Steve McGrath

Background

About Steve McGrath

Independent practitioner, researcher, management consultant, engineer, project manager and public administrator with 40+ years working experience and a focus on how accidental and unintended conflict is generated through hidden but habitual patterns in our language usage. Completed a PhD in project management, researching the interface between organizational and project governance, affecting project delivery across civil infrastructure and IT projects. This resulted in a book just published by Springer titled "Speaking Management: How to spot language traps and resolve contested management terms", as well as 11 publications in international peer reviewed project management journals. These range from developing a method for defining groups of related ( & possibly contested) terms and then applying that in defining governance in 2015, to postulating the lifecycle of an ideological error/ grand disaster in a paper on PRINCE2 in 2020. The papers produced rigorous definitions of contested terms across many areas of management. They also enabled identification of common themes in mistakes that experienced scholars and practitioners across many fields tend to make. Have recently been re-writing one subject of an MBA course for USQ. Previously held various leadership and program management roles with Brisbane City Council and the Department of Transport and Main Roads including- Leading the Planned Incident Management Unit at Brisbane City Council delivering a program of 30 congestion reduction projects per year and managing road closures and road operations- Managing a $390M delivery program of interchange upgrades between Nerang and Tugun together with planning for the full $3B upgrade for TMR- Leading strategy development and implementation of a program of indigenous community marine and aviation infrastructure asset upgrades in the Torres Strait for TMR- Project managing Stage 1 of the Inner Northern Busway project- Introducing the OnQ project management framework into Queensland Transport (QT) and subsequently establishing and leading a centre of project management excellence- Introducing asset management concepts into QT- Leading asset management of Brisbane’s busway network- Managing transport planning and design as well as development approval in two TMR districts- Developing transport models for many urban centres in Queensland- Managing rural road, bridge and urban intersection construction projects across Queensland.