President’s message

Tony Barry, FIDIC president

Since the world was disrupted by Covid-19, with the increasing frequency and severity of weather-related disasters and more recently the escalation in geopolitical tensions, many of our norms and accepted practices are being challenged. For many people in our world, these past years have been traumatic and difficult. For others, the disruption has led to discovery and, for others, change.

Our resilience and that of our political systems, our communities, our economies and our infrastructure have been tested. In some cases, like never before.

FIDIC, our member associations, our industry, our firms, our clients and the contracting sector have all been challenged. It is a great credit to technology and to the investment in it by our industry, that many of the businesses in the industry have survived, and in many cases, thrived. They have adopted flexible work practices, enabled remote working, implemented collaborative technologies and continued to serve their clients effectively. Leadership and the people in our industry have shown themselves to be very resilient.

At FIDIC, we have been privileged to have had Bill Howard as our president from 2019-2021 and also Dr Nelson Ogunshakin as our CEO to lead us through the worst of the pandemic. We were able to move quickly to publish guides on dealing with pandemic issues, to run webinar programs engaging very large audiences, to hold virtual conferences and general assembly meetings and maintain our connectivity globally.

On behalf of you all, I thank and commend Bill, in particular as our past president, who continued to give of his time, intellect and energy, when the circumstances globally and at home were so challenging. He was calm, confident, consistent and persistent in leading us to a better place. I also thank Diane and Bill’s family for sharing him with us throughout a very difficult time.

Nelson and his team stepped up to every challenge and opportunity with energy, passion, commitment and professionalism, of which we can all be proud. Again, on your behalf I thank them for their excellent work.

I was, on the one hand, humbled in becoming your president in 2021 and on the other, very enthusiastic to build on the work of so many before me. It was a pleasure to have launched the FIDIC Climate Change Charter in October 2021 and I would urge everybody in the FIDIC family to sign up to it at www.climatechangecharter.world.

In 2020-2021, we redefined our statutes and by-laws and revamped the terms of reference and membership of FIDIC’s working committees. These moves are already having a positive effect. We also initiated FIDIC Credentialing and have now launched all five of the credentials on offer, engaging professionals from 78 countries in seeking FIDIC credentials. This is a vital element of our FIDIC capacity building strategy.

In the past year, we have also launched the FIDIC Academy, building on the substantial training offerings around FIDIC contracts to address the full scope of the FIDIC Body of Knowledge, going forward. As with FIDIC Credentialing, we started by establishing a clear governance structure and have recently begun to appoint both volunteer participants and welcomed our first FIDIC Academy general manager.

Both of these initiatives will contribute in a very real way to the more effective delivery of global infrastructure and have been welcomed by members, firms and our stakeholders. Successful projects rely on sound planning, design, procurement and construction and FIDIC agreements and contracts are core to that success.

“Our resilience and that of our political systems, our communities, our economies and our infrastructure have been tested. In some cases, like never before.”

We are also developing new forms of contract and updating our existing forms. This year the reprint of the 2017 suite and the guide to be launched at the International Contract Users’ Conference in London in November, the publication of the Green Book (short form) and Emerald Book (tunnelling) have been significant achievements. The contracts committee, its task groups and our many volunteers is key to this success and very much appreciated.

Since becoming president, I have had the opportunity and pleasure of addressing various FIDIC regional conferences, webinars and contract users’ conferences as well as a number of our member associations and ten stakeholder conferences and meetings, including the 17th plenary meetings of the OECD Initiative for Policy Dialogue on Global Value Chains. I have experienced first-hand the tremendous appreciation our stakeholders have for FIDIC.

We are also now working with the sustainable development and business practice leadership committees to set up substantial task groups to provide the specialist guidance on the many issues impacting our industry.

The new Global Leadership Forum and the advisory board running it are in place, engaging C-suite participants from many infrastructure clients, contracting organisations and consultancy firms across the globe with two major online events in 2022 and the first in person meeting to be held in April 2023. Many of our MAs have nominated invitees from their top firms to join the forum and we are pleased that it now has nearly 100 members.

We have also begun the initial work to establish FIDIC Africa, hosted by Consulting Engineers South Africa and FIDIC Asia Pacific in Beijing. These initiatives will give life to our regional strategy and in time enable FIDIC to support our member associations and to work across the time zones much more effectively. These initiatives would not be possible without the tremendous support of volunteers, who enable FIDIC to contribute to lead and advocate on behalf of the industry to addressing some of the world’s key challenges and opportunities.

Subscription income continues to decline in real terms, but we are implementing initiatives to grow our revenues and deliver real value to our members and their member firms. Financial management is key to our stability and we very pleased to be able to deliver a good balance between financial results, service to our industry and investment in our industry’s future.

Lastly, I am very grateful to two wonderful people who have given a great deal to FIDIC and contributed very significantly to the FIDIC board. Lui Luobing served as vice president from 2019-2021 and has been a board member since 2017. He has also been involved in working with FIDIC contracts and our transparency and integrity agenda. Mark Pehlig also retires after four years and has contributed very significantly to our governance, statute changes and nominations process as well as our collaboration with EFCA. On behalf of the board, I thank them for their contribution and leadership.

I would also like to thank our two vice presidents, Catherine Karakatsanis and Luis Villaroya Alonso for their tremendous support and leadership throughout the year and the board members for their great work in supporting FIDIC in achieving so much in 2021-2022.

Looking forward, I believe that FIDIC is well positioned to continue its development and growth, to serve the industry effectively and to support its members to address some of the key global challenges affecting us all.