A $20 Million Point of View

Those Who Aspire Need To Go Beyond Engineering

By almost any measure, John Grill is one of the most successful engineers in Australia. But he is by no
means an unquestioning supporter of the profession. I'm a bit of a contrarian he says.
He does not, for instance, think engineers have any special claim to leadership roles in engineering
companies. In fact, he says engineers do not have an especially good record in managing projects and have
overseen some egregious examples of cost and time overruns.

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A $20 Million Point Of View

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His own track record gives him the right to make such claims. In 1971, Grill joined Smith, de Kantzow and
Wholohan. In 1976, he reformed this entity as Wholohan Grill and Partners and established it as a small but
growing consultancy. In 1987, the company acquired the Australian interests of Worley Engineering.
The merged company was floated on the ASX in 2002. By this time it was employing 3000 people in 30
offices globally. In 2004, Worley acquired Canadian company, Parsons E&C, and since then has traded as
WorleyParsons. Grill left the company in 2012, having it up to deliver more than $7 billion in business in
2013.

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Grills observation is that the big issues that de-rail large engineering projects are often not especially
technical in nature. He argues that they often have to do with managing the divergent interests of a
multitude of stakeholders.
The development of coal seam methane resources in NSW is a classic example of the types of projects I'm
talking about. The technical issues are complex, but well understood. They can be solved. But managing
the various stakeholders the politicians, the farmers, the various environmental groups all of which have
a different viewpoint, is extremely complex, and there is nothing in an engineer's training that makes him
especially good at managing it.

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Project Management
Cost Control & Scheduling

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The lesson seems to be that engineers who aspire to higher level management have to recognise that there
is a serious lack in their education, and do something about it, he says. In particular, engineers need to
educate themselves in project or business management.
Project management used to be about cost control and scheduling, but you need much more than that to be
successful today, Grill says.

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He was sufficiently concerned about the dearth of project management skills in engineering to establish the
John Grill Centre for Project Leadership at Sydney University with a personal donation of $20 million in
October 2012.
Mega-projects worth tens of billions of dollars are the new face of the global economy, but there is a
worldwide lack of the leadership skills required to manage these projects, Professor Tyrone Carlin, codean of the university's Business School, says.

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Grill also says Australia's engineers are consistently of very high quality. He believes that while
WorleyParsons does 85% of its business outside Australia, hiring engineers locally is worthwhile.
Good they may be, but, he cautions that Australian engineers are also expensive. It's relatively easy to send
detailed engineering work overseas. It's impossible to do project management remotely, Grill says.
The result is that people who want to make a career out of technical engineering find themselves in
competition with people overseas, who charge half as much.

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www.eeaust.com.au | +61 3 9274 9600 | info@eeaust.com.au