John is providing risk management and program optimization assistance to the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority’s water tunnel program, which consists of approximately 14 miles of deep rock tunnels and surface connections, to provide redundancy for Boston’s water supply.

John continues research and publication of papers, most recently for the Rapid Excavation and Tunneling Conference in Boston, June 2023. His paper, written with colleagues from RiskConsult In Austria, presents a summary of the last 30 years of advancements in tunneling risk management, an integrated probabilistic cost-schedule estimating program and new digital-twin capabilities. You can download this paper from the HOME page.

John is also working in a strategic assistance role with HNTB Corporation, related to their National Tunnel Practice, in the areas of megaproject delivery, risk management, contracting and delivery.

John is generally retired but continues to engage in professional activities including research and publication of topics of interest including management, contracting and risk for complex infrastructure and underground projects. He recently wrote a paper on “Tunnel Boring Machine Procurement, Risk and Technology Advancement” which was published online in TunnelTalk, November 5, (www.TunnelTalk.com).

This year he completed the text for, and input to, an interactive eBook which is an introduction to risk-based cost estimating procedures, sponsored by the National Highway Institute for the US Federal Highway Administration. The eBook and related course training are expected to be completed in early 2021.

John is in communication with colleagues from recent projects and young professionals who he has helped and/or mentored during and after project development. These colleagues are in North America and several international countries. A focus is the advancement of women in infrastructure, for example web-broadcasts regarding career development in science and engineering.

Papers and Presentations, 2016

John has written new papers for 2016 which are published in the International Tunneling Association’s conference proceedings. The papers deal with:

“Megaprojects – 50 years, what have we learned?”
“Risk Management – Correlation and Dependencies for Planning, Design and Construction”

You can download these papers from the Home page.

John has written papers on risk and cost and the use of probabilistic cost-risk estimating with co-authors Alfred Moergeli (Switzerland) and Philip Sander (Austria). The papers have been presented and published at the International Tunneling Association Conference in Dubrovnik in May and at the Rapid Excavation & Tunneling Conference in New Orleans in June.

Probabilistic cost-risk estimating delivers a rich source of information regarding base cost, risk and opportunity costs, risk specifics and leads to better budgeting for owners, better cost and risk strategies for owners and contractors and explicit risk management plans.

This builds on risk research by John over the last 20 years and the development of the Washington State Department of Transportation’s “Cost Estimate Validation Process” (CEVP) developed by John with the Department and implemented by several U.S. Federal and State Agencies.

The 2015 ITA/RETC paper can be downloaded from this website (see HOME page).