In 1968 CMPS, a consulting engineering company in Chatswood, was looking for a project controls engineer, which was a new area evolving with the development of computers. Chatswood was a good location, as I was living in not-too-far away Forestville. Kevin Torpey, a brash young manager, interviewed me. His speech was peppered with expletives. Computer skills were his main focus, and he was keen to use a new IBM product for project management. After an hour of grilling he offered me a job… if I was able to pass the scrutiny of the partner, Eric Mansfield.

A secretary led me in to a wood-panelled office where sat a gentleman in a pin-striped suit and striped shirt. Eric Mansfield was courteous and offered me tea. Then he began. ‘Well, where have you come from?’ ‘McDonald Constructions, sir.’ ‘No, what school?’ ‘Oh, Sydney High.’ ‘Hmmm, good rowers and quite good at football. Well done. What did you play?’ ‘Tennis, sir.’ ‘Excellent! That’s my game. I hope you’ll be happy here.’ I was surprised that he didn’t quiz me on my technical skills. I returned to Kevin’s office and he gave me the papers to join the company. ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘the job’s in Melbourne.’ This was a surprise, but I was happy. I explained that I was looking forward to working with the team in Sydney and Kevin added ‘It’s only for a year, they need help down there’.

I rushed home to tell Margaret the news. She was relieved as she was two months away from having our second child. I had mentioned that it was likely that we would be in Coonabarabran if I stayed in my current job. There was much to be done as I needed to rent our house in Forestville for the year we would be away. I also needed to give notice at McDonalds which was hard as they had been very supportive although there were no contracts that I could move onto, just prospective possibilities. Such was the life of a contractor.

We flew to Melbourne for our new adventure a few weeks later. I reported to the CMPS partners’ office on the top floor of Clunies Ross House in Parkville. I was ushered into a well-appointed corner office, to be confronted by a short man who introduced himself as ‘Nairn’. He stared at me coldly. ‘You’re the new man from Sydney?’ The emphasis was on ‘Sydney’, as if it was a dirty word. ‘Yes.’ ‘Why are you here?’ ‘They said you need a project controls engineer.’ ‘We don’t need one, they think we do. I was against it. Never had one before and Melbourne engineers can control their own projects.’ Nairn said forcefully. I paused for a moment and said, ‘I’m to introduce a new IBM management program that’s driven by computers.’ His eyes narrowed ‘Well, we don’t need American technology here. British technology is what we use.’ With that, he started reading his mail, ignoring me. I was getting a message: Sydney folk are not welcome.

Nairn’s secretary showed me to my desk and I introduced myself to some of the people around me. I then called Kevin Torpey at the Sydney office and told him about my exchange with Nairn. ‘Yes, he’s an arsehole. Only likes people from Melbourne and Adelaide. You’ll find the project manager’s a prick too.’ ‘Great,’ I said, ‘what have you got me into?’ ‘Look, don’t worry about that. Get the controls set up, liaise with the main contractors and find out where the project sits, cost and schedule wise.’ I took some comfort from Kevin’s words, but Nairn had shaken me up. I felt isolated. I had taken my family interstate, rented my house and changed jobs.

I was still idealistic about my profession. I hadn’t realised that personalities would play such a strong role in the engineering process.

Electrolytic Zinc and Goldfields had joined forces to deliver a total change to the west coast mining operations in Tasmania. Copper, lead and zinc were currently being exported via an APT railway from Queenstown to Strahan, and then shipped through Macquarie Harbour. The bar in the harbour was quite shallow and difficult. The system was old and expensive to maintain. The turn-around involved shutting the copper smelter and exporting metal concentrates north via the Emu Bay railway to the port of Burnie. This required new rail-handling facilities at Melba Flat, Rosebery and Burnie with a rail upgrade, principally at the Pieman River, involving a new high-level bridge. Additionally, the iron pyrites (fool’s gold) would be transported and processed at a new sulphuric acid plant at Ulverstone, near Burnie. There were many elements that needed to be coordinated. Some of the sites were remote and the west coast suffered high rainfall.

I started to map out a program and found the other staff members enthralled by what I was doing. They had never seen the planning tools I was utilising, but were willing to give me the necessary data I needed. I visited the IBM offices and outlined my requirements. They were generally unhelpful, as they were largely salesmen who weren’t familiar with this product. The experts were in the United States. I liaised closely with Kevin Torpey in Sydney and we found more helpful and knowledgable IBM people there. Kevin arranged a meeting in Burnie in Tasmania – ‘in the pub by the jetty at 5’ – the following week to check the port and acid plant sites. He would be driving from Hobart, as he had meetings with the Electrolytic Zinc people. We had other projects in Risdon near Hobart.

I flew into Wynyard, a few kilometres west of Burnie, and took the shuttle bus to town. Armed with some plans from the office and wandering around the port I tried to visualise our facilities; I began to understand the scope of our project.

At five pm I headed for the pub and waited for Kevin, who burst into the bar at five thirty, cursing about several things that were annoying him. ‘Bloody hell! Simple things seem to trip up Nairn. He has no concept of a project. He’s only interested in the status issues, organising lunch and brown-nosing the Goldfield executives. You OK?’ ‘Yes.’ I replied open mouthed. Kevin dug into his bag looking for memos. He paused, looked up and asked, ‘How’s Nairn treating you?’

‘Fine, he doesn’t talk to me.’

‘Good, he’s an arrogant prick. You need to get with the contractors and come down here for a week a month to keep up with the local gossip. Reading reports is no good – they only want to tell you the good stuff.’ He wrote some more notes and I got some beers. We went through all the issues with the rail upgrade, as it seemed the most vulnerable to government interference and delays. More beers and discussion saw the sun disappear and Kevin exclaim, ‘I’m hungry! By the way, where are we staying tonight?’ I looked at him blankly, and said, ‘Your girl made the booking. I’ve never been here before. How many hotels are there?’ ‘Buggered if I know. We’ll just have to ask around.’ We drove off in his car as the pub where we were drinking had no reservation and was full. By now it was eight thirty and every hotel or guest house we found was closed.

‘Christ, I have to eat. There was a fried chicken place on the main road next to a service station.’ Kevin exclaimed. We went there and tore a fried chicken apart with our bare hands. The chicken was delicious and we felt better.

It was getting cold and the warming glow of the Boag’s beer was wearing off. I asked the attendant at the service station about hotels. ‘There’s one on the hill you might have missed, up by the carpentry workshop.’

We drove up, but it looked closed. Kevin said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll go around the back.’ We did so and entered through the kitchen and found the manager. ‘You’re a bit late! Come into the office.’ It was the right place. We put our bags in a share room and Kevin started for the bar. ‘They have early closing, but we’ll be right.’ We entered the bar to lots of noise and almost a full house.

‘It’s my shout. Find a seat.’ There were none, but a large timber worker created a space at the bar. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked. I explained a bit and he nodded. ‘Great to see the place booming. Good luck!’

Kevin returned with a couple of pints. ‘Who was that?’ ‘No idea, but he was onside.’ ‘You’ve got to be careful, there are people against the project.’I left Kevin at ten thirty. He was involved in a vigorous conversation about Irish politics. I was tired and a bit drunk and fell into bed. I walked into breakfast at six thirty next morning to find Kevin halfway through his eggs. ‘I didn’t want to wake you and I need to get back to Melbourne. I’ll leave you the car if you drop me off at the airport.’ He looked chipper and I felt hungover. ‘Don’t let Nairn get you down, we can work through this’ were his final words at the airport.

The project was coming together and the family had settled into a maisonette in South Yarra. Margaret was due in a few days and David, our 2 year old son, was running riot. We had an unexpected visit from my best mate from Sydney, Robert Edwardes. He was passing through Melbourne at the start of his trip. He and his wife Carolyn were off to Europe on a world trip for a year. They were both school teachers but had taken leave for the trip. He quizzed me on the project, while I kept an eye on my wife in case we had to dash to the hospital. He asked, ‘Are you spending much time in Tassie?’ ‘About a week a month. I’m still trying to find out how the company operates. The Melbourne people don’t get on with the Sydney head office. It’s hard when you’re new and you don’t feel welcome. My boss in Sydney is supportive and I think things will work out.’ I wished I could emulate Robert and do the Aussie thing and do Europe, but I had a growing family and work was my priority.

My efforts to introduce structure into the project were frustrated by Nairn and his project manager, Jim Smythe, who came out of the same mould as his boss. I persevered and wrote the monthly report based on my financial and schedule reports.

I adopted the construction daily schedule of starting fairly early in the office around 7am. Other staff usually came in around 8.15am. I found the quiet atmosphere good for thinking out the day’s activities. I was unaware that Nairn liked to be in first as everyone had to pass his office. One morning as I came past his office he was standing there waving a report. ‘ I don’t want you sending me these reports, I’m not interested.’ He ritually tore it up and threw it in the rubbish tin as he retired to his office. I sat at my desk and wondered what to do. I decided to continue with the reports and just put them in the files.

The following month in my report I criticised the acid plant designer and builder for suppling optimistic schedules and not recognising supply chain constraints. I was called into a meeting Nairn was having with the contractor. ‘Grahame thinks you don’t know what you’re doing. How many have you built?’ snarled Nairn. ‘Sixty-two,’ was the contractor’s reply. Nairn looked at me, ‘How many have you built, Grahame?’ It was an ambush. I ignored his question and asked how long they had been using their project control tools. ‘This is the first time.’ Touche! ‘Right. The option you used to predict the end date assumed all activities would occur with no delays, and no risk assessment was applied?’ Yes, that’s right.’ ‘Well, where are all of the bin liners?’ (This was a new high-tech plastic material to protect the steel.) He checked his printout and announced, ‘They’re in the store in Burnie. They arrived three days ago.’

I said ‘I’ve received a report from a mate on-site that the bin liners had suffered an accident during offloading and were actually in the harbour. ‘We have no report of that.’ ‘Well, you might want to make a phone call.’ I looked at Nairn. He walked out of the meeting.

The contractor and I spent several hours going through the detail and agreed there was a likelihood of a delay, but judicious overtime could haul that in. They left, cordially suggesting we might have a drink later in town. I agreed, although I needed to check Margaret’s condition as she was nearly due. I found that by gaining the contractor’s confidence and sharing information you could break down the barriers set up by the contract.

Next morning Nairn confronted me. ‘You don’t want to compromise yourself with contractors. We could end up in court and they could use certain information against you.’ I replied, ‘If we document all discussions and agreements we should be safe, and the contractor will trust you more.’ ‘You can never trust contractors. They’re just after money and don’t have the professional ethics that we have. Be careful’. I went to my desk and pondered this. This elitist attitude was strange to me. I hadn’t detected any higher level of intellectual insight to support his position. The contractors employed many fine engineers; in fact, I had recently been employed by one myself. Nairn had never bothered to find this out. I vowed to go with my gut feel and work closely with them.

I needed to find a topic for my master’s thesis. After much deliberation I decided to look at the relationships between design and construction activities. All efforts in scheduling had focused on the logic of the construction task and the resource levelling benefits that this planning tool could bring. I would focus on the complete project task, from conception to completion. My first hurdle was convincing the university and finding a thesis supervisor who would take it on. During my visits to Sydney to brief Kevin and his boss Kevin Napier, I talked to the civil engineering school where I met with a cool reception. They weren’t really into the management of engineering, just the engineering itself; they were unaware there were problems there to solve and wondered if my project had any merit. Finally, they suggested I talk to Michael Folie, who had just joined the faculty from the economics school. Michael listened to my ideas and suggested I develop them along the lines of resultant economic benefit, that is, the faster project delivery lowers the cost as production can be sold earlier.

I returned to Melbourne and started gathering data. I needed to spend time with the designers to understand their processes and how the interdisciplinary design needs were handled. I was met with quizzical looks. ‘Why do you need to know? It’s very complicated, we just work together.’

I started to spend time with the lead designers, asking how they confronted their job. They obviously knew what they were doing, but they’d never had to visualise the process in a forward-planning way. I started to piece together elements of a process and fed it back to the leads. Though sceptical, they played the game. After a while there was some good banter, with an overtone that my task was a waste of time. ‘Design is an art and can’t be systematised,’ seemed to be their anthem. They felt I was commoditising their profession and that that could diminish their value. As the project developed I collected data and tried to reconstruct events into logical sequences. I also tried to monitor the crises when packages of drawings and documents needed to be issued for contract bids. I noted that deadlines were achieved by having holds on areas when design was incomplete, either for lack of vendor data or because of client changes. Contractors were asked to price work that was not defined. This led to difficult evaluation processes and unit price quotes. As the many parts of the project started to converge, the planning and costing work that was my main task became more difficult. I was starting to feel inadequate.

The chief estimator was Bob Williams, from Sydney. He was experienced and helped me understand how the particular processes worked. Unfortunately, he too had a bad relationship with Nairn, whom he considered a complete idiot. ‘If Nairn could manage the client better and stop snivelling up to them we could reduce the changes. How can you design something when it keeps changing? You have to fix the process flow diagrams and then the plot plan, otherwise you keep chasing your tail and costs escalate and the schedule is blown.’

Instantly I started to see why I was making no progress. There was no leadership. Nairn never consulted the schedules and trending was a totally foreign concept to him. He started each day as a new challenge, with no reflection on where our plan stood. I felt my best efforts would come from continually talking to the leads and trying to piece together a story.

Meanwhile Margaret was due. All babies seem to be born in the early hours of the morning and so it was with my second son, Miles. Margaret and I arrived at the hospital at eleven thirty pm. Miles was born at two am. We were very happy.

Back at work the project lurched into the mid stages. Nairn came under pressure from the client and became agitated. We were not meeting the target dates due to the numerous changes. He started attacking all the lead engineers, with no real purpose other than to suggest it was entirely their fault. I found his negative attitude to me began to change as he realised my work could help the team get on top of things. They started asking questions about planning and I tried to organise coordination meetings to share information. I realised that some of them were doing the biggest job of their careers and we were all as inexperienced as each other.

I was regularly visiting Tasmania and with the persistent rainfall, the work progress in Rosebery was slow. We had hired a local earthworks contractor named Bill Singline to clear the rail handling site. Bill was a personality in Tasmania. He had a logging business, a supermarket and a fledgling mining company, Tasminex, trying to export iron ore from a mine south of Burnie. His earthworks operators had come to a grinding halt on the site. Bill was totally bogged down, with a pile of cut material that was unsuitable for fill as it was spoiled with water penetration. He had submitted a claim for extra costs that exceeded his total contract value. My job was to find a way to get the site back on track. My background in soil mechanics gave me a good understanding of the problem. The spoiled material could not compact due to high clay content. We needed to locate a source of sand and loam to create the fill.

I met Singline’s foreman and ran him through my ideas. Had he considered mine waste? ‘Grahame, I just manage the plant. You have to give me a lead on what material will work. Bill will just walk away if you don’t give us some money. We’re in your hands.’ This was a surprise. I thought Bill was a successful businessman. Said his foreman, ‘He’s all front, runs things by the seat of his pants.’

Next day I visited the mine. The mine manager Ed Jones was very helpful and suggested a few possibilities. He was aware that the project was important for him and went out of his way to have some material tested for its suitability as fill. Over the next few days Bill’s man and I agreed on a rough compensation plan for the new fill material. We had a solution.

Back in Melbourne, I was bogged down. I reviewed my thesis data. I had been collecting statistics on drawing numbers, material take-offs and costs. The design functions and their interrelationships were still muddy. I didn’t have any benchmarks and the design leads just seemed to respond to crises. I started a new round of questions along the lines of what would they have done better now they could see the recent history. Anticipating the external needs was not easy. The mechanical guys relied on vendor data for the conveyors, bins, chutes and crushers. There didn’t seem to be a good system of anticipating the inputs and then refining the design when final data was received. The purchasing group was isolated from the processes because the designers didn’t see the value of their input. Contract documentation was not managed well, adding to the confusion.

How could all this be improved? The main problem was that the engineers were focused on their design competency and took no responsibility for the project needs. This gap was the responsibility of the project engineers. However, their role was diminished by Nairn and his project manager Smythe, who bypassed them. I reported all this to my bosses in Sydney. Finally, Nairn was instructed by Sydney to hire a new project manager, Norm Elphinstone. I felt elated but worried as to how the transition would play out.

Nairn treated Norm as he treated me, but Norm was more senior and seemed to handle Nairn well. This improved the office performance, and Norm encouraged me to spend more time with the project engineers, to improve their planning skills. He also gave me more insight into the design interfaces and the potential for different contracting strategies. I started to see ways to package work to improve the overall schedule. I felt I was making real progress.

With Norm on board and some new project engineers hired, the project started to have some structure. I found the new team fun to work with. Nairn was now nice to me. ‘I was reading your monthly report,’ he said. ‘I like the trending section; it gives us a good idea of status. The client likes it too. Join us for a drink this evening.’ After nine months on the outer, finally I was in the ‘in group’!

I had learned so much in Melbourne, but little of it related to engineering, or my idea of what an engineer is trained to do. After leaving NSW Railways I had been exposed to the realities of commercial life in a contractor’s office. It was a shock, but helped me understand the nature of construction. The railways had no cost constraints and there I had been able to experiment without fear of failure. My experience in Melbourne had revealed a different environment. The different cultures represented by government, project owners, contractors and consulting engineering came together with very rough edges. Each had a different view but all played their role in the development world. Lack of understanding among the groups gave me many hours of reflection and a great source of inspiration for my master’s thesis.

One year on and exactly to the day I left Melbourne to return to Sydney for new adventures. Nairn encouraged me to stay with a pay rise and new responsibility. I politely declined and left.

Ten years later I returned to Melbourne to take Nairn’s job and run the Southern operations, but that’s another story.

Grahame Campbell