I have read the article  “Reconstruction does not start with concrete: Who should manage complex infrastructure projects?” published on LB.ua.

The author raised a large number of questions that, in my opinion, will become even more acute as Ukraine will be moving toward big reconstruction.

Who prepares the project? Who coordinates its participants? Who manages variations, deadlines, costs, and risks? Where are the limits of responsibility? And finally, who handles the whole project from the initial idea to the commissioning?

This is no longer a theoretic discussion.

We can feel it in our daily work, and we can see it especially clearly when we communicate with municipalities. Notably, for local governments, this conversation begins even before a specific construction project emerges. Recovery and development of territories is impossible without a quality spatial planning. The urban-development documentation should make the community understand how its territory will develop, where it needs new infrastructure, what decisions are priority one and how they are interconnected. That is why I consider comprehensive plans of territory development not a formal requirement but a basic tool of the communities’ future.

But even when the community realizes what and where it needs to build or restore, the following question remains: How to professionally lead a specific project from concept to outcome?

The Interstate Consultants Engineers Guild has recently held another workshop for representatives of local self-government bodies. Frankly speaking, I was amazed by their interest in the organization and administration of projects.

The reason is clear.

The communities are now getting an opportunity to fulfill the ideas that grow more complex by the amount of financing, number of participants, procedures, and degree of responsibility. The construction client must work simultaneously with the designers, contractors, supervision engineers, consultants, authorities, oversight and law-enforcement agencies, donors and financial institutions.

Availability of all these participants is not sufficient to ensure a controlled process.

Thus, to my mind, we have gone through the stage of discussion whether the communities need extra competencies. They do. The next question is much more practical: How to provide the communities with access to them and bring different competencies to a single system of project management?

International practice suggests various answers. These can be project offices, outsourced professional teams, models of integrated project management. FIDIC has also accumulated a significant experience of organizing complex infrastructure projects, with its contract forms and management approaches being widely used around the globe. One of the professional tools in this system is the consulting engineer.

It is worth noting that for Ukraine, this is no new structure that needs to be invented or imported from abroad. The institute of the consulting engineer has been legislated in Ukraine. The client can engage them in performing certain functions during the preparation and execution of contruction.

It’s a different matter that we still do not use the potential of this tool to the full extent.

As for me, I would not reduce the today’s discussion to the question who should manage a project.

We do not need a fight for more powers or a larger part of the market. What we need is an answer to a different question: What model will enable Ukraine to implement complex infrastructure projects faster, to higher quality, and with a predictable result?

For one project, a consulting engineer can be the best solution, for the other – a project office or a different professional model. Choosing the right tool in advance is not important. What is important is to build a system where a client can choose it in line with complexity and needs of a concrete project.

That is why I suppose we currently need a comprehensive professional discussion.

ICEG is ready for such a dialog with the state, local governments, construction market, and other professional associations and international partners.

We are ready to sit at one table and go into detail about what is already working and what is not, what mechanisms we lack, what prevents us from using the existing tools, and what should be changed.

Besides, we do not need to start from scratch. There are international experience and time-tested approaches of FIDIC and other professional systems. Our task is not just to bring them to Ukraine technically but to understand which of these practices can work in our legal and institutional context and what we need to apply them effectively.

And this talk is needed right now. Ukraine is gradually deciding what the recovery management system will look like and how the state, communities, professional environment, and international partners will be interacting. Once all the rules are finalized, it will be much harder and more expensive to change the lame decisions, while the price at stake is much higher than the efficiency of using the funds or period of building a specific facility.

We are building not for the sake of reporting on the scope of restoration. The level of present organization quality defines the way our towns, roads, schools, hospitals, water, or energy sector will look like in ten, twenty, or thirty years.

Infrastructure is not just about concrete, metal, and kilometers of networks. It shapes the quality of people’s lives, capacities of communities, investment attraction of territories, and to some extent, the vector of the entire country’s development.

Therefore, changes in the system of recovery management are necessary not for the system itself. They are necessary for Ukraine to be able to recover faster, to better quality, and in a sensible manner, so that the enormous resources invested by our country and our international partners in the recovery could turn into modern infrastructure that will serve the generations to come.

And so that as a result of reconstruction, we get a country where people want to live.