Insights
Operating insight from more than 25 years at the frontline of capital projects, offshore energy and industrial operations, written for the people who run contracting and project-delivery businesses today.
Featured / Operations / 7 min read / September 2026
If one person leaving would breach a contract, not just stall a project, you have a single point of failure. Most contracting and project-delivery businesses have several. Here is what they look like, what they actually cost, and the order to remove them in.
Read the articleControls
6 min read
September 2026
A system gets patched, a process gets worked around, a supplier gets swapped, all under deadline pressure, all without anyone asking what new risk it creates. Here is why unmanaged change is the failure mode that undoes the other five you have already fixed, and how to close it.
Leadership
8 min read
September 2026
Six years on Barrow Island, 8,500 people on a nature reserve, and a project that could not stop. Scott Buchanan on the three rules that transfer directly to a mid-market contractor, and why every one of them maps to a failure mode we still see today.
Controls
6 min read
September 2026
It is not in the IT register. It has no backup plan and no owner other than the person who built it. It is also the number the board runs on. A hard look at the spreadsheet that quietly became your system of record, running on borrowed time.