In mega infrastructure programs, delivery risk rarely sits within individual contracts. It emerges at the interfaces between contractors, systems, and stakeholders. This presentation explores how delivery certainty can be achieved in such environments through a structured, integration-led approach to scheduling. Using the Marinus Link project (Power transition between Tasmania and Victoria) as a case study, the paper demonstrates how an Integrated Master Schedule (IMS) can be repositioned from a reporting and passive tool into a delivery active mechanism that governs interfaces across Australian and international contractors and suppliers, with incentivised target cost and lump sum contracts, and complex approval pathways. The IMS integrates over 24,000 activities across contractors, suppliers and land acquisition, creating a single, controlled environment for managing interdependencies and predicting outcomes. The session will present practical techniques for integrating various contractor schedules, validating interface logic, and maintaining schedule integrity under tight reporting cycles. It will also examine how the IMS enables consistent critical path analysis, supports risk-informed decision-making, and delivers aligned reporting to operational teams, executives, and government stakeholders. Key lessons learned, including critical success factors and common pitfalls, will be shared to demonstrate how a well-governed IMS can drive predictable delivery in complex, world-class multi-contractor programs.

Project performance continues to decline despite increasingly sophisticated approaches to managing cost, schedule, and technical risk. Yet one of the most critical drivers of success remains largely unmanaged: the quality of relationships between organisations. This presentation introduces RelationalRisk—a practical diagnostic approach to assessing and managing relationships within complex project environments. Drawing on 15+ years of research and insights from major infrastructure programmes, we demonstrate how relationships can be structured, measured, and actively improved. At the core of the approach is a seven-dimension framework covering partner selection, contract design, alignment of expectations, interpersonal dynamics, ways of working, issue resolution, and performance management. Using this model, project teams can identify hidden sources of misalignment, quantify relational risk, and intervene before issues escalate into disputes or delays. Through real-world examples and industry insights, we show how unmanaged relationships contribute to poor outcomes—and how a more deliberate, data-driven approach to relationship management can improve collaboration, decision-making, and delivery performance.

Infrastructure projects are under increasing pressure to quantify and reduce carbon emissions while maintaining cost, schedule and delivery certainty. Traditional carbon estimation approaches often rely on deterministic values, providing limited visibility into uncertainty and risk. This presentation introduces a probabilistic methodology that integrates carbon estimation into project controls, enabling better decision-making throughout the project lifecycle. Using real-world infrastructure examples, the session demonstrates how probabilistic techniques can improve emissions forecasting, quantify uncertainty, and support more informed trade-offs between cost, carbon and programme objectives. Attendees will gain practical insights into integrating carbon data with project controls processes, enabling infrastructure organisations to make more confident, evidence-based decisions while supporting sustainability objectives.

In an increasingly volatile world, project leaders are expected to make critical decisions despite incomplete information, conflicting priorities and rapidly changing conditions. This presentation explores how organisations can strengthen decision-making under extreme uncertainty by applying practical risk management principles drawn from major projects and high-consequence environments. Using real-world examples and lessons from complex programmes, the session examines how leaders can balance uncertainty, resilience and governance while maintaining delivery confidence. Attendees will gain practical insights into improving strategic decision-making, strengthening organisational resilience and embedding risk-informed thinking into project delivery.

In the past, risk management was an afterthought in property Project Delivery; relegated to the ‘safety’ category and dealt with only when issues eventuated. Over the past 4 years, I’ve embedded a risk framework and process to capture and standardize risks and changed the perception from risk-as-a-handbrake, to risk management as the driver of strategic and operational decision making; from capital and contingency, to informing project closures and lessons learned. In 4 years, the team has gone from offline risk spreadsheets to a single process in which every project undertakes a series of customizable, standardized risk detection questionnaires, resulting in the monthly capture of 890+ risks and 28+ issues from across 290 active projects. This data allows me to uncover risk trends and the ‘so-what’; fueling risk reporting and governance structures and paving the risk management road ahead for the team. The presentation will show how I shifted the PM team from a room full of blank stares to an engaged team of construction project risk managers working together to save time and money on their projects.

Two years on from our last presentation on the “data monster” in the Project Controls Expo in London, project controllers still spend up to 50% of their time handling data - yet the technological landscape has shifted dramatically, creating a growing risk for organisations that fail to adapt. What was once seen as an operational inefficiency is now a strategic vulnerability. In a world where speed, accuracy, and foresight define competitiveness, organisations trapped in fragmented data ecosystems are structurally disadvantaged. The breakthrough is not incremental improvement - it is a change of paradigm. Project Controls is moving beyond digitisation into full virtualisation. Structured data is no longer the end goal; it is the foundation for intelligent, agent-driven systems capable of executing, monitoring, and continuously optimising controls activities. This session unveils how “agentisation” transforms the function - shifting effort away from manual data handling towards autonomous orchestration. We will show how data management has evolved into data orchestration, then into agentised platforms, and ultimately into virtual co-workers: hyper-contextualised, intelligent, orchestrated agents equipped with real-life know-how.