Queensland Rail operates and maintains 6,600km of track across South East Queensland and regional areas, running over 8,000 services each week, all dependent on electric power to run its rolling stock. The Traction Power SCADA System that manages this grid has been in service for nearly two decades, and in 2021 Parasyn was appointed as QR's Owner's Engineer to support its upgrade and replacement.
Owner's Engineers are typically third-party consultants overseeing, endorsing, or delivering critical outcomes across a project's lifecycle, spanning project evaluation, feasibility, vendor selection, staging, technology assessment, concept design, procurement, type approval, and design assessment.
The gap between client and customer expectations is especially challenging on technology projects. Good requirements, ones that define implementation, deliverables, and technical specifications clearly, reduce project and lifecycle risk while still meeting business and technical needs. Functional Consultants bring the advantage of hands-on experience delivering similar specifications before. Lifecycle goals that may seem less obvious to suppliers and vendors are often critical to the principal, especially for critical infrastructure like passenger railways.
Detailed requirements give suppliers a clear guide for what to expect. High-level statements and generic references to standards leave the principal exposed to a wide range of methods and complexities, which generally leads to commercial exposure and risk against organisational goals. At the planning stage, the goal is transparent communication from both parties, building toward an execution plan based on a feasible design.
Stakeholder engagement validates assumptions and exposes gaps in requirements. It's also an opportunity to build a project group focused on success and a shared understanding of business needs. That group needs a genuine, two-way approach to accountability and risk sharing, since withholding information for commercial leverage erodes trust and pushes the project toward an adversarial culture. Suppliers are acutely aware of where delivery risk sits, and the principal is acutely aware of operational and other risks the supplier may be less exposed to. The Owner's Engineer's role is blending those expectations, process, and technical outcomes.
As strategic and technical advisor, Parasyn carries the responsibility for sound technical advice, architectural, design, methodological, and sometimes commercial. That advice takes on strategic weight once lifecycle and impact assessments are factored in. As a project matures and the impact of technical changes becomes clear, risk assessments, human factors, and design acceptance build the platform that change management needs to occur on.
Each Change Management Plan is unique to its project, there's no one-fits-all template that satisfies every organisation's needs, so it's developed per project, per fundamental system change, or per new asset creation event. At QR, the Safety Change Management Plan (SCMP) guides how the business treats its obligations to regulators and stakeholders, acting as the gateway between technical, operations, and the business through information transfer, education, training, communication, and impact assessment. Technical implementation plans aren't complete until the change management plan is cemented, this is the business's quality and safety gate, never to be treated as a formality.
Systems Engineering Management is distinguished from general project management by its focus on the technical and engineering activities of a project. Systems engineering is an essential component of a project's management structure, ensuring the engineering method itself is suitable for uncovering and managing technical and other risk, relied upon as a process rather than fabricated per project.
The SEMP focuses on the technical plan and the systems engineering processes used to produce artefacts for verifying requirements, validating system performance, and meeting every approved requirement. Its purpose is to detail those engineering tasks and provide records of the processes used, covering design reviews, development methodologies, user acceptance planning, human factors engineering, change management, knowledge transfer, and configuration management, among others that aren't always addressed adequately.
As principal consultant working with QR, Parasyn's direct duty is to QR, extended to a wider community of engineering compliance, including legal and ethical conduct in all circumstances. Parasyn also works within the wider consultant community as Functional Consultants, supporting other Principal Consultants by focusing on specific domains that complement a wider scope than Parasyn's own remit.