I congratulate you on organising such an excellent event in a spectacular venue, and I look forward to hearing of your plans for 2015.

The attendees clearly reflected the view that this was a must see event as it attracted many high level controls individuals including our own Stephen Jones who spoke on the topic of agile and earned value. With three streams of speakers running in parallel throughout the day, the audience was spoilt for choice at the vast selection of subjects covered. We couldn’t attend them all, but from what we did attend here are our highlights;

Key note speaker David Birch regaled us with his many years of experience and whilst it is always great to hear David’s thoughts on project controls it was his rallying call around professional recognition and career growth that really resonated. He called for a community of practice around controls rightly pointing out that more can be done around sharing knowledge outside of events like these and looked to the APM and chartership to spearhead this vision. This theme of collaboration, or lack of, was also echoed and articulated by George Haddad, VP of product strategy for Oracle, who showed how far the construction industry was behind in this regard.

With collaboration being the central topic of the day, Ben Vaughan discussed his experiences on collaborative working between suppliers and customers and offered some tactical advice on fostering a more collaborative approach to establish a robust project controls environment that can be trusted by both parties. Jim Malkin, a fellow PMC SIG member took us through six areas for improving visibility and presented a framework for determining and improving project maturity which further demonstrated the importance of visibility and collaboration.

On the more specific technical skills side, David Bordoli discussed how important progress, position and prediction was to project delivery success, and provided an alternative approach to predicting project completion for projects who do not utilise earned value management. Andy Abu-Bakar then dove into the world of schedule risk analysis (SRA) and took us on a journey through an SRA process, pointing out common pitfalls and offering some tactical solutions to ensuring robust SRAs are conducted on complex, long-term engineering projects. Glenn Hide then talked us through the benefits of the NEC3 framework and imparted some of his substantial knowledge, providing valuable insight for both supplier side and client side parties to enable them to manage their project effectively within the NEC3 construct, focusing mainly on the topic of programme acceptance.

Overall the speakers at this year’s expo were of an extremely high quality and it once again proved that events like these can be opportunities to enlighten each other and spark debate and not just focus as a place for vendors to solicit business. We are thoroughly looking forward to next year, long may it continue!

Catering was excellent! The exhibition area could have been expanded - I mean more desks with more companies but overall the venue and event were absolutely fantastic!