Episode Overview
On a $20 billion program, alignment is engineered, not hoped for. Tarun Gohel spent his West Qurna 2 years on the owner’s project-controls team in Dubai, coordinating design in Italy, fabrication in South Korea and execution in Iraq, and this episode is his playbook: put a 200–300-page project-controls requirements document in every contract, explain it face to face, incentivize instead of penalize, give every risk a trigger and an owner, and then audit your way to the true schedule. It ends with the human side: bombing a presentation, briefing Iraq’s Minister of Oil, and the curiosity that turned a piping designer into a project-controls director.
Documents don’t do the work
“Document cannot walk.” Requirements only matter when contractors price them, understand them and are rewarded for meeting them, and when the owner goes and verifies the reality behind the reports.
Piping designer → PC director
Tarun learned Primavera by helping a site planning engineer in the evenings. The career that followed runs through India, Kazakhstan, Ghana and Dubai to the U.S., including the owner-side controls team on West Qurna 2.
A greenfield the size of a city
West Qurna 2, Iraq: reserves in the billions of barrels, on the order of 100–150 wells, upstream processing, export infrastructure, a ~3,000-person camp and its own power plant, all executed from hubs across the globe.
Quotes are transcribed from the published 53-minute episode and lightly condensed for readability (false starts and fillers removed, meaning untouched). Timestamps are approximate, with the on-air welcome at 0:00. The chapter map, runtime strip and stats are computed from the same transcript. Biographical details come from what Tarun says on the record and from the episode’s published show notes; he appears in a personal capacity, and his views are his own, not any employer’s or project owner’s. The header is a design treatment: no project photography is used.
Episode Timeline
The conversation as it unfolds: seven chapters across 53 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.
Four dense Act II chapters (contracts, risk, audits, reporting) carry two-thirds of the runtime before the advice and bookshelf close.
The $20 Billion Scope 0:00
Reserves in the billions of barrels, 100–150 wells, a ~3,000-person camp, its own power plant, and hubs from Dubai to Italy to South Korea.
The 300-Page Handshake ~4:20
Project-controls requirements embedded in every contract, WBS control points, and why carrots beat sticks.
Risk Needs a Trigger ~13:00
Realistic registers, shared thresholds, and the thing most risk logs are missing: when to act, and who acts.
The Project Controls Audit ~21:50
Quarterly visits, owner-built realistic schedules, and how “everything’s on time” becomes an admitted two-month delay.
Reporting to the Minister ~30:10
Systemized reporting across three contract types, a bombed presentation, and how to brief the Minister of Oil.
Right-Sizing, AI & Breaking In ~39:30
Fitting requirements to a small team, AI as a productivity boost, and curiosity as a career engine.
The Bookshelf & Close ~49:00
Books, professional associations, managing money, and where to find Tarun.
Who carried the mic
A strongly guest-forward split: Orion sets up each theme and hands Tarun the floor. Measured across the full published conversation.
The Guest · Tarun Gohel
Tarun started as a piping designer in the field, and got curious. Evenings spent helping a site planning engineer type activities into Primavera became a planning career, and that career became senior project-controls leadership on mega projects across India, Kazakhstan, Ghana, Iraq and the Gulf: Senior Planning Engineer with Punj Lloyd in Atyrau, Project Controls Manager with KazStroyService, Contracts Manager with Zakhem Construction in Ghana; then nearly eight years with LUKOIL on the ~$20 billion West Qurna 2 program, first on site in Basra as Lead Planner, then as Project Controls Manager at the program’s Dubai administrative hub. There he worked on a 24-person owner-side project-controls team coordinating contractors and facilities across South Korea, Turkey, Pakistan, France, Italy and Russia, presenting results to executive leadership and, on occasion, to Iraq’s Minister of Oil. Along the way he collected an unusual credential stack: Chartered Quantity Surveyor (RICS), CIOB membership, an LL.M. in Construction Law and Arbitration, membership of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators, plus an MBA and an MS in Accountancy from the University of Illinois’ Gies College of Business. In 2020 he crossed into life-sciences capital projects at Sanofi, and since 2022 he has been Director, Global Project Portfolio Controls at Catalent, leading a global capital-project portfolio from Greater Houston.
“You, as an owner’s project-controls professional, have a responsibility to go and find out the truth, what is the real delay, so it doesn’t happen that one month there is zero delay and the next month, six months.”Tarun Gohel · on the show, ~24:00
Career journey
Chart drawn from Tarun’s LinkedIn history, which begins May 2004: the piping-design years that started it all, evenings typing activities into Primavera (~48:00), predate it.
On West Qurna 2
- Role
- Owner-side project-controls team: Lead Planner on site in Basra (2012–2015), then Project Controls Manager from the program’s Dubai administrative hub (2015–2020)
- The program
- ~US$20B greenfield in Iraq, one of the largest oil-and-gas developments in the world, with company offices in Moscow and execution hubs across Europe and Asia
- The machinery
- 200–300-page project-controls requirements in every contract · WBS control at levels 2–3 · weekly/monthly earned-value reporting · quarterly contractor audits
- The audience
- Executive leadership, government stakeholders, including presentations to Iraq’s Minister of Oil
Credentials & community
- Chartered
- Chartered Quantity Surveyor · member, Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS)
- Built environment
- Member, Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB)
- Law
- LL.M. in Construction Law and Arbitration · Robert Gordon University · member, Chartered Institute of Arbitrators (CIArb)
- Business school
- MBA and MS in Accountancy · Gies College of Business, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · Harvard Business School Online certificate (Business Analytics · Financial Accounting · Economics for Managers)
- Also
- MSc in International Construction Management · multiple PMI credentials · Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belt
- Languages
- Hindi & Gujarati (native) · English (full professional) · Russian (elementary)
- Find them
- LinkedIn: /in/tarungohel
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
- Same engine room
- Tarun ran owner-side project controls across global hubs; Orion builds the reporting and analytics layers those teams live in. The WBS structures, earned-value cycles and audit data flows Tarun describes are exactly the machinery Orion instruments for billion-dollar owners.
- The reframe
- Orion’s three-levels-of-contract-maturity read-back (~8:30) (no requirements → a stick with an untrained recipient → the contract as a meeting of the minds) turns Tarun’s playbook into a ladder any owner can place themselves on, and Tarun adopts it on the spot.
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.
The $20 Billion Scope
Orion opens by asking the obvious question: why was it so expensive? In two minutes, Tarun sketches a greenfield that is really an entire industrial ecosystem: wells, gathering lines, central processing, gas-to-power, storage, export, plus the city you have to build to build it.
“It’s a massive footprint, connecting maybe over a hundred or 150 wells, bringing those gathering lines to the central processing facilities, then storing and finally shipping. It’s an entire program.”Tarun Gohel · ~2:20
A city, a power plant, an export chain
Proven reserves in the billions of barrels. Upstream processing facilities, associated-gas processing feeding electricity generation, a dedicated combined-cycle power plant (“if I’m not mistaken, 200 to 300 megawatts”), and an accommodation camp for about 3,000 people. ~1:00–2:20
Executed everywhere at once
“Bits and pieces are happening all around the world”: administration in Dubai, company offices in Moscow, design conducted in Italy, fabrication in South Korea, and contractors from South Korea, Turkey, Pakistan and France. ~3:00–4:00
- The scope in one breath: wells to gathering lines to central processing; associated gas turned into electricity; crude stored and shipped out of the country.~1:00
- Mega scale means self-sufficiency: the program carries its own power plant and a ~3,000-person camp.~2:00
- The global map: “a very diverse, multicultural effort going on in different hubs,” with the core administrative function in Dubai.~3:30
The 200–300 MW power plant (“if I’m not mistaken”), the 100–150 wells and the ~3,000-person camp are Tarun’s on-air recollections of a project he worked on years ago; treat them as directional. The ~$20 billion figure is how the episode (and public reporting on West Qurna 2) frames the program.
The 300-Page Handshake
How do you keep fabrication in South Korea and design in Italy moving as one project? Tarun’s answer starts before execution: define the project-controls requirements early, embed them in every contract, and then treat the signature as the start of the conversation, not the end of it.
“It’s not just dumping a document, it’s meeting them on the document. The document itself is not going to do the work. Document cannot walk; document cannot do the concrete cubic meter. People are going to do the work.”Tarun Gohel · ~6:25
WBS: control the top, free the bottom
The owner controls the work breakdown structure at level 2–3 (“this is our control point”) and leaves everything below to the contractor, on one condition: the lower levels must roll up cleanly. On billion-dollar contracts where “things will change very rapidly,” defining everything from day one is a trap. ~7:30
Price it in, then reward it
“Every requirement you put in comes at a cost: nothing is free. Make sure they price for it” in the bid itself. And when clauses alone don’t move behavior, incentivize the way modern safety culture does: hit the milestone safely and earn, say, 1% of contract value as a bonus. ~11:00
- Same template, same format, same WBS: the whole point of the 200–300-page requirements document is that a South Korean yard and the Dubai office report in one structure.~5:00
- The failure mode: the contractor signs, nobody is trained, and the planning engineer was hired three months after signature: “it’s a wild west.”~6:45
- Orion’s three levels of contract maturity: nothing in the contract → a stick with an untrained recipient → the contract as a meeting of the minds.~8:30
- Carrot over stick: liquidated damages and withheld bonds breed “the opposite reaction”; priced, positive, safety-style incentives get the behavior you actually want.~9:45
Risk Needs a Trigger
“Whatever you think could go wrong, would go wrong.” On a program facing geopolitical risk, supplier failures and contractor delays, Tarun’s framework starts earlier than most (with what deserves to be on the register at all) and ends with the discipline most risk logs are missing.
“Every risk must have a trigger… If you don’t have the trigger, you don’t know when to take an action to mitigate it.”Tarun Gohel · ~17:10
Be realistic before you quantify
Rain in South Africa on your risk register? “How is it really impacting your project?” Risks are everywhere: “if you try and quantify every risk, your project value will double.” Set thresholds first: “When your project is impacted by $2 million, is it risky on a $20 billion CapEx?” ~14:15–15:40
The two triggers
One trigger tells you the risk is now occurring. The mitigation trigger tells you when to act on it, and “every mitigation trigger must have a mitigation owner assigned”: who acts, when, reviewed monthly or quarterly against whether the action actually happened. ~19:30–20:10
- Alignment before analysis: a risk-management plan that settles the language (what “negative risk” even means, which thresholds matter) before workshops and qualitative/quantitative passes, Monte Carlo simulation and schedule risk analysis.~15:00–17:45
- Define during basic and concept design: “the earlier you define, the more control you have.”~16:30
- The worked example: a contractor trending three months late. Do you act at a one-month forecast? Two? And with which lever: pay to crash the schedule, run foundations in parallel, wait for the equipment? “There are A, B and C.”~20:30
- Accepting risk is allowed: “You can’t do business without risk”: a clear pathway for accepted business risk is what keeps the contingency (and the estimate it feeds) realistic.~17:55
The Project Controls Audit
Orion names the hidden-variable problem: months of “everything’s on time,” then green flips to red with a six-month delay attached. Tarun’s team institutionalized the countermeasure: go to the contractor, quarterly, and build your own version of the truth.
“They are going to show you what you want to see. They’re not going to show you what the true delay is… You have to build a realistic picture from your own end.”Tarun Gohel · ~23:00
What the audit inspects
The engineering deliverables register: every deliverable’s status, issued-for-review and issued-for-construction dates. The technical document register. The procurement register: every PO’s stage, from inquiry to commercial evaluation to placement. A high-level quantity list (concrete m³, cable meters, piping inch-meters). Then every deliverable ID is matched to its Primavera P6 activity: “we need to see the realistic scenario.” ~26:00–27:45
Receipts beat assertions
“If you’re buying a centrifugal pump from Europe and the delivery is 52 weeks, we as an owner deal with those vendors too, and they quoted us 80 weeks. How can you tell me 52? What is your basis? Show us the document. Do you have a signed PO?” ~28:20
- Why the contractor’s schedule can’t be taken at face value: it “always comes with a constraint on the finish date: the date won’t move.” Ask for P10/P50/P90 dates and “they will never give it to you.”~23:30
- The audit is a contractual right: an open-ended clause in the project-controls requirements, exercised quarterly with about a month’s notice. Not an ambush: “we don’t just go and jump there.”~25:45
- It’s also an organizational X-ray: is the contractor’s controls team properly staffed, and does their culture even allow showing a delay?~24:30
- The endgame: the owner’s internal forecast goes to management, management meets the contractor, and “after two, three months of brainstorming… the contractor says, okay, we are not delayed by three months, we are only delayed by two. We’re happy to show two months in our report.”~25:10
Reporting to the Minister
Weekly and monthly earned-value cycles, three contract forms (lump sum, time-and-materials, unit rate), each with its own reporting mechanism, and stakeholders from head office to the Iraqi government. Then the part they don’t teach: what happens when your audience is the Minister of Oil.
“If your project is 2% behind schedule, the minister wouldn’t mind. But a $50 million variation order that has to come to his desk for approval, then he wants to know every detail of what that $50 million is going to be.”Tarun Gohel · ~34:30
Systemize or suffer
Reporting at this scale is “strict, structured and effort-intensive”: government, head office, the Moscow office, contractors and external parties all depend on it. “If you don’t have the system set up in the beginning, you’re going to suffer a lot”: collect the data, analyze it, report the right metrics, and roll everything up to program level. ~30:45–32:00
The bombed presentation
“I went to one presentation and I completely bombed it… I delivered straightaway whatever I had to deliver, without thinking what the context was, what the culture was.” The fix: research the audience, understand why the information is being asked for, and never assume they know what you know. ~32:50
- “Explain it to your mama”: present as if to somebody walking on the street with no project context, then navigate the gray zone between oversimplified and overwhelming.~33:45
- What executives actually want to know: is the project going well, and where do I personally need to act?~34:15
- Public speaking, honestly: “To be honest, I’m still scared to speak publicly”, and why there’s no way around it once your career grows past a certain level.~35:55
- The format that works: five or six key messages, a story behind each. “Tell the story, make a point. Tell the story, make a point… People will remember the story.”~38:30
Right-Sizing, AI & Breaking In
Orion calls the conversation “almost a sales pitch for project controls teams”: you can’t run audits or 300-page alignment programs on a skeleton crew. Tarun agrees, then flips it: most projects can’t afford 24 controllers, so scale the requirements, never the corners.
“Small resources doesn’t mean you cut a corner… Lower your expectations in the beginning, but make sure the critical expectations are there.”Tarun Gohel · ~42:20
The small-team playbook
Write the requirements to fit the team: on a lean project, state up front that there will be no cost/schedule risk analysis, but never trade away monthly reporting, a proper level-3 schedule or a real cost report. His own $5–15M projects run on one person at 25% allocation, “focused on the right things.” ~42:40–43:45
AI in project controls
“It’s impacting everything… It will still not take the core skills of project controls away, but it will really help to boost productivity”: report analysis that used to be manual becomes “dump the data set, ask the AI.” Planning discipline and the interpersonal work with contractors stay human. ~44:20
- Experience compounds into intuition: “You become an auditor even sitting in your seat. The information comes to you, and you immediately catch that there is something wrong.”~41:30
- Curiosity as the entry ticket: “Currently I’m in project controls. I’m learning about accounting, I’m learning about AI… I always ask: what does the accountant know that I don’t know?”~46:20
- The origin story: a piping designer spending evenings typing activities into Primavera for the site planning engineer: “I never applied for any position. I just got curious about it.”~47:40
- The market reality: project-controls professionals are “in short supply… very highly demanded”: show your work and junior doors open, even without the classic résumé.~47:10
The Big Ideas
Three ideas carry the episode. Sketched here the way an owner’s project-controls room would whiteboard them.
A contract you only enforce is a stick with an untrained recipient. West Qurna 2 used it three ways: embed the requirements, explain them face to face, and pay for the behavior you want.
Tarun’s diagnosis of why defined, quantified risks still go unmitigated: the register never said when to act or who acts. Two columns decide whether a risk log is a control or wallpaper.
Mitigation actually happens: the action has a name, a date, and a monthly or quarterly review against “did it happen?”
Someone is accountable but nobody knows when to move: action arrives after the delay is already fact.
Everyone sees the line crossed; acting on it is nobody’s job.
Risk-register wallpaper: defined, quantified, reviewed, and never acted on.
Two schedules describe the same project. The audit is the bridge that reconciles them, before the gap becomes a surprise.
The contractor’s schedule
- Constraint on the finish date: “the date won’t move”
- Green every month, until it suddenly isn’t
- P10 / P50 / P90 dates never offered
The owner’s realistic schedule
- Built from deliverable, procurement & quantity registers
- Every deliverable ID matched to its P6 activity
- Vendor lead-times cross-checked: 52 weeks claimed vs 80 quoted
Bookshelf & Links
The episode closes on Tarun’s reading list and professional homes (“unless you know how to manage your own money, how can you expect to manage somebody else’s money?” ~50:55), plus where to find the people and the show.
Tarun's bookshelf
- Leadership
- Spirituality for Leadership & Success, picked up on a trip to India; “it connects spirituality with leadership… understanding yourself before even doing anything: a balance between inner peace and outer success” (~49:40). Exact title as heard on air; edition unverified.
- Leadership
- The Soul of Leadership · Deepak Chopra. “Pretty fascinating, a very iconic book.” (~50:20)
- Thinking
- Thinking, Fast and Slow · Daniel Kahneman. His pick for the science of human behavior: “very, very popular.” (~50:40)
- Money
- Rich Dad Poor Dad · Robert T. Kiyosaki, standing in for the finance shelf: a project controller is “also managing money.” (~50:50)
- Strategy
- Good to Great · Jim Collins. Referenced on air by Orion as one of Tarun’s earlier mentions (~48:55); the mention itself sits outside the published cut.
Professional associations
- In the US
- PMI · Project Management Institute · AACE International: “those are the two great ones” for project controls (~51:20)
The episode
- Listen
- Episode page (53 min) · Apple Podcasts · Spotify
- The guest
- Tarun Gohel on LinkedIn: “all my contact details are there” (~52:30)
- The host
- Orion Matthews on LinkedIn · Queryon
- The show
- themajorprojectpodcast.com: new conversations from the people building projects over US$1 billion.
The project, for the curious
- West Qurna 2
- A publicly documented supergiant oil-field development in southern Iraq: “it is a public project… you can find a lot of information online” (~0:55). The episode discusses it solely from Tarun’s personal lessons-learned perspective.
- Tooling named
- Primavera P6 (schedules, deliverable-ID matching) · Monte Carlo simulation and schedule risk analysis · earned-value management reporting
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.
The $20 Billion Scope 0:00–4:20
- “It’s a massive footprint, connecting maybe over a hundred or 150 wells, bringing those gathering lines to the central processing facilities, then storing and finally shipping. It’s an entire program.”
- “Bits and pieces are happening all around the world: design in Italy, contractors from different parts of the world. It’s a very diverse, multicultural effort going on in different hubs.”
The 300-Page Handshake ~4:20–13:00
- Highlight“The document itself is not going to do the work. Document cannot walk; document cannot do the concrete cubic meter. People are going to do the work, so the document is as good as people are aware of it.”
- “It’s not just dumping a document, it’s meeting them on the document.”
- “You use the contract as a meeting of the minds… alignment using the contract as an alignment tool, since you’re going to use it as an enforcement tool.”
- “If you punish a small child, you always see the opposite reaction. But if I give my son a candy and ask him to do something, he will do it.”
- Highlight“Every requirement you put in comes at a cost: nothing is free. Make sure they price for it… And if the contractor doesn’t fulfill those requirements, then instead of penalizing, you incentivize them.”
Risk Needs a Trigger ~13:00–21:50
- Highlight“Every risk must have a trigger… If you don’t have the trigger, you don’t know when to take an action to mitigate it.”
- “Risks are everywhere; if you try and quantify every risk, your project value will double.”
- “When your project is impacted by $2 million, is it risky on a $20 billion CapEx?… There has to be a threshold.”
- “Every mitigation trigger must have a mitigation owner assigned: who is going to take the action, and when.”
- “We faced almost all the major risks… Where we couldn’t do anything about it, one of the root causes was nobody knew what the trigger was.”
The Project Controls Audit ~21:50–30:10
- Highlight“You, as an owner’s project-controls professional, have a responsibility to go and find out the truth, what is the real delay, so it doesn’t happen that one month there is zero delay and the next month, six months.”
- “They are going to show you what you want to see. They’re not going to show you what the true delay is.”
- “The contractor’s schedule always comes with a constraint on the finish date: the date won’t move… If you ask for their P10, P50, P90 dates, they will never give it to you.”
- Highlight“How can you tell me the delivery is 52 weeks when the vendor gave us a proposal for 80 weeks? What is your basis? Show us the document. Do you have a signed PO?”
- “After two, three months of brainstorming, the true delay comes, and the contractor says: okay, we are not delayed by three months, we are only delayed by two. We’re happy to show two months in our report.”
Reporting to the Minister ~30:10–39:30
- Highlight“If your project is 2% behind schedule, the minister wouldn’t mind. But a $50 million variation order that has to come to his desk for approval, then he wants to know every detail.”
- “I went to one presentation and I completely bombed it… I delivered straightaway whatever I had to deliver, without thinking what the context was, what the culture was.”
- “Keep the mindset that you’re going to present to somebody walking on the street who has no clue what the project is. It’s like explaining to your mama what the project is.”
- “It’s not about what you are going to deliver, it’s about how you’re going to make people feel about it.”
- Highlight“Tell the story, make a point. Tell the story, make a point… People will remember the story.”
- “Don’t worry about making mistakes. If you’re scared, just go there and just stand there; it’ll improve your confidence when you go the next time.”
Right-Sizing, AI & Breaking In ~39:30–49:00
- “Small resources doesn’t mean you cut a corner… Lower your expectations in the beginning, but make sure the critical expectations are there.”
- “The more you practice, the more experienced you become: you become an auditor even sitting in your seat. The information comes to you, and you immediately catch that there is something wrong.”
- “It will still not take the core skills of project controls away, but it’ll really help to boost productivity.”
- Highlight“Be curious. Whenever I want to learn something, I always ask: what does the accountant know that I don’t know?”
- “I never applied for any position. I just got curious… In the evening I used to sit with the planning engineer and say, what can I do for you? … That’s how I learned Primavera.”
- “I feel like maybe Leonardo da Vinci would’ve been in project controls.”
The Bookshelf & Close ~49:00–53:00
- Highlight“Unless you know how to manage your own money, how can you expect to manage somebody else’s money? So I read a lot of finance books.”
- “It connects spirituality with leadership… It talks a lot about understanding yourself before even doing anything: a balance between inner peace and outer success.”
- “It is a true honor… great meeting you, like-minded people.”