Planning & Project Controls · Australia
Lead Planner & Scheduler — construction, infrastructure, resources and energy.
Twenty-five years in heavy industry and major projects — planning power station outages since 2003, and since then the schedules behind desalination, offshore gas, pipelines, solar, rail, transmission, hydro and underground mining across Australia. I work in Primavera P6 — and in code, writing the reporting and analysis tools that make a schedule tell the truth about a project.
About
Most programmes look fine until the job moves. My work is making schedules that hold up under progress, delay, claim and audit — properly logic-driven, coded for cost and risk, and reported on a cycle that never slips.
I came into planning sideways — a materials engineering background, laboratory and production work, then quality, OH&S and environmental systems consulting through the early 2000s. That is still how I read a programme: from the work face up. Since the Loy Yang A outages in 2003 I have planned major shutdowns at Maryvale Paper Mill, offshore maintenance for Esso across Bass Strait, commissioning and energisation for the Victorian Desalination Plant, level crossing removals for the North West Program Alliance, a 330 kV switching station and transmission line at Maragle, and mechanical and electrical installation at Snowy 2.0. I am now site scheduler on the Prominent Hill Operations Expansion in South Australia.
The other half of the job is systems. Reporting that depends on someone manually rebuilding a spreadsheet every Monday is reporting that eventually stops being true. I build the connection instead — Python and SQL straight into the P6 database, so S-curves, progress and forecasts come from the schedule itself rather than a copy of it.
I am a committee member of the AACE Australian Section and write a continuing series working through AACE International’s Recommended Practices, the framework most of this discipline is actually built on.
CPM planning & scheduling · project controls · cost engineering · earned value · delay and EOT analysis · schedule risk analysis · controls systems and automation.
Underground mining · hydro & renewables · high-voltage transmission · gas pipelines · rail & road infrastructure · offshore oil & gas · power generation · pulp & paper · water.
Diploma of Applied Science (Materials Engineering).
Capabilities
From tender programme through construction, commissioning and completions — and the reporting and claims that go with it.
Development and maintenance of integrated master schedules in Primavera P6. Multi-calendar networks, disciplined logic, and coding structures that still make sense two years into the job.
Weekly and monthly reporting to management and client: earned value, S-curves, productivity, labour histograms and critical path commentary — produced on time, every cycle.
Preparation and assessment of EOT claims, delay analysis, and cold-eyes review of contractor programmes and variation claims.
Labour and cost forecasting, accruals, cost flow forecasts, and the integration of schedule and cost so that the two agree with each other.
Coding schedules for quantitative risk analysis, Monte Carlo modelling with correlated inputs, and contingency assessment aligned to AACE recommended practice.
Standing up project controls procedures, P6 administration and databases, WBS and coding standards, and the automation that connects P6 to live reporting.
Experience
Every role since January 2000 — outage contracting, maintenance planning, and two decades of major project schedules. Drawn the way I’d draw any other job.
Tools & Development
Planning software is where I stop being only a user. These are tools I’ve built or am building — for live reporting, for analysis, and for keeping a piece of scheduling history alive.
S-curve and progress reporting that reads directly from the Primavera P6 database rather than a manual export. Area and discipline classification from WBS path and Activity ID prefix, automatic refresh, and a live-data banner so nobody presents a stale number.
A critical path engine written from scratch: all four relationship types with lag, multiple calendars, resource-constrained scheduling by SGS heuristic and exact branch-and-bound, time–cost trade-off crashing, and Monte Carlo risk analysis with correlated sampling via Gaussian copula.
Utilities for interrogating P6 XER exports — activity search, month-on-month schedule comparison, milestone movement and total float deterioration — feeding straight into formal monthly progress reporting.
A long-running reverse-engineering effort on a legacy planning package: roughly 23,000 nodes across 814 source files, ported from Delphi/Pascal to Python. Part software archaeology, part preservation of a scheduling engine that predates most of what is on the market today.
Writing & Speaking
A continuing article series taking AACE International’s Recommended Practices one at a time — what each one actually says, and what it means on a live job.
The AACE Recommended Practices are the closest thing this discipline has to a shared technical standard, and most people in it have never read one. The series works sequentially through the numbered set — cost and schedule terminology, estimate classification, planning and scheduling practice, risk and contingency estimating — translating each into language a site team can use.
Committee member, supporting the section’s technical programme and webinars.
Presenting on artificial intelligence in project controls — what it can genuinely do for planning, reporting and analysis, and what it cannot.
Beyond the day job
Alongside this site I maintain a genealogy database tracing the Baker family and its connected lines — births, marriages, migrations and the records behind them, published with TNG (The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding).
Contact
For planning, scheduling, project controls or reporting work — or to talk about any of the tools above.