The PMO that manages money on projects.
Commercial-grade project controls for Australia's most capital-intensive sectors.
Project Controls, defined the way the profession defines them
A Project Management Office exists for one reason: to give Project Directors and executives a single, reliable view of cost, time and risk, and the confidence to act on it. Done well, integrated controls provide advance warning of trends, slippage and baseline deviation while there is still time to correct course. Done poorly, a PMO becomes reporting theatre: data without evidence, dashboards without decisions.
Two professional traditions shape how PMOs are scoped. AACE International's Total Cost Management Framework provides an integrated approach to portfolio, programme and project management, underpinning recommended practices across scheduling, cost, earned value, risk and forensic analysis. Lewis Woolcott is fluent in both: we lean towards the AACE framework for resources and energy clients, and deliver the RICS-grounded quantity surveying approach where an organisation's people, procedures and contract forms are built around it. Either way, our services cover the same core:
Cost Control & Forecasting
Baseline, trend and forecast discipline, with an estimate-to-complete you can defend at board level.
Planning & Schedule
P6-based programming, planned-vs-actual and critical path assurance, powered by LWARE Logic+.
Change, Trend & Contingency
Disciplined change management and contingency drawdown aligned to delegations of authority.
Risk Management
Quantitative risk and contingency modelling integrated with cost and schedule rather than run beside them.
Quantity Surveying & Commercial
Measurement, valuation and contract administration, target-cost and incentive regimes, procurement and claims avoidance. Money on projects is our core trade.
Information Management, Data & Systems
Data architecture, systems integration and Power BI reporting: a single source of programme truth engineered by our own data team.
Four reasons clients choose a specialist
Recent independent analysis of Australia's major-project pipeline found thirteen publicly funded road, rail and energy projects had exceeded their initial estimates by a combined $130 billion. Scale, on its own, has not delivered cost certainty. Leadership teams are demanding controls that produce evidence rather than reporting alone. That is precisely the gap a specialist fills.
Niche Commercial Expertise: Money on Projects
We are not a generalist consultancy with a controls team attached. Commercial management is our core business: RICS-chartered quantity surveyors, forensic delay and quantum experts, and project controls leaders in one bench. Our PMOs are built by people who understand where money is won and lost on projects: procurement models, target-cost regimes, change, contingency and claims. The result is a controls environment that protects value as well as recording it.
Technology That Pays Its Way: LWARE
The tools available to our industry weren't built for commercial work on site or in dispute, so we built our own. LWARE Logic+ reads Primavera P6, Microsoft Project and Asta files without third-party licences and runs full critical-path analysis in minutes. LWARE SMART is a GIS platform capturing the location, movement and idle time of every tracked person and plant item in real time, creating an immutable as-built record. On Lewis Woolcott PMO engagements, LWARE software is included within our offer: clients cover only the hardware cost. Our data engineers integrate it with your existing systems, so the technology serves the PMO rather than becoming another silo.
Big Enough to Deliver, Small Enough to Care
The senior people in this document are the people who run your engagement. As a medium-sized specialist we tailor the PMO to your organisation, your delegations and your contract forms rather than to a global template, and we mobilise at a speed larger structures cannot match: a full multi-disciplinary team inside three months on a major rail renewals programme; an independent gap analysis turned around over a Christmas shutdown for one of Australia's largest energy projects.
We Assess as Well as Build
Because we are independent and software-agnostic, clients also engage us to review PMOs they already have: benchmarking procedures, governance, systems and organisational design against comparable major projects, and delivering a prioritised, evidence-based roadmap and, where wanted, the team to implement it.
Assess. Design. Mobilise. Operate.
a structured review of the current controls environment against best practice from comparable major projects, through document review, site observation and structured interviews.
target operating model, procedures and systems architecture, drafted in plain language, aligned to your delegations of authority and written to be used rather than filed.
embedded functional leads and configured systems, live inside weeks and without disrupting delivery.
run, measure and continuously improve, with reporting that gives leadership advance warning instead of post-mortems.
The people who run your engagement
David Hoare
A mechanical engineer with more than 30 years' owner-side delivery across oil and gas, energy and heavy engineering. David has delivered major elements of the $24 billion APLNG CSG-to-LNG mega project, including a $200M pipeline compression facility, and led portfolio delivery of around 80 projects a year with a $150M annual budget, in senior roles with Origin Energy, Santos and Oil Search spanning concept to commissioning.
He brings an owner's-eye view of governance: delegations, stage gates, portfolio reporting and delivery assurance built for how projects are actually run.
Suha Hagan
A construction and infrastructure specialist with NEC4 and mediation training and hands-on experience in procurement, contract governance and claims management across the energy, water and transport sectors. Suha held the pen on the PCO procedural drafting for both a $10B+ renewable energy megaproject and a state health capital portfolio, translating governance frameworks into procedures that project teams actually use.
She brings the rigour and administrative discipline that keeps a PMO's paper trail defensible.
Behind them sits Lewis Woolcott's wider bench of 40+ specialists: senior project controls professionals, cost engineers, planners, change specialists and the LWARE data engineering team, scaled to each engagement.
Let's talk about your project
A conversation with David and Suha costs nothing, and an independent view of your controls environment is often the fastest way to find money on your project.