Episode Overview
Finishing a billion-dollar project on time and on budget isn’t luck: it’s a choice. That’s the thesis Geoff Ryan has spent two decades earning the right to say: a pipe fitter who rose to project manager, helped coin “WorkFace Planning” on Alberta’s megaprojects, and, after CII’s research expanded it into Advanced Work Packaging, wrote the books the discipline runs on. Host Orion Matthews walks him from the anatomy of a single installation work package up to the audit data across 70 megaprojects showing a 22% productivity difference, then into the data center gold rush, where the delivery model itself has flipped. The listener gets the method, the ROI math, and a to-do list for the decade ahead.
Predictable execution is a choice
“Today the reality is: it’s a choice. You have the choice to finish on time and on budget.” Every time a foreman goes to the field, they should carry a proven, constraint-free package. Everything else in AWP exists to make that true.
The pipe fitter who wrote the book
Geoff Ryan came up through the trades, helped define WorkFace Planning in Alberta, founded Insight-AWP, and authored Schedule for Sale and Even More Schedule for Sale, the latter now in five languages.
22% → 10% → 1,000%
Across 70 audited megaprojects: 45%-compliant vs 75%-compliant projects show 22% busier workers, roughly 10% of total project cost on the table. On a $1B project, ~$10M of AWP spend chasing ~$100M of savings.
Everything attributed here was said on the record in the released episode. Quotes are transcribed from the conversation and lightly condensed for readability (false starts and fillers removed, meaning untouched), and timestamps are approximate. Biographical details are limited to what Geoff says on the record and the episode’s published show notes. The hero banner uses the show’s design system rather than photography: no license-verified project photos were used for this episode.
Episode Timeline
The conversation as it actually unfolded: eight chapters across 74 minutes, following the show’s four-act arc. The strip maps each chapter’s share of the runtime; timestamps are approximate. Click any block to jump to its chapter.
“It works out to about 10% of the total cost of the project is what’s on the table, which is a crazy statement. You should not be able to move a billion-dollar project 10%. But that’s essentially what’s on the table.” ~18:20
Two acts carry the weight: the AWP method (chapters 02–03) and its data center application (04–05). Then the wrap runs long because the ROI math lands there.
From Pipe Fitter to AWP
The welcome, Geoff’s route up from the trades, and the Alberta research that became WorkFace Planning, then AWP.
Inside the Installation Work Package
What lands in a foreman’s hands, why EPC silos backfire, “construction in heaven,” and CII’s 60 conditions.
The Billion-Dollar Math
70 megaproject audits, tool-time studies, the 22% delta, and the thesis: on-time delivery is a choice.
Data Centers & the PEPSI Model
2,700 megaprojects by 2030, procurement-first delivery, modular everything, and telling Google they suck at data.
The Project Director’s Playbook
Start from a blank page, let procurement drive the schedule, skip the lump sum, and the case for true project management.
Careers & Measurement
Take your resume to a conference, measure what you manage, share the data, and Orion’s progress-bar test.
2030: Ruptures, AI & Regulation
Uber-style ruptures, the world’s manufacturing capacity in an app, burning platforms, and mandated best practice.
The Books, AWP Chat & Insight-AWP
Two books (the AWP edition in five languages), an AWP chatbot in the works, ~30 embedded PMs, and the $10M → $100M close.
Who carried the mic
A healthy guest-forward split for an interview show, measured by word share across the full transcript.
The Guest · Geoff Ryan
Geoff came up through the trades: a pipe fitter for many years who worked through the ranks of construction to become a project manager. In the early 2000s he joined a committee of Alberta owner representatives dissecting why megaprojects go sideways; two years of research landed on a tangible deliverable (the foreman gets a proven, week-long package) and a name the group coined for it: WorkFace Planning, “where the pick hits the coal.” He hung up his own shingle to help projects implement it (Insight-AWP, which he has owned and run since 2006), and when CII’s research expanded the model across engineering, procurement and construction as Advanced Work Packaging, he wrote the books that carry it: Schedule for Sale (2009) and Even More Schedule for Sale (2017). His LinkedIn fills in the résumé behind the story: a NAIT-certified pipefitter/steamfitter/gasfitter with PMP training, six-plus years as a productivity specialist with Fluor, KBR and Jacobs on four multi-billion-dollar projects, and a firm that has stood up AWP or WorkFace Planning on 33 megaprojects ($50M–$10B), written the processes for 10 major owners, and developed several hundred Workface Planners. Today he runs Insight-AWP from Kemah, Texas (roughly 30 project managers embedded on megaprojects around the world), with a decade of audit data across 70 of them, and a growing data center practice.
“Today the reality is: it’s a choice. You have the choice to finish on time and on budget.”Geoff Ryan · on the record, ~19:10
All four numbers as shared by Geoff on the record in this episode.
Career journey
Roles, employers and years from Geoff’s LinkedIn profile (the Exxon, Shell, Cameco and Valero engagements ran through Insight-wfp / Insight-AWP).
The AWP lineage
- The trade
- Pipe fitter for many years; worked through the ranks of construction and studied to become a project manager. Trained at NAIT (Northern Alberta Institute of Technology): Pipefitter/Steamfitter/Gasfitter, then PMP / project management.
- The research
- Two years on an Alberta owners’ committee comparing succeeding and failing megaprojects. The difference: good-quality plans with a tangible deliverable for the foreman. Rolled out at industry conferences through 2005. He stayed in the construction-productivity R&D world for decades: by his own tally, 15 years with COAA and 10 with CII.
- The expansion
- CII (the Construction Industry Institute, out of the University of Texas) researched the model and widened it from a construction fix into an engineering-procurement-construction framework: Advanced Work Packaging.
- The practice
- Insight-AWP coaches three lanes on live projects: engineering & procurement, information management (“consumable data”), and work packaging, “we’re not consultants, we’re project managers.”
Find him
- Based in
- Kemah, Texas (Houston area).
- /in/geoff-ryan-pmp-66786212
- Company
- insight-awp.com · Insight-AWP
- Videos
- Insight-AWP on YouTube: start with “AWP by the Numbers”
- The books
- Even More Schedule for Sale · Schedule for Sale
The Host · Orion Matthews
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.
Why this pairing works
- Data meets the workface
- Geoff’s scorecards and tool-time studies are exactly the measurement layer Orion builds reporting on. The episode keeps landing on the same maxim: if you measure it, you manage it.
- Standards people
- Geoff is pushing AWP toward mandated best practice with governments; Orion is building an open, ISO 21508-aligned common data model for project controls. The closing stretch is two standards-makers comparing notes.
Beyond the PMO
- The builder’s arc
- Founded Introspect Software out of high school; built and sold Design-PT (acquired 2015). His software has run from McMurdo Station to aircraft carriers, with write-ups in Scientific American, CNN and Maxim, and a BP Helios Award.
From Pipe Fitter to AWP
Geoff’s route in: a pipe fitter who worked up through the ranks to project manager, then joined a committee of Alberta owner representatives in the early 2000s dissecting why megaprojects go sideways. Two years of research landed on a deceptively simple finding: the winners weren’t just planning better, they were handing foremen proven, week-long packages.
“It’s all about the workers and the foreman. If we can give them everything they need, then they get a lot of stuff done. Now, if you don’t give it to them, they don’t get much done.”Geoff Ryan · ~2:10
The committee’s discipline
“We were very strict on ourselves. We weren’t trying to create an answer; we wanted to capture best practices. We had to have examples of where people were doing this and being successful.” ~3:00
The CII expansion
“It’s not actually just a construction problem. It’s an engineering-procurement-construction problem. It’s okay to say we want packages, but if you don’t have the drawings, you don’t have the materials, you’re not building packages.” ~4:30
- A series of early-2000s Alberta megaprojects “had really bad results”, so owners banded together to compare succeeding and failing projects. The difference: good-quality plans with a tangible deliverable.~0:45
- Why “WorkFace Planning”: the workface is where the pick hits the coal. The name deliberately centers the workers and the foreman.~1:50
- The findings were rolled out at conferences through 2005, but teams had only literature and no support, so Geoff quit his job and hung up a shingle to help implement. That was the start of his company.~3:40
- CII (the Construction Industry Institute, out of the University of Texas) saw the model at a conference, researched it for a couple of years, and expanded WorkFace Planning into Advanced Work Packaging.~4:10
Inside the Installation Work Package
Orion plays the brand-new foreman: what actually lands in my hands? Geoff walks the anatomy of an installation work package (scope, materials, tools, crane, permits, crew and budgeted hours, with a risk register in the back), then widens out to why the traditional model breaks (EPC silos), how to flip it (“construction in heaven”), and the CII conditions that predict whether your packages will actually be executable.
“Basically setting the foreman up to understand an expectation of what we expect to get done, but also that we’ve done everything we can to make that happen. And now it’s their role to execute.”Geoff Ryan · ~6:10
The parent in the room
“Project management needs to be recognized as a holistic view of the project. I raised a couple of teenagers, so I often think of this as: I’m the parent in the room as the project manager, trying to get these teenagers to play nice with each other.” ~8:20
Silos backfire
“If you optimize engineering and procurement to their own budgets and schedules, then construction pays the price, and construction truly represents half of the cost of any project. We are optimizing the smaller costs and construction pays the big price.” ~9:10
- IWP anatomy: here’s the scope, materials organized for delivery, “we think it’s five days’ work for 10 people, so you earn 500 hours when you get this done”; tools, crane, permits included, plus quality checkpoints and safety risks addressed.~5:40–6:50
- The path-of-construction workshop: “Imagine construction in heaven: what does that look like?”, with engineering and procurement in the room, asked whether they can deliver in that sequence.~10:00
- Too late to start? “Don’t put out work you can’t do. Just put out work you can do”: executable packages pay off at any stage of the project.~11:20
- The trust deficit: foremen have spent careers being “pushed into the field, given 10 people and starved for information and materials”. Moving them from survival mode to planning a full week takes training.~13:10
- The health check: CII published a list of 60 conditions under which AWP works well. Auditing the process against them “tells you a lot more about our ability to build these packages than the actual package.”~14:30
The Billion-Dollar Math
Orion asks the project-director question: happy foremen are nice. Where’s the ROI? Geoff answers with a decade of measurement: CII-scorecard audits paired with in-field tool-time studies, accumulated across 70 megaprojects around the world.
“Once you have those points established, you can say: this is how much it actually changes. So the answer is 22%. The difference between 45% compliant with best practices and 75% compliant is 22% busier workers.”Geoff Ryan · ~18:00
What that translates to
“Say you get 20% more done every day. Just think about that across 5,000 workers. It works out to about 10% of the total cost of the project on the table, which is a crazy statement. You should not be able to move a billion-dollar project 10%. But that’s essentially what’s on the table.” ~18:20
The thesis, in one line
“If nothing else, I would like to share with people the fact that today the reality is: it’s a choice. You have the choice to finish on time and on budget.” ~19:10
- The method: score a project’s alignment with CII best practices, then measure in the field how busy the workers actually are, “as you can imagine, there’s a correlation between how organized the project is and how busy the workers are.”~16:20
- The dataset: 70 megaprojects over the last 10 years, from around the world, enough to average compliance against tool time.~17:20
- Orion’s takeaway lands where most listeners will: “I think that won’t be on the table forever, but it’s on the table today.”~18:40
The 22% tool-time delta, the ~10% of total project cost, and the later $10M → $100M example are Geoff’s own audit figures, cited from memory on the record. Insight-AWP’s video “AWP by the Numbers” walks the underlying 70-project dataset; treat the on-air values as directional.
Data Centers & the PEPSI Model
Roughly 2,700 U.S. megaprojects before 2030: “basically a gold rush.” The equipment race has inverted the delivery model: you no longer design a facility and then buy the parts; you find out what you can buy and design around it. Geoff calls it the PEPSI model (Procurement, Engineering, Planning, Construction, Initiate) and follows the consequences through agile engineering, modularization, and tech owners learning what they don’t know.
“You need to go out into the market and figure out what can I buy, use that to come up with the capacity you’re trying to achieve, and then you design around what you could procure. That’s the procurement, engineering, planning, construction, initiate model: the PEPSI model.”Geoff Ryan · ~23:00
Traditional EPC says “this is what I want: go buy it.” The data center gold rush runs the other way:
Procure: what can I actually get? → Engineer: design around it → Plan: sequence to the parts → Construct → Initiate
Everything modular
“As much as we want to build something and have it operate for the next 50 years, our data centers will not do that. The technology is gonna change every year, if not six months, so everything we build has to be modularized, so it can be pulled out and the new stuff put in.” ~24:10
Telling Google they suck at data
“You can imagine going to Google and telling them that they suck at data. But they do, because they don’t know what to do with it. The true value of data is understanding what to do with it, or how to use it.” ~28:10
- The scale: “basically 2,700 mega projects before 2030” in the U.S. alone, each in the hundred-to-five-hundred-million range, “do the math on that.”~20:00
- The automated-warehouse preview: “When we went to them and said, I know you guys are in the business of data, but you suck at building… they have a very low tolerance for being told that.”~27:40
- “Smart people know what they don’t know”: Google, Meta and Microsoft are really good at what they do; building their infrastructure is not part of that.~29:10
- The pairing that works: data scientists with “our grizzly old construction guy,” turning a PM’s “what do you need to know?” into consumable data, “which is actually how every app on your phone works.”~31:00–31:50
- Supply-chain muscle: the big players are going upstream to buy manufacturing capacity outright: “we hear about car manufacturers buying lithium mines; same thing, they’re trying to control their own supply chain.”~25:00
The Project Director’s Playbook
Orion sets the scene: you’ve just accepted the project-director role on a pre-FID data center. Geoff’s to-do list starts with humility (nobody’s done this before) and gets concrete fast: flexible engineering and procurement, construction in the room early, procurement driving the schedule, contracts built for flexibility, and a case for project management as its own profession.
“Let’s just start with a blank page and say: nobody knows how to do this. We don’t need people to come up and say, ‘I’ve done this before, you’re in good hands.’ We need people who are flexible: ‘I’m with you, I’m gonna figure it out.’”Geoff Ryan · ~33:00
Procurement drives the schedule
“When can I have this stuff? We’re gonna build the schedule around when that gets here, and then have a fanatical focus on holding those dates. Fly over there, have a look at the production facility, see your piece of equipment being built.” ~36:00
No lump sums (for now)
“Nobody knows how much it’s gonna cost or how long it’s gonna take. Trying to absolve risk by having a lump-sum contract in that space is not gonna work. This is gonna be about flexibility, and maybe the emergence of true project management.” ~37:00
- Equipment sold out from under you: “We’ve seen instances where it gets built and then it goes out to the highest bidder; you’re at the back of the line again because you weren’t in that race.”~36:30
- True project management: a unique discipline, not a function of engineering, possibly a separate company that conducts the orchestra with no vested interest in E, P or C.~37:30
- Orion’s “project advocate” riff: one person whose only interest is the project itself, channeling a book he read years ago, Bare Knuckle Project Management.~37:40
- Geoff’s house build as third-party PM in miniature: “I don’t have a dog in any of those hunts, except that I want the whole thing to work for me.”~39:10
- Shallow pools: high-voltage and low-voltage electricians “are two separate professions”, and data center work is overwhelmingly high-voltage, with real safety stakes.~40:10
- “The quickest way to build anything is to build it once”: time-to-market must not impinge on quality and safety when the facility needs 99.99% uptime.~41:20
- Cooling keeps moving: air → water → submersion, “and they are three different buildings.” The owner takes the final connection and configuration, because that’s where their expertise lives.~43:30
Careers & Measurement
The flip side: you’re a student listening to this. Geoff’s advice is unusually literal (take your resume to a data center conference), then deepens into the discipline he thinks the next generation will actually build: measuring engineering and procurement the way we already measure construction, and sharing the data instead of hoarding it.
“There are piles of data center conferences going on right now. My advice would be to take your resume and go to one, or go to several. The industry is hungry for people that are just interested in going here. You don’t have to show up and say ‘I have done this before.’ Just: ‘I’m flexible. I wanna learn.’”Geoff Ryan · ~45:30
Project controls 101
“There’s a great project management expression: if you measure it, you manage it. What percentage complete are we when we finish procurement? Understanding what that equation is, and how to gauge the level of effort required, is going to be an evolving skillset.” ~46:20
Share the cards
“We’ve always kept those cards really close to our chest because we think it’s competitive advantage. Advanced work packaging is an example of collaboration in the industry, and I promise you, we all have the same problems. Collectively we know the answers, but individually we don’t.” ~47:40
- It works: Insight-AWP has hired people who walked up at conferences, “they came to us, which is awesome.”~46:00
- The real moat isn’t hoarded data: “What’s going to give you an advantage is that you’re really good at understanding what needs to get done and when it needs to get done, a predictable outcome based on that agility.”~48:10
- Orion’s progress-bar test: progress that goes backwards, or sits at 99% forever, is measurement lying to you. Geoff’s name for the disease: “a status that we call done but done.”~48:40–50:10
- On degrees: engineering or data science both work, but “25% of the jobs that we work now did not exist when we were at college. Give yourself a foundation, but understand that gets you to the starting line.”~51:00
2030: Ruptures, AI & Regulation
Orion asks for the forecast. Geoff’s answer braids three threads: industries change by rupture (Uber did it to taxis), AI as harnessed collective wisdom that could put the world’s manufacturing capacity in an app, and regulation as the burning platform that finally makes professional execution non-optional.
“Uber was a rupture, and the world changed from that point forward. We will have ruptures in our project management world, and I’m hoping AWP will be part of that. If you come in late or you overspend the budget, you had the choice to go there, and you chose not to.”Geoff Ryan · ~52:30
AI’s endgame
“Maybe we get a program where you put in the capacity you’re trying to achieve, it searches the world for what’s available and spits back your procurement plan: you can get this stuff, it’ll all fit together, do you wanna order it? We should be able to get the manufacturing capacity of the whole world in an app.” ~54:00
The burning platform
“Change comes from desperation. If we don’t have a burning platform, we’ll just keep doing what we’re doing, and it’ll be acceptable to run late and over budget. That’s really the job of government: to encourage us to go places we don’t really want to go.” ~56:10
- Regulatory precedents: the UK and Singapore have mandated BIM on government projects; Geoff hears Russia is considering AWP as a mandated best practice. (Cited from memory on air; directional.)~55:30
- Even hyperscalers: “Microsoft and Google I know are talking about mandating AWP… they know it’s a level of professionalism that they’re gonna need to make this work.”~56:50
- Orion’s 2026 project: an open-source common data model for project controls aligned to ISO 21508, the BIM / HL7 / MLS playbook applied to project data.~58:00
- Standards need teeth: “Once you have standards, you have to have measurement, much like ISO does, an auditing process on whether you’re compliant.”~59:30
- The deferred slippery slope: data centers need power: “how do we not make the price of residential power crazy?” Orion’s framing: watts per person becoming watts for bots. Parked “for a different day.”~59:50
The Books, AWP Chat & Insight-AWP
The wrap covers the artifacts: two books written so teams wouldn’t have to hire him, a translation story that doubles as a masterclass in knowledge transfer, an AWP chatbot in the works, and the business model behind ~30 project managers embedded on projects worldwide, closing on the ROI math that gives this episode its title.
“What do you mean, schedule for sale? How can you buy a schedule? Well, you can buy a schedule. But you can’t buy it with money. You’ve gotta buy it with effort and time and process.”Geoff Ryan · ~1:03:30
The reader’s verdict
“Most people that have been in the project industry any length of time read the book and they’re like, ‘Yeah, I didn’t learn anything, but I have a holistic understanding of how things fit with each other.’ Which is really what we’re trying to achieve.” ~1:04:00
The $10M → $100M case
“It costs you about $10 million to apply AWP on a billion-dollar project. If you realize that full 10%, you can reduce the cost of that project by a hundred million; that’s a thousand-percent return. Even if you only get a 500% return and the project finishes on time, it’s not even close.” ~1:10:40
- Schedule for Sale (the WorkFace Planning original) was written “so people didn’t have to hire us to figure this out”. When the model expanded into AWP, he wrote the next version: Even More Schedule for Sale, “the process of synchronizing engineering, procurement and construction.”~1:02:30
- The St. Petersburg translation: a polytechnic professor’s class spent a semester translating (and arguing about) the book. Now it’s in Russian, Mandarin, Spanish and Portuguese, plus an audiobook. “You don’t just Google-translate this type of concept. You have to understand it.”~1:04:50
- AWP Chat: the world’s published AWP data in a chatbot that answers only from that data, “a concept at the moment… watch this space.” Step one: asking the data owners.~1:06:10
- The business: ~30 embedded PMs (“we’re not consultants, we’re project managers”), coaching engineering & procurement, information management, and work packaging, typically for the life of the project.~1:08:00
- The continuous-improvement closer: “If you’re not doing AWP, what are you doing?”~1:11:20
- The parting gift: the free videos (“AWP by the Numbers” and augmented reality in construction), “because you need to convince somebody else to try this. Here’s the evidence.”~1:12:10–1:13:40
The Big Ideas
Three ideas carry the episode. Sketched here the way a workface planner would whiteboard them.
One week of work for one crew, proven executable before the foreman ever sees it.
The old theory said silo E, P and C and optimize each; the reality is construction (half of any project’s cost) pays for everyone else’s optimization.
The silo model
- Engineering and procurement optimized to their own budgets & schedules
- Drawings and materials arrive out of sequence
- Construction (half the project’s cost) pays the price
The AWP alignment
- Construction names its ideal sequence first
- Engineering & procurement sequence to match it
- In data centers, procurement drives the schedule: plan around when the parts arrive
A decade of paired audits turns “AWP works” into a number, and the number into a choice.
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.
From Pipe Fitter to AWP 0:00–~5:00
- Highlight“It’s all about the workers and the foreman. If we can give them everything they need, then they get a lot of stuff done. If you don’t give it to them, they don’t get much done.”
- “We weren’t trying to create an answer. We wanted to capture best practices; we had to have examples of where people were doing this and being successful.”
- “It’s not actually just a construction problem. It’s an engineering-procurement-construction problem… if you don’t have the drawings, you don’t have the materials, you’re not building packages.”
Inside the IWP ~5:00–15:30
- Highlight“Don’t put out work you can’t do. Just put out work you can do… If you just focus on building packages that are executable, you will get results, and you can do that at any stage of the project.”
- “I raised a couple of teenagers, so I often think of this as: I’m the parent in the room as the project manager, and I’m trying to get these teenagers to play nice with each other.”
- Highlight“If you optimize engineering and procurement to their own budgets and schedules, then construction pays the price, and construction truly represents half of the cost of any project.”
- “We’d have a path-of-construction workshop, and we say to the construction team: imagine construction in heaven. What does that look like?”
- “We push a foreman into the field, we give ’em 10 people, we say keep those guys busy, and then we starve them for information and materials… going from survival mode to planning a week takes time.”
- “Auditing the process as it develops tells you a lot more about our ability to build these packages than the actual package.”
The Billion-Dollar Math ~15:30–19:30
- Highlight“The difference between 45% compliant with best practices and 75% compliant: the difference is 22% busier workers.”
- Highlight“It works out to about 10% of the total cost of the project is what’s on the table. You should not be able to move a billion-dollar project 10%. But that’s essentially what’s on the table.”
- Highlight“Today the reality is: it’s a choice. You have the choice to finish on time and on budget.”
- “I would love to see the world be able to create projects that aren’t over budget and over schedule all the time. It feels like people just assume: if I do a billion-dollar project, it’s gonna be late, it’s gonna be a wreck, and we accept it as fact.”
Data Centers & PEPSI ~19:30–32:30
- Highlight“Basically 2,700 mega projects before 2030… do the math on that. It’s basically a gold rush.”
- Highlight“You need to go out into the market and figure out what can I buy, and then you design around what you could procure. That’s the procurement, engineering, planning, construction, initiate model: the PEPSI model.”
- “Everything we build has to be modularized so it can be pulled out and the new stuff put in: the technology is gonna change every year, if not six months.”
- Highlight“You can imagine going to Google and telling them that they suck at data. But they do, ’cause they don’t know what to do with it.”
- “We have great success when we have our data scientists paired with our grizzly old construction guy… ideally you bring them together to build consumable data, which is actually how every app on your phone works.”
- “We hear about car manufacturers buying lithium mines, same thing. They’re trying to control their own supply chain.”
The Director’s Playbook ~32:30–45:00
- Highlight“Let’s just start with a blank page and say: nobody knows how to do this. We need people who are flexible: ‘I’m with you, I’m gonna figure it out.’”
- Highlight“The procurement is gonna drive the schedule… and then have a fanatical focus on holding those dates. Fly over there, see your piece of equipment being built.”
- “We’ve seen instances where it gets built and then it goes out to the highest bidder; you’re at the back of the line again because you weren’t in that race.”
- “Trying to absolve risk by having a lump-sum contract in that space is not gonna work. This is gonna be about flexibility, and maybe the emergence of true project management.”
- “There has to be one person whose only interest is the project itself: you are the project advocate… able to say the things you could never say if your incentives aren’t aligned properly.”
- “Most often when we think we have an electrician, we think we’ve got an electrician. In the data center world, that’s not true: high voltage and connecting light bulbs are two separate professions.”
- Highlight“One of the foundations I was taught as a tradesperson: the quickest way to build anything is to build it once.”
- “We used to cool with air, then we used to cool with water, now we cool with submersion. And they are three different buildings.”
Careers & Measurement ~45:00–52:00
- Highlight“Take your resume and go to one, or go to several. The industry is hungry for people… You don’t have to show up and say ‘I have done this before.’ Just: ‘I’m flexible. I wanna learn.’”
- “There’s a great project management expression: if you measure it, you manage it, which is project controls 101.”
- Highlight“Advanced work packaging is an example of collaboration in the industry, and I promise you, we all have the same problems. Collectively we know the answers, but individually we don’t.”
- “You want a smooth progression where you start at zero and end at a hundred, and the rate of that progress bar is true to the reality of the project. If you say it’s 99%, it should be 99%, not 82.”
- “It’s a status that we call done but done.”
- “25% of the jobs that we work now did not exist when we were at college… give yourself an engineering or a data science foundation, but understand that gets you to the starting line.”
2030 & Regulation ~52:00–1:01:30
- Highlight“Uber was a rupture… we will have ruptures in our project management world, and I’m hoping AWP will be part of that.”
- Highlight“If you come in late or you overspend the budget, you had the choice to go there, and you chose not to.”
- “We should be able to get the manufacturing capacity of the whole world in an app that tells us what we can get, where it’s busy, how much it is and what the level of quality is.”
- “Change comes from desperation. You’ve heard of the burning platform: we need a burning platform… that’s really the job of government: to encourage us to go places we don’t really want to go.”
- “Something I’m working on for 2026 is a gold-standard open-source data model: this is how we model this information, and I don’t care what systems you have.”
Books & Insight-AWP ~1:01:30–1:14:00
- Highlight“You can buy a schedule, but you can’t buy it with money. You’ve gotta buy it with effort and time and process.”
- “They read the book and they’re like: yeah, I didn’t learn anything, but I have a holistic understanding of how things fit with each other. Which is really what we’re trying to achieve.”
- “You don’t just Google-translate this type of concept. You have to understand it.”
- “We’re not consultants, we’re project managers.”
- Highlight“It costs you about $10 million to apply AWP on a billion-dollar project. If you realize that full 10%, you can reduce the cost of that project by a hundred million. That’s a thousand-percent return.”
- “If we are in a continuous improvement model: if you’re not doing AWP, what are you doing?”
- “The videos are our gift to them… because basically you need to convince somebody else to try this. Here’s the evidence.”
- “We’re looking for those billion-dollar lessons, and I feel like AWP and that 10% is what really sticks with me. Here’s how you can save a hundred million dollars.”
Bookshelf & Links
Everything recommended in the episode, plus where to find the people and the show.
Geoff's bookshelf & resources
- The AWP book
- Even More Schedule for Sale · Geoff Ryan. “Basically the process of synchronizing engineering, procurement and construction.” Available as an audiobook and in Russian, Mandarin, Spanish and Portuguese.
- Where it started
- Schedule for Sale · Geoff Ryan (2009). The original WorkFace Planning guide, titled to wake up the reader.
- The evidence
- “AWP by the Numbers” (YouTube): walks the 70-project dataset behind the 22% figure. “It should be a tool in your back pocket… you need to convince somebody else to try this. Here’s the evidence.”
- Future state
- Augmented reality in construction (Insight-AWP): foremen carrying an iPad instead of a hard-copy package, seeing what they’re supposed to build.
- Raised by Orion
- Bare Knuckled Project Management · Gruebl, Welch, Dobson & Collart. The source of Orion’s “project advocate” framing (title recalled from memory on air).
- Institutions
- CII · Construction Industry Institute: the research home that expanded WorkFace Planning into AWP · ISO 21508: Orion’s anchor for a common project-controls data model.
- For job-seekers
- Data center conferences: “take your resume and go to one. Or go to several.”
The episode
- Listen
- Episode page (1h 14m) · Apple Podcasts · Spotify
- The guest
- Geoff Ryan on LinkedIn · insight-awp.com · Insight-AWP on YouTube
- The host
- Orion Matthews on LinkedIn · Queryon
- The show
- themajorprojectpodcast.com: new conversations from the people building projects over US$1 billion.