Systems Thinking in Megaprojects: How to Fix Broken Integration

Episode Overview

Most project failures aren’t caused by a single issue: they’re the result of broken integration. Orion Matthews sits down with Ellie Moradinezhad, President and Founder of tactHive Consulting and former Global Discipline Director for Project Management Development at Hatch, to unpack the most misunderstood concept in major project delivery. Ellie brings a practical framework (vertical, horizontal and cross-functional integration, running across systems, procedures and people) and ninety minutes of stories from Canada’s biggest transit programs, global oil and gas, and a PMO that spanned thousands of projects. If you’ve watched a project fall apart despite having the right tools and talent in the room, this episode explains what was actually missing.

Inside the Episode

The conversation as it actually unfolded: eight chapters across 90 minutes, following the show’s four-act arc: intro, topics & projects, advice, wrap-up. The strip maps each chapter’s share of the runtime; timestamps are approximate. Click any block to jump to its chapter.

Each block links to its chapter below: the map mirrors how the recorded conversation flows.

Who carried the mic

The Guest · Ellie Moradinezhad

Ellie Moradinezhad, BEng, MBA, PMP

President & Founder, tactHive Consulting

Burlington, Ontario, Canada

Systems ThinkingPMO DesignProject GovernanceTransit MegaprojectsChange Management

Ellie started as a chemical engineer with Rudolf Group (Lya Fam Chemie), the German-Iranian industrial firm where she spent six years, got curious about how anyone manages megaprojects “thousands of miles away,” and answered the question with an executive MBA (Industrial Management Institute, 2009–2011) and a move into oil and gas: a procurement role with Statoil (2007–2009), then international contracts with Payahoor and a country-level business-manager role with telecom contractor CSE-Transtel. After moving to Canada, she climbed from project coordinator (IBI Group, 2014) to project director on some of the country’s largest transit programs, including the Eglinton Crosstown LRT and Metrolinx’s GO Expansion (RER OnCorr), with global engineering firms including IBI Group, Hatch and GHD, and returned to Hatch as Global Discipline Director for Project Management Development (2023–2024), the role the episode introduces her by. Since March 2022 she has run tactHive Consulting, a boutique Canadian advisory firm focused on business-driven PMOs, project governance and performance improvement for complex capital programs, and, per her LinkedIn, since April 2026 she has also served as Sr. Commercial Director at Egis in Canada.

“Systems thinking, more than anything else, is a mindset: how to be open to contradictory information, how to review, analyze and absorb the right information rather than being affected by one specific methodology or one specific media.”Ellie Moradinezhad · on the show, ~1:22:50

Portfolio and contract figures as cited by Ellie on air, from memory: directional, not audited.

Career journey

Roles, employers and dates from Ellie’s LinkedIn bio. The gold bar marks tactHive running concurrently: she founded the firm in March 2022 and has led it alongside the later Hatch and Egis engagements. The Egis role (April 2026–) is from her LinkedIn and isn’t discussed in the episode.

The Host · Orion Matthews

Orion Matthews

Founder, Queryon · Host, The Major Project Podcast · PMO data & analytics

Eugene, Oregon, United States

Project Controls ReportingPMO Data AnalyticsCapital PortfoliosAI in ProjectsPower BI

Orion is an award-winning programmer, entrepreneur and technology executive who has spent the last decade in the engine room of major capital projects. He founded Queryon in Washington, D.C. in 2015 with a focus on data analytics and software for the construction industry, starting with bellwether client BP, whose project-controls solutions his team deployed globally, from the North Sea to Azerbaijan to Houston. Today he's a recognized expert in PMO data analytics and project-controls reporting, serving billion-dollar portfolios for owners including BP, Santos, Balfour Beatty and Turner & Townsend, a regular speaker at major industry conferences on AI and analytics in capital projects, and the host of this show.

From Chemistry to the Giga Picture

Orion opens with the show’s standing frame and a long, earned introduction. Then Ellie tells the origin story: a chemical engineer on small industrial projects who couldn’t stop wondering how anyone delivers the giant ones, and the factory owner whose end-of-day questions taught her to see the whole system before she had a name for it.

“I was always curious: if we are struggling to deliver small projects in the industrial sector, how are they delivering huge megaprojects thousands of miles away? How are they managing big corporates globally? That was the reason I started my MBA.”Ellie Moradinezhad · ~2:20

1. The guest intro lands the arc: 24+ years across transportation, infrastructure, energy and industrial; Hatch, GHD, IBI Group; Eglinton Crosstown and GO Expansion (RER OnCorr).~0:35
2. The MBA as a systems-thinking bootcamp: finance, organizational behavior, negotiations, contracts (“courses we never had as engineers”), studied while working procurement on Statoil-led oil & gas projects.~3:00
3. The Canada restart: oil and gas hiring was frozen, so she was “accidentally” hired by an engineering consultancy: project coordinator, then project manager, then director-level roles in transit.~4:20
4. Why Hatch tapped her to reestablish global project management development: a diversified background, “and maybe because of the ideas I had.”~5:15
5. “Even today, I consider it a platform for my systems thinking”: the internship, decades later.~8:05

What Integration Actually Means

Orion notes that integration usually only comes up in after-action reviews: after it broke. So they start from the definition, and Ellie immediately locates the failure inside the dictionary entry itself: everyone does the combining; almost no one checks the combination is effective. From there she lays out the three domains (systems, people, procedures) and a requirements-driven sequence for building integration deliberately.

“Integration is the action of combining two or more things in an effective way; that’s the Cambridge definition. In reality, we take the combination part and we forget about the effectiveness.”Ellie Moradinezhad · ~9:30

1. Define first, argue later: “Many misunderstandings start from different interpretations of one vocabulary.”~9:10
2. Borrowing from software: map the functions up front, then build iteratively: you can’t address everything at once.~12:45
3. The wider environment belongs in the system: communities, future economy, growth, environmental impacts: “we are designing the future.”~13:40
4. Sequencing, answered like an engineer: interview projects to identify requirements → go vertical (what the portfolio, program and business need to see) → go horizontal (what each function needs and struggles with).~17:00–18:30
5. Fit the sophistication to the tier: at Hatch, systems designed for major projects were crushing thousands of small ones: “when your budget is small, sophisticated procedures and systems may kill your budget.”~16:00
6. Cross-functional review (routine in engineering management, rare in PMO and organizational development), and it never ends: “That review and continuous improvement should take forever. The needs are changing, the market is changing, your people are changing.”~19:20

ROI & the People-Problem Trap

The hardest part of integration work isn’t the design: it’s selling prevention to people who aren’t in pain yet. Ellie is unusually honest here: she names the symptoms that finally make leaders call for help, walks through an ERP failure that everyone had misdiagnosed, and admits the communication mistakes she made in her own corporate years. Then the conversation turns to resistance, curiosity, and when to reach for the hammer.

“I’ll tell you the truth. I made some mistakes myself. I didn’t communicate the ROI and the benefits in a way that could convince my own managers. You need to change your communication language, see the problems from their perspective, find the numbers at pilot level, and share the aggregated numbers gradually.”Ellie Moradinezhad · ~23:20

1. Why prevention doesn’t sell: “It’s like problem solving versus risk management: when the problem is not there, people are not investing in preventative solutions.”~20:40
2. Orion’s confession: his leadership instinct is to pick one lane (“it’s a people problem”) and launch an initiative; Ellie’s reframe: treat it as an integration issue and root-cause the combination.~24:00
3. “Blaming others is always the simplest way. Blaming ourselves is the most difficult.”~24:55
4. The full report lands: leadership “so surprised how much more complex the problem is, they thought, ‘we’ll just change the setup in the system and everything will be fine.’”~29:10
5. On resistance: “As an engineer I underestimated this in the past and I overestimate it today: a big portion of our decisions are made emotionally rather than logically.”~30:00
6. The toolkit: engage people from day one, workshops plus confidential private interviews (“that should be part of any contract”), stay curious, connect their reasons to your root causes, and prioritize what they see as the priority.~31:00–33:45
7. On force: it depends on your role and authority: read the room, adapt mid-presentation, put concerns in writing, and remember “ultimately they are the decision makers.”~34:30–37:30

Joint Ventures, RACI & One Team

Inside one company, integration is hard. In a joint venture, you’re integrating entities whose objectives “may not be aligned at all, except one: delivering the project successfully.” Ellie compares oil-and-gas EPC culture with Ontario’s alliance-model transit programs, explains why the P3 era flipped long-standing roles overnight, and makes the case that a RACI isn’t paperwork: it’s how collaborative models survive contact with pressure.

“On Eglinton Crosstown I was sitting at this desk, my construction team member was sitting next to me, the client was a few floors down. It created an environment where we really didn’t feel we were from different teams; you want to feel that you are one team.”Ellie Moradinezhad · ~50:50

1. Start from the common goal: it may be the only objective the JV partners actually share.~38:30
2. PMO playbook for collaborative models: understand the contract and delivery model, strategize, engage early: “bring people in and let them be part of that governance creation.”~42:00
3. System selection as a JV negotiation: capability is only one factor: cost, integration with the owner’s systems and reporting, and how many people can use it without retraining decide the pick. On OnCorr, leadership ran dedicated sessions just to choose the software.~43:20
4. RACI, taught properly: define the structure, roles and authority levels; decisions escalate by thresholds: PM → steering or alliance committee → client and investors. The decision-maker and the ultimately accountable person are often not the same, and delegation must be explicit.~44:40–46:50
5. The bottleneck test: on paper the PM reviews every invoice; on a major project that PM becomes the constraint, so responsibilities get delegated deliberately, not by accident.~47:00
6. Remote vs in-person: a 2.5-year OnCorr proposal ran across Australia, the Middle East, South Africa, the Americas and two Canadian provinces, and won a $15B job. It worked, “but you can do it for a certain time”; by the end (mid-COVID) she was exhausted, and today she wants both modes.~49:20

PMO at Scale & Measuring Maturity

Orion asks for a concrete story, and Ellie delivers the biggest one she has: leading global project management development at Hatch, where the problem wasn’t one megaproject but thousands of small ones: every sector, every contract model, dozens of countries. Her team’s answer, a step-by-step delivery platform, worked, and then created its own new problem. The chapter closes with the honest state of the art in measuring integration maturity.

“You solve some problems, and then it creates new problems. We started to think: OK, who will be responsible to maintain this huge monster now?”Ellie Moradinezhad · ~57:50

1. “In engineering companies, to be honest, anybody can be a project manager”, and many of them don’t want the PM half of the job: “Why do I have to issue the invoice? Because now you are a project manager in addition to the technical expert.”~56:30
2. The unsolved ending, admitted openly: maintaining the platform stayed a problem when she left. “These are the real struggles.”~58:00
3. Maturity models exist (PMI’s OPM3, PRINCE2’s model, P3M3, plus IT- and BIM-aligned checklists), but they mostly grade one area at a time.~59:00
4. The gap she built her own method for: “Many of these methodologies focus on a specific area; they are not covering the integration: vertical, horizontal and cross-functional, and between systems, procedures and people.”~59:40
5. The humility clause: “It’s an improving method… I don’t think I know everything. I learn a lot.”~1:00:45

AI Meets Integration

Orion asks where AI intersects the cross-functional space, and the exchange gets genuinely two-sided: Ellie is already building agent solutions with client teams, and Orion is shipping AI into project controls. Her most interesting claim is architectural: that agents may make today’s brutally expensive point-to-point systems integration unnecessary, starting at the reporting layer.

“Integrating these platforms on infrastructure projects is extremely expensive and not cost-effective, and you cannot just integrate on each project, leave it, and jump to another project with new systems. The best thing might be integrating via agent solutions at the reporting level.”Ellie Moradinezhad · ~1:03:40

1. She’s in the arena: “I got engaged with a few teams to develop agent solutions for a few small areas and analysis… it needs a lot of fine-tuning.”~1:03:00
2. Orion’s counterpart thesis, AI as a “decision accelerator”: the Markov simulation is done before the meeting, so the cost engineers and schedulers spend their time on the decision itself.~1:05:15
3. His prediction, flagged as such: by 2028, 15% of decisions in the construction space made autonomously (cited from memory on air; treat as directional).~1:05:20
4. Her sleeper pick, risk: “We are extremely underestimating risk management.” Geopolitics moving steel prices, multi-front changes rippling beyond the critical path: “AI can evaluate all the scenarios simultaneously and calculate the probabilities of the outcome much quicker than we could.”~1:06:10

Servant Leadership

Orion pivots to the part of Ellie’s bio he hadn’t introduced: she’s a vocal advocate for servant leadership. Her answer starts with a Statoil-era manager two layers up who redefined the job for her, and lands somewhere unusual for an engineering podcast: personality types, executive coaching, and a story about grief on a joint venture that explains why “the human-level touch” is an integration tool.

“He would say: don’t apologize, and never thank me for the job I’m here to do. I’m here to solve the problems that you alone couldn’t solve, and support you to achieve what you are supposed to achieve.”Ellie Moradinezhad, on her Statoil-era manager · ~1:08:50

1. The humility of the welcome line: that manager and his wife greeted every team member one by one at events, and said goodbye the same way.~1:09:20
2. Mentorship as future-building: the next generation is “extremely clever, with a different mindset; we are building the future with them and for them.”~1:10:50
3. The engineer’s conversion: “I was totally against psychology: everything should be two plus two.” A struggle on a major project led her manager to suggest an executive coach; the tests were “very eye-opening.”~1:14:30
4. What the coaching fixed: an intuitive who jumps to conclusions learning to ask analytical teammates what they observe: “not to assume that whatever I see, everybody else sees.”~1:15:40
5. The story that stays with you: she lost her father mid-project, and her JV counterpart never acknowledged it: “that human-level touch actually connects us together.”~1:13:30

Advice, tactHive & the Takeaway

The close covers three beats: career advice for the young and the pivoting (including her own unvarnished account of founding a firm), what tactHive actually does, and the takeaway Orion asked for: where to go deeper on systems thinking. Her answer refuses the reading-list format entirely, and it’s the strongest section of the episode.

“Starting a business in Canada is not easy. Consulting at all is not easy. I’m not a hundred percent sure even today if it was the right decision, but I owed it to myself to give it a try. That was my dream for many years.”Ellie Moradinezhad · ~1:17:30

1. “Be patient, step by step. Accept more responsibility, be brave, try different things… this life is beautiful, and there are so many things to learn.”~1:19:40
2. Change management, redefined: not a cost-and-schedule addendum but a lifecycle discipline: “it starts much earlier, from bid phase, proposal preparation and negotiation, and continues to project closing.”~1:20:50
3. The anti-reading-list: “You can Google and find thousands of reference books. But real systems thinking, more than anything else, is a mindset: be open to contradictory information.”~1:22:40
4. Widen the aperture: project leaders need finance, economy and politics (“politics is one of the main influencers on these major projects”), plus economic, environmental and social risk, not just project risk.~1:23:40
5. “We have become very polarized… read totally contradictory opinions. It’s important to hear them, because your client might have the same perspective.”~1:25:40
6. The gardening masterclass: soil, water, sun, zone, climate shift: a complete systems-mapping tutorial disguised as a hobby, ending at “then we can start to make the right decisions and design the best systems.”~1:28:00
7. Orion’s synthesis: you don’t have to become the IT expert: take little bites of everyone’s world, “because you can’t think in systems if you can’t see a little bit from other people’s perspective.”~1:26:40

The Big Ideas

Three ideas carry the episode. Sketched here the way a PMO war room would whiteboard them.

Bookshelf & Links

Asked for books, Ellie deliberately declined the reading list (“real systems thinking is a mindset”), but she did leave concrete pointers for anyone who wants to measure where they stand.

Quote Bank

The best on-the-record lines, gathered in one filterable place. “Highlight” marks the lines most worth scrubbing back for; quotes are lightly condensed and timestamps are approximate.