exposed me to large engineering operations across all mining regions of the world where I audited and benchmarked the in country organisation’s systems and performance.

In my GM roles, what set my division apart from others was I knew exactly the skills and performance requirements of every position in my organisation, not only engineering and construction, but back of house; accounting, administration and those at the front desk and when something went wrong I could dive in beside them and find a solution.

In the last of those GM roles I started an executive MBA with the Australian Graduate School of Management, and unlike my first two engineering degrees, I had rich experience to reflect on and consider. Further the learnings were meaningful and of immediate value. Undertaking this degree also informed my mind that it was time to step out and create my own companies.

They included being self-managed, fully compliant, end to end and, bolt on and detachment of high-performance complete teams. I had the ability to move between being an owner’s rep. and prime contractor and was torn between them because I loved the different challenges of both.

I left the boardroom, the coffee my PA brought in each morning and some 300 direct and indirect reports and started my own business with an employee of one, me.

That did not last very long.

I took a contract role as the project manager of the principal contractor with multiple packages and the business development role to set up and secure post build capital and maintenance contracts. That success allowed me to supply my own project leadership people.

What I had become aware of was there were more companies, than major projects that could provide continuous engagement for the tier 1 principal contractors. This resulted in them spilling not only their direct labour into the contact fringe but also the majority of their project staff.

The flow on affect was a loss of the corporate memory and organisational knowledge as it resided in the people.
With time they would secure their next project and form the project team, however the team would never progress beyond storming as they could not bed down their relationships and trust.

This is where I positioned complete ready to go hi-performance project teams who would bolt on to the principal contractor meet the objectives and detach. My role became the sponsor and PM thought partner which facilitated steep growth.

Clients included Rio Tinto, BHP, Shell and the Australian Federal Government. As a mid-size private that was nimble and fast to act on issues and gaps, my focus along my duties as the MD became building a means to transfer the proven way. By toggling between owner’s rep. and principal contractor I got great exposure to what both required.

As the owner’s rep. with the ability to develop a great constructability plan and form a budget and schedule the owner could assess their business case from, we knew the questions required in selecting the major contractors and then with the key mindset of ‘make the contractor successful’ the owner’s rep. teams did so by doing the things that set the contractor up for success and removed any road blocks.

As a principal contractor, my contract companies grew into their positioning statement of ‘self-managed’ and ‘fully compliant’ as they were cognisant of the complete requirements of the project’s owner’s rep. It was no accident that the mining operations and owners would point to my companies as being the benchmark of required performance and compliance on their mining, operations and/or refinery sites. 

This performance translated into consistent growth with the of GFC providing the opportunity to build the Project Execution Plan (PEP) war room. 3m high by 1.2m wide panels covered 50m of wall space that enabled continuous transfer of building and implementing the PEP project delivery explicit knowledge and a forum for company leaders to gather their teams and imbed the required knowledge as a belief through sharing their project war stories to transfer their tacit knowledge.

The company’s activities had progressed to delivering some 4 -5 simultaneous projects and had geographic penetration across Australia in mining, refinery and oil and gas industries.

One of the key measures of project success that continuously appears as a project objective on Ultra large projects, is no harm. A measure of no harm, that is a public record, is a company’s recorded lost time injuries. My construction company achieved the milestone of 10 years without a lost time injury. Something many thought and still believe is impossible.

An audit by British Gas on my company to learn how this performance had been achieved is best described by their summary of findings; this company’s safety systems were good, however our tier one contractors have better, but what sets them apart is they have full implemented their systems which was demonstrated through compliance from the boardroom to the coalface.

A complete worldwide commodity price crash affecting mining, minerals and oil and gas. I had actioned a strategic objective of diversification but unfortunately, that diversification saw us in all of the mining construction areas across Australia.

Prior to COVID 19 most could not relate to this type of event.

Clients cancelled contracts, suspended contracts and where they could, renegotiated contracts for under cost. My revenue went from US $7 million per month to under $2 million over night. Our fixed costs were $3 million a month and I worked around the clock to get these down and replace the lost work. I made good traction in the board rooms of new clients where the executives acknowledged meeting safety, quality and productivity targets were critical requirements to the business.

Each level of these large organisations were quality discussions until you got to the procurement department. I opened the books to demonstrate what they were asking for a pricing was less than cost and by removing resources they requested, their contract terms could not be delivered.

I had a belief I could always find a way, but with scale my fixed costs had grown and everywhere I went seemed to be a dead end. I would back out of those dead ends and regroup.

The following 12 months saw some 100 mid-tier privates close. I had stabilised the losses in that time and secured marginal contracts but the funders had lost interest and I became another to close the door.

This event changed my world and my journey took another path. For a couple of years, a very challenging and difficult one, one that tests the very fabric of one’s being.

Reflecting and where I am now, I would not want to change a single thing. It brings clarity to the things that really matter and from consciousness comes internal growth and fresh beginnings.

What is interesting when an event takes you and puts you somewhere else, is you haven’t developed amnesia, nor has your rich tacit knowledge been erased, but the environment does view you differently and there lies the challenge of the mind. How do you view yourself?

My thoughts went to what to do with such rich tacit knowledge in project delivery and as the practice of yoga quietened the mind, how to share it to bring benefit to others.

It was the timing of receiving it and I could not get it out of my mind.

I read it several times. I could relate to what was presented very well. It deals with the leadership mindsets and practices, pitched to the owner and points to important requirements, however through my eyes and experience the issues to address this global waste were only surface level explanations and certainly not a complete solution. 

Well there you have it. 

I have the knowledge, proven unique experience from the coalface to the boardroom and a strategy forming to make significant positive impact on global project overrun that is wasting the world’s resources and talent. 

I got an old white board from under my fishing shack and went to work on a plan of how to effective inform the world, the project decision makers and educate the next generation of project leaders. 

Then for the next four years using my entire career learnings, I assembled the complete boardroom to coalface, end-to-end project life cycle project deliver intelligence that addressed the deadly project sins. 

What YouTube and other similar platforms have taught us is an effectively way of efficiently transfer the required knowledge, is to visually witness the process in action. With that concept, I created an US $8 billion ultra large virtual project with a vertical slice of the organisational design that enabled a complete solution to be presented from the boardroom to the coalface. 

This process crystallised some 31 charters that appear and present the knowledge through their eyes and mind. The charters were based on real people where their personality is described.

The knowledge was then codified and structured into 10 principles that addressed each of the deadliest project sins and graphically displayed on 150 A2 size visual intelligence maps. 

The work was then tested by presenting it to my known trusted executives that were delivering ultra large projects or referred me to others undertaking the same.

The response was over whelming and even more surprising with the referrals. From politely fulfilling a request by a trusted executive to allow me one hour to present on the topic of project delivery. What would start with passive engagement, went to wanting me to stop turning pages as the displayed knowledge would trigger and align with their tacit knowledge with the hour time frame set aside. 

One comment stuck with me. ‘you have explained to us how we setup and deliver an ultra large project that manages the complete process, better than we can explain it to our clients’

The journey to identify and prevail over the deadly project sins is told through the mind of the project director and leaders at each level as they set up and deliver the US $8 billion ultra large virtual project. I hope you enjoy the read.

This frame work of knowledge, methodologies and principles provide the foundation for my consulting, advisory and auditing services described in this website.