Opinion piece written by Francis Norman AFIEAust CEngA, President of Engineers Australia WA Division.
One of the most important things in life is to learn from our past, to recognise our strengths and failings and to use that knowledge to build a more robust and resilient future. At the societal level, this is why it is so important for students to study history. At the professional level, this is why we need to spend time on lessons-learned exercises during and after projects and, at the personal level, why self-reflection can be such a powerful tool.
This need to continue to learn from others’ experiences is one of the principle reasons professional organisations such as Engineers Australia place such a high premium on Continuous Professional Development (CPD). Through well considered and open CPD events we can all learn from the experiences of our professional colleagues and, through that, deliver more predictable outcomes, better engineered products and a balanced future.
Historically, Engineers Australia’s CPD has maintained a strong focus on the technical engineering challenges we face, sharing the knowledge of our collective membership. Alongside the technical CPD events are those delivered by the new College of Leadership and Management and groups such as Risk Engineering and Cost Engineering. These groups focus their efforts on sharing knowledge in the broader engineering, project management and leadership spaces.
There can be little disagreement that during our recent boom times we were less than proficient in maintaining a healthy balance in, what project managers refer to as the “iron triangle”, the ongoing tension between Time, Cost and Quality. For much of the last few years, the focus was almost exclusively on achieving the often ambitious schedules of our projects to the detriment of cost and quality. Those days, though sadly not their legacy, have been behind us for a while now and, for the past few years, many of us have been reflecting on the impact of our former “one eyed” obsession with meeting schedules. An obsession which sacrificed both accepted best practice and rational project management, and cost and quality control, to meet often fictitious end dates.
During Engineers Australia's Convention 2014 there was a very successful stream dedicated to sharing lessons from complex projects. Recognising that many engineering projects are not just complex in their technical content but also in how they are controlled and run. The range of speakers was both broad and deep, gathered from all states and territories and from virtually every industry where engineering is represented.
To capture the presentations given by WA speakers we are hosting, Conversations from Convention. This will include a local launch for the Mastering Complex Projects white paper, which was produced during and after the convention stream. This white paper captures the key concepts and issues raised by the speakers.
@FrancisNorman