Contruent True Talks, where we explore the intersection of innovation, leadership, and technology that is shaping the future of capital programs.

Andy Veron: I’m your moderator, Andy Veron, and I’d like to wish everyone a happy new year as this is the first episode for 2026. I’m really excited to have two executives joining the show today, Joe Leone and Les McMullen. Joe, Les, welcome to the show.

Joe Leone: Thank you, Andy. Happy New Year to you, too, and happy new year to everyone.

Les McMullen: Appreciate it, guys. Thank you.

Andy Veron: Thank you for your time. I know you guys are super busy. You’ve got a company that you need to run and manage and taking some time out for me and the audience is greatly appreciated.

Guys, I always like my guests to introduce themselves. So please take a few minutes, introduce yourselves, and talk a little bit about your company and what you guys are up to. Joe, you want to lead us off?

Joe Leone: Sure. Yeah, sure. Once again, happy new year to everyone. My name is Joe Leone. I’m a 30 plus year project professional. I’m a civil engineer by academia, but I’ve always worked in the process industries, mostly in the field of project controls. I worked throughout all of the disciplines of project control.

Started as an estimator, then became a planner, worked as a cost engineer, became a project controls manager, then became VP project services for one of the major EPC PCM companies in Canada. I essentially worked my entire career for two large international firms.

About three years ago, I retired from the firm I was working at and started my own company, Techn PMC. We’re a multi-disciplinary project services consulting firm. We work primarily for owner organizations on mega projects in the process industries, mostly oil and gas, mining and metals. We started our relationship with Contruent two years ago and here we are.

Andy Veron: Sure. Appreciate it. Thanks for that. Les, over to you.

Les McMullen: Sure. My name is Les McMullen. I’ve been in the project controls business for quite a while now, for quite a few decades. Very active with AACE International. I think we’re going to talk a little bit about that later on.

I’ve worked for major EPCM companies as well as I’ve worked on the owner side. So I’ve got to see how both sides live and how they’re interfaced.

Looking forward to this discussion today. Really the discussion is also focused around one of our themes which is bringing certainty to your project. So I know it’s going to be worked into the introduction and that’s something we’re very proud of. Our clients are looking for certainty. We know how to bring it with the team that we have with the vast resources we have. So this is something we look forward to sharing today.

Andy Veron: Yeah guys, thank you and Les, you hit it right on the head. The science of certainty and capital programs is where the discussion is going to focus in and really kind of double click on how we do that and why the industry and the industries we serve need that.

Bringing certainty to capital programs and projects couldn’t be more relevant. When I look around our customer base and listen to the size and scale of these projects, these multi-billion dollar mega projects, it’s truly amazing and in lies the challenges. How do you gain visibility, accountability, and predictability across every phase of that execution?

One of the things that I think is really intriguing to me, you both have massive experience working for large organizations, but now you’re in a much more small and more agile organization and how you can bring those experiences down from the big organization, but also bring those small agile techniques back to those owners and back to those larger firms. This is some of the things that I really want to talk to today.

We’ll get into a little bit about how to help those organizations through these transitions.

Guys, let’s start first segment for me. Let’s talk about mega projects and risk trends. What are the biggest emerging risk trends shaping mega projects today? What do you see? Is there anything changed around that risk?

Joe Leone: Yeah, that’s a good question, Andy. When I started my career 30 plus years ago, and Les probably a little before that, a billion dollars was a bonafide mega project. Today a billion dollars is the size of an average change order on one of these jobs.

Projects have just gotten so big financially, and the success of a project has such an impact on the bottom line of any owner organization, or even institution or government agency. So the sheer size of these projects has become a risk in itself in that it requires so much financial backing.

I like to think of projects as basically you start your own company, you hire hundreds of people. In fact, on some of the larger projects, thousands of people that may or may not have ever worked together, and within a couple of months you start spending hundreds of millions of dollars a month. In some cases at the peak a billion dollars a month or several billion dollars a month. Then within three or four years you basically close out your company.

So you’re spending so much money and so much resources in such a small time and ramping up so quickly that that becomes a risk in itself. Now today compared to 30 years ago you’re doing that with limited resources in terms of human capital and even financial capital because everyone’s looking after their investment. So I think really the sheer size has become a risk in itself.

Andy Veron: Yeah for sure.

Les McMullen: Yeah I agree with that. What I see is risk today is evolving not just in magnitude but also in complexity, connectivity, and pace. Many of these risks that we see today and we’re living through were forecast by organizations such as the Construction Industry Institute some years ago and many of them have come true.

One is the complexity, open interfaces multiply. Today we’re dealing in projects with multiple engineering service providers, multiple contractors, parallel design packages, and interdependent technologies that drives integration risk. It’s not just about identifying the elements. It’s about identifying the interfaces between them and that’s one of the services that we do offer.

We see the need for strong integration between these different parties on projects. So certainly the size is an impact.

The other thing is market and supply chain volatility. We’ve seen that since even before the pandemic, but especially since, and geopolitical tensions. We just have to turn on the television to see what’s happening there today, right?

There’s human and organizational risk. Remote and hybrid work models were forecast, but nobody could really imagine what happened five years ago. Distribution decision rights and knowledge loss from workforce churn.

I think Construction Industry Institute talked about the graying of project controls, the massive retirements, the gaps in the industry today.

And of course one of the biggest changes that I’ve mentioned is the IT and AI. Embracing digital twins, digital transformation, all of these things including AI which is evolving on a very regular basis that brings a lot of opportunities but it can also bring risks as well.

Andy Veron: Yeah guys, thank you for that. That’s really great insight.

I think the other thing for me, listening to that talk track, it’s really taking risk from just a compliance task and tracking, but really to giving you a strategic advantage as you deliver projects to your ultimate owners and customers. It really has in my opinion.

Joe Leone: Yeah, it’s got to be proactive, Andy. It can’t be reactive otherwise in this day and age you’re going to be unsuccessful.

Les McMullen: Yeah for sure that is true. If we look historically, risk tracking was a compliance-driven industry. It was to satisfy governance requirements. Do you have a risk register when you’re doing an audit? Do you have it? Are you using it?

But risk tracking is no longer about proving that a risk register exists. It’s about using risk intelligence to improve decisions before we lose value. So the strategic advantage today comes from the timing and the optionality that risk management brings us.

Andy Veron: That’s really great because it, we’ve got to obviously keep those risks and anticipate those risks which is key, but we’re moving on to the next segment.

For me it’s that cost journey. If you think about from the estimate through closeout and we spend a lot of time thinking through that, joining that earliest estimate all the way through procurement. We’re not going to have time today to go through that in detail, but kind of at an elevated level, walk us through the life cycle of a cost and where does that certainty, more importantly where does that certainty usually break down on mega projects?

Joe Leone: Sure. Look, the cornerstone of cost certainty, or any kind of cost control, it begins with the estimate. You need to have a good estimate in order to have a really good cost control process and that’s throughout the phases, right?

If your project is going through a front-end loading process regardless of the nomenclature you use, FL2, FL3, PFS, FS, throughout each phase, when you do your estimates they have to be done using the correct methodology. The information that drives that estimate needs to be done correctly as well, needs to be feeding your estimate correctly.

From the estimate to execution, or in between phases, a proactive trending and forecasting process is a must-have.

If you don’t have a really good trending and forecasting process on your project and you’re living between the various estimates throughout the phases, that’s where you’re going to break down on your project.

So it starts with the estimate. It’s got to be done according to the proper methodology. Then your trending and forecasting needs to be proactive and timely so there’s no surprises.

The last thing that a client organization wants is a surprise. It could handle bad news if that bad news is communicated in a timely manner, but it can’t handle surprises because in this day and age if you have to report to the market as most organizations need to do because they’re publicly traded, that could be a death sentence.

Andy Veron: For sure. Bad news is good news, right?

Les McMullen: Yeah, I agree with you Joe, everything you’ve said there. To me cost certainty is not a single event. It’s built progressively and repeatedly tested through the project life cycle and I think that’s what you’ve indicated.

I think about the planning phase, the concept, the definition, the authorization phase. I often talk with students about Abraham Lincoln’s story. It’s a really good one. He said, “I had six hours to cut down a tree. Take the first four hours to sharpen the axe.” So preparation, planning are essential.

Too many times companies try to rush the planning thinking they can rush through the execution, but if your planning is done well it can reduce the uncertainty and it can really speed up the execution of your project.

Andy Veron: That’s great guys. Two things on that, listening to the conversation. Have you seen technology connect the estimate through execution and then the actuals for that continuous visibility? Do you see that as you’re delivering projects that people have actually connected it through the estimate?

Les McMullen: Definitely. The thing with digital transformation and connected tools today, it creates that thread that goes from the estimate all the way through. So you can go from the estimate, create the budget, execute the project, manage change, do forecasting, trending, take action, and then eventually you close out the project and that electronic data follows all the way through into your benchmarking program.

To me that’s a very important aspect. AACE talks about the project controls loop and if you have a system that can do that, that provides a common thread, but it starts with something as simple as common work breakdown structures, digitally linking the assumptions to performance, integrating forecasting, embedding change and risk into the data flow, and basically shift project controls from reporting to insight. But a connected tool can do all of those things.

It may sound like jargon, but having one instance of the truth makes that all possible. If you’ve got a tool that’s able to provide that in an integrated fashion, then you’re able to do the analysis rather than chase the data. So that’s definitely a plus today.

Andy Veron: Yeah. And I think it’s super important. I meet with customers around the globe and everyone’s talking about AI, but the foundation, guys, and I hope you support this comment, the foundation really starts with that benchmarking data, right? It doesn’t have to be outside of your own company. Most of our owners and our customers have enough data inter company, inter organization that they can learn from. Every project of this type and location, there’s enough benchmarking data to build that foundation for AI and for modeling. Love your input on that.

Les McMullen: Yeah. I think it’s a very good point. I see the digital transformation having a digital hub where the engineering quantity data flows into the estimating system and the pricing from the estimating database creates that estimate. So you can basically have a continuous live estimate through the different phases of planning and into execution. Then that continues with forecasting and trending as Joe mentioned. So definitely I see that.

Joe Leone: Yeah. And we see it with a lot of our really sophisticated and bigger clients. Benchmarking is not a nice-to-have. It’s a must-have.

When we’re delivering estimates or managing projects for them they always want to compare it with what’s the industry standard, how are we doing relative to other projects we’ve done in the past. More importantly when you work across different geographical areas then how do the factors tie into each other. So absolutely benchmarking is key.

Andy Veron: Guys, one last question before we leave this segment. Les, I’ve heard you say this several times where forecasting is not project accounting. All too often there has to be that definition of what true forecasting is versus just counting what’s happened on the project. Why don’t you double click on that for us?

Les McMullen: Yeah, that’s one of my pet peeves. Often this comes up. You get people that say, “Cost accounting and cost control is all the same. It’s just cost.” But to simply put, forecasting and project accounting serve fundamentally different purposes. Confusing them is one of the most common reasons capital projects lose predictability.

Just think about it. What does forecast mean? The definition is to predict or estimate a future event or trend. And what does trending mean? It’s a general direction which something is developing or changing. That alone kind of defines the difference.

I have ultimate respect for the work that project accountants do. I’ve worked with many of them closely and with finance.

Project accounting tracks costs incurred, commitments made, invoices paid to ensure financial accuracy and compliance.

Forecasting considers the remaining scope of the project, the current productivity, internal and external impacts on the project, emerging risks, the market, and it predicts the forecast to complete. It’s very predictive.

People say, “Predictive AI.” Well, guess what? Forecasting has always been predictive. AI can assist us and help us because of its capabilities to cut through huge volumes of data like a knife through butter, but you still need the subject matter experts at this point to drive the forecasting.

So that’s the difference really. One is more backward-looking or current. We’re current but also forward-looking. That’s the real difference between the two.

Joe Leone: Yeah. And you use the term forecast at completion or forecast to complete, and I think that from a project perspective it’s not how much you’ve spent today. It’s not what you spent this year. It’s what you’re going to spend throughout the life cycle of the project that’s important.

Andy Veron: Well, that’s great guys. Appreciate that. Really great insights.

Let’s shift gears. We always like to get into a little bit of organizational change. You both in your opening talked about working for large organizations supporting large owners. If we have a large enterprise listening, what are some of the things that they can learn from your experience to be more agile and where would they start?

I think the challenge is in large organizations, and all three of us have had the opportunity to spend a lot of our career in large organizations, that desire for speed and innovation. But you’re in an organization that it just takes time to make changes. What can you bring forward that could help a large enterprise?

Joe Leone: Yeah. I think what we’ve seen in the last couple of decades, and more because of the governance issue, because of stuff that’s happened in the financial markets, is a need for more governance. Larger organizations react to that by adding layers to their businesses.

To be more agile or more innovative, I think not all but some organizations are going to have to look at perhaps removing some of those layers to make their organizations react quicker.

That doesn’t mean you have to give up on governance or bend the rules. To have an agile organization you have to have a leaner approach, staff it with the right people, the competent people, and empower them. Empower the people that you do have and give them the accountability to make decisions and take actions.

I think that’s essentially the only way you could become more agile, by empowering your people and removing some of the layers in the organization which perhaps don’t really add value. You may not be getting the bang for your buck to have such a large organization.

Les McMullen: Sure. My take on that is it really begins with how decisions are made and informed across the life cycle.

Two examples could be scope changes. Sometimes because of the decision flow it can take a long time to have them approved whereas often times you need to have very quick assessment and approval.

Another thing is updating your forecast at the trend meetings. There may be procedures in place in an organization where, “Oh well you can’t put that forecast in right now. It still needs to be approved” or “We don’t believe that that will happen” or “We think we can turn it around.” But by the time the decision is made, it’s put into the forecast, it may be too late to actually take action.

So agility without forecasting discipline creates speed but without direction. Improving forecasting gives leaders confidence to act earlier which is the foundation of agile governance.

Andy Veron: That’s great guys. Great insights there.

Let’s shift gears. New topic that we’ll dive into. We talked about it a little bit already. When you think about integrations, interfaces, and collaborations, why do we still see so many programs operate as disconnected silos despite some of the modern tools that are out there?

And a follow-up question is, there’s so much benefit to that integration amongst owners, the contractors, and the technology that’s out there. What do you guys see there and why do programs operate in silos?

Joe Leone: It’s going to sound basic, but I think it comes down to human nature.

You could have the best processes, the greatest procedures, and the best tools in the world, but it ties into that discussion on how do you get your organization to be more agile. I think it’s all about people and empowering people to be able to do what they need to do.

Giving them the right training so they actually understand what it is they need to do. Human nature, when you’re not clear on what you really need to do, a project is essentially a collection of different clans. You’ve got the engineering, construction, procurement people.

So it’s human nature to revert to relying on your clan. You’re not communicating with the other members of the team.

We do a lot of audits and independent project reviews. On projects that have gone well, there is a good cohesiveness amongst the different departments and different disciplines and that’s fostered usually, it begins with senior management. It’s always top down.

If senior management or the executives promote that sort of cooperation, typically you’ll get a project where people do work together as a group. The reverse is true. The projects that we’ve reviewed that have gone bad, you’ve got that silo approach.

So at the end of the day it comes down to you need the tools, the processes, the procedures, but you need to have the right people, train them correctly, and empower them.

Les McMullen: Right. We know that communication is the key. In project controls and project management, lack of communication can sometimes be caused by silos.

When I’ve lectured to universities about project controls, I always show them a diagram that shows project controls as the hub of the project control decisions. All the departments from engineering, procurement, construction, contract administration feed into estimating and forecasting. We can’t maintain a forecast without the total integration of all these groups.

So I would say we’re the most integrated group probably on a project to make it work. I think there’s no excuse in the digital age now not to have integrated tools which also provides the speed and provides us with the data at hand.

Twenty years ago software companies said your project will be at your fingertips but it really wasn’t. It wasn’t digital the way it is today. Today the information truly can be at our fingertips.

Andy Veron: That’s great. Fantastic.

Another great reason to get those teams out of those silos, it’s people, process, and technology.

Guys, we brought up a few times during the segment, but we are all big believers in organizations that support our industries and our customers.

Les, you talked about the Construction Industry Institute, you talked about AACE. Talk a little bit more. Why are those groups valuable? Why should some of the folks that are going to listen to this podcast get involved? What’s your experience been?

Les McMullen: AACE, well, I got involved in AACE when I started in estimating too. It seems to be a really good place to start. All the estimators I worked with were all seniors and they said, “Les, you have to join AACE.” I had no idea what it was, but I took their advice.

I joined it and I didn’t realize what a great influence it would have on my career and my knowledge as well.

So I served on AACE sections. I was president of the Montreal section for 15 years. I’m still a past president. I served four years on the board of AACE.

What I love about AACE, from their perspective, influence is not exercised through regulation or mandates. It’s exercised through credible practice and shared learning and professional consensus.

AACE advances the discipline by turning experience into standards that practitioners actually want to use.

If you look at their documentation, the Total Cost Management framework is an annotated framework of what to do, supported by over a hundred recommended practices of how to do it. They have a vast library and body of knowledge. It’s really the authority in total cost management.

When I lecture at universities, because we need to bring the next generation into project controls and project management, I always take the time to explain AACE, how to become a member, the benefits, also the career opportunities. You’d be amazed how many university level students and even graduate students have no idea of the fantastic opportunities in this industry for planners, estimators, and risk managers.

CII, the Construction Industry Institute, have written so many great papers on project controls. They have documents called the Predictability Index. They have written documents on how to do detailed forecasting. So I often refer to them as well. Also PMI, I’m also involved in that.

To me all of these associations are something we can’t do without. In fact one thing that CII and AACE say, the same basic thing, certainty doesn’t come from eliminating uncertainty, it comes from managing it deliberately. Alignment, which is the front end organizationally, credible forecasting, good data discipline, risk and change management, and engaged stakeholders drive predictability.

I could certainly say more about AACE, but that wraps it up in a nutshell for me. It’s something that we need to have. It’s not an option. We need to get the young people joining that association, get people in our organizations. We encourage that. In any organization I’ve been in I’ve encouraged membership for the students and that’s what we do also at Techn PMC as well.

Andy Veron: Fantastic guys.

I can’t let you off the call here until, because you are the first show, the first episode of the year for True Talks. What are some of your 2026 predictions in the markets that you serve, in the industries and the owners here? What do you think 26 brings us? What are some of the things you guys are most excited about?

Joe Leone: So look, sitting on the other side of the border, we have a pretty interesting perspective in that our country has identified certain projects that are of national interest and they’re being supported at the highest levels. Whether that’s in the critical mineral space or the power space.

They’re getting a lot of coverage in the news. There’s talk about streamlining the approval process for all of these.

So what we see in 2026, and we operate primarily in the resources and power space, so it’s really our business, we see a lot of projects which for many years, and in fact some of the studies that we’re working on right now have been around for decades, we see these now being accelerated so that they’re actually going to happen. That’s something we’re really excited about.

Our offices are across Canada. Our main office is in Montreal, but we’re present in Toronto and in Vancouver, and we do work in the Maritimes.

There’s mining, oil and gas, and power projects all over the place. We do have some projects in the US as well, in the same industry, critical minerals I think is important. Oil and gas, and internationally as well.

Oddly enough, I don’t want to talk politics but the response to the tariffs has been looking at building projects elsewhere in the world.

So I think there’s a lot of projects out there and we’re in the project space. For 2026, that’s definitely something that we’re excited about. We think it’s going to be an interesting year.

Andy Veron: That’s great. Les, any comments on that?

Les McMullen: Yeah, I think my interest, what I’m excited about coming up, is the advancing technology that we have at our fingertips compared to 20, 30, 40 years ago.

Organizations like AACE, they’re going to be celebrating their 70th anniversary this year, started back in 1956. PMI was in the early 60s and so forth.

So the knowledge has been there, but today with technology, it takes it to a whole different level really. When you see the integration with engineering tools right through the project management cycle, it just increases the reliability and predictability.

I’m excited about that. I’m excited about the standardization across the industry in project controls and estimating, risk management, the advantages of risk management. Working for international clients at times, we work for clients in two or three continents at the same time. Having these standards that we can bring so that clients know that the way we work is going to be the same wherever it is in the world we bring that. It reduces the learning curve.

Also bringing in that next generation of cost controllers and cost schedulers and so forth, bring them into the organizations and building up for the future.

Project controls has so much to offer along with risk management.

I’ve read the accounts of several of those PMI awarded top projects and I’ve been involved with at least three or four of them. I’ve looked in the closeout reports and it always includes front-end planning as one of the reasons for success, team communication, proactive cost control, robust risk management, and they all have these same qualities.

So these are the things that excite me, that I’m interested in seeing apply to our projects as we head into 2026 and beyond.

Joe Leone: And I think that’s an opportunity. All these projects on the forefront here, there’s no secret that we’re an industry that has not necessarily developed the next generation. Now we’ve got this opportunity with potentially all of these projects coming to fruition where we could start bringing on board a lot of young people and training them for the future because, you just walk around a lot of the clients or the engineering service providers that are also working for our clients, we’re not a young industry. I think we need to bring some more youth into it.

Andy Veron: Yeah, for sure.

Great insights. I think 26 is going to be an amazing year for the industries that we serve collectively.

Guys, you are tremendous partners of Contruent and we value that and thank you for that. Just talk a minute about the way you’re driving value out of the Contruent tool. We talked a lot about connected cost and schedule and performance data and integrated delivery. Just talk a little bit about your own experience.

Joe Leone: Yeah. So look, I could talk about what our experience has been and the reason why we opted for Contruent.

We’re a small business. We’re a project services provider. We don’t necessarily, we’re software or tool agnostic because our clients may already have their set of tools.

But when it came time for us to choose our tool, and we sourced the market and looked at what was out there, and keep in mind we’re a small agile organization with limited resources. We don’t have a lot of financial backing. I personally bootstrapped the company in the first years.

What we found in Contruent was a tool that provided us the opportunity to work the way we’ve been working with all the best practices that we know in project controls, project management, contracts, procurement, estimating.

We were familiar with the methodology behind it. What I personally liked about Contruent was the out-of-the-box version was basically usable.

In fact on our first mandates with Contruent we were able to flip the estimate into a control budget within days. I know for a lot of your competitors out there and tools that our clients also use, that’s not possible because they require a large amount of configuration.

So for us, the fact that we were able to use it essentially from day one with little to no configuration and quite frankly little to no training because the methodology was consistent with what we were accustomed to, the way we were accustomed to work, I think that was the selling feature for us.

Andy Veron: Yeah. With 30 years of a software that was built by cost engineers and cost professionals for cost engineers and cost professionals and we stand by that, right? So that’s great.

Les, anything you’d like to add?

Les McMullen: Yeah, I concur with that. I’ve looked at a lot of project management softwares in recent years and I know what works and what doesn’t.

What I see with Contruent, platforms are designed around the project life cycle. We talked about that earlier, from the estimate, the planning, the commitments, the execution, the forecasting, eventual close out, and then the cycle back in the control loop so that you have your benchmark data in a good format.

A lot of companies have really separate software. They’re working with three, four separate software. I saw a study by IPA a while back looking at software and you can see it’s all over the place in the industry. A lot of companies are constantly updating their software. Some are very unhappy with their software.

I think with the change in technology, we really don’t have an excuse. We need to get the best tools.

The delivery speed I would say from Contruent stems from the software being designed about how capital projects are managed. That’s what Joe was basically saying.

Also when the software reflects that flow, the team spends less time on integration, more time on decision-making. So instead of customization, teams adopt proven structures consistent with best practices.

You had mentioned it earlier, the fact that the estimate is not abandoned once the project starts. The estimate is worked on and improved on. It remains a traceable basis through the life of the project preserving the estimate, forecast, feedback, and that benchmarking loop.

Joe Leone: And the other thing we actually appreciate, when we came on board with Contruent we were just a handful of employees. We’ve grown since then. We’re involved on some major projects. I would even consider them potentially generational projects.

Even though we weren’t a big organization, your folks have always worked with us. If we needed certain improvements, if we needed certain tweaks to an already usable software, we were always able to talk to someone without any issue.

In fact, I think Les has a fortnightly meeting with some of the people there at Contruent and consistently look at what the added features are.

As a small business owner I really appreciate that because I know I wouldn’t get that with a large organization. So that’s definitely something that I find very useful.

Andy Veron: I really appreciate that and like I said earlier, we truly value our partnership and thank you guys for that.

Guys, I always like to close with just a couple reflections as I listen to the conversation. Guys, thank you. You guys shared on a lot of topics and your insights are amazing.

Bringing certainty to capital programs is not about eliminating risk. It’s about aligning people, process, and data around a single source of truth. That rang out for me listening to you both.

From mega projects to aligned portfolios, success comes from transparency, integration, and shared accountability. When it comes down to it, that’s what you need to manage any project no matter what the size is.

I really do appreciate the passion that you guys put into these industry standards and these organizations like AACE and CII. It’s what’s going to keep the next generation informed and going.

Guys, I can’t thank you enough for joining me today. Let’s keep this conversation going online once this is published. Let’s hope we get a lot of great comments from folks.

All I ask you guys is keep the conversation rolling and for the better of the industry. That’s why we do these. Thank you and really appreciate your time.

Any final thoughts?

Joe Leone: Yeah. No, thank you Andy. This is great to be able to share our experiences with our colleagues out there and yeah we should do more of this.

Your conclusion pretty much hits the nail on the head. For 2026 and beyond, I think we need to focus in on those issues if we want to be successful in the project space.

Andy Veron: Les, over to you.

Les McMullen: Well I just refer back to our company slogan, bring certainty to your capital projects. That’s what we intend to do. That’s what our clients need.

But to do that you need to have the structures in place. You need to have that robust proactive cost control view with forecasting, and also working very closely with risk management. That’s a big part these days and with the best tools you can on the market.

I think that’s really the way to achieve successful project delivery. Getting everybody on board, getting the team together, and really working through the project life cycle to deliver projects successfully.

Andy Veron: Great summary guys. Thank you so much and happy new year. 26 sounds like it’s going to be a super exciting year for your organization, and I think many organizations around the world that are focused on delivering projects and programs.

Guys, thank you very much and we’ll talk to you soon.

Joe Leone: Thank you.

Les McMullen: Thank you, Andy. Appreciate it.