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Warren Hollings is this country’s most awarded construction project director and his achievements and those of the teams he lead are reflected in Auckland’s modern-day city skyline – from high-rise tower blocks to the new Auckland City Hospital and dominated by Sky Tower.

Embedded in his writings are the hard lessons of a 40 year career as a project director on New Zealand’s largest, toughest and most demanding construction projects. He maintains that in the rush to adopt modern techniques and processes the hard lessons of the past have been overlooked, and the worse, forgotten at considerable cost.

He led the team that built and delivered Auckland’s SkyCity Casino and the landmark Sky Tower in unprecedented time and in absolute contradiction to industry thinking at the time that it simply couldn’t be done against regulatory-imposed time constraints. Success here in compacting an otherwise three and a half year building programme into less than two years came down to challenging conventional methodology, then innovating, developing breakthrough strategies and fostering a teamwork approach that allowed production levels to soar.

As a consultant, he now shares his approach and learnings across the entire industry sector, teaching, conducting specialist strategic planning workshops, mentoring and in the ultimate, stepping in firsthand to fix projects gone wrong. Industry organisations and leaders he has assisted maintain these teachings, and this book, could well be the most important single contributor to industry and particularly project delivery success in more than a decade. Those that have adopted his approach refer to it as their new work ‘religion’ delivering, as it does, improved performance and result. 

In this, what was once called the ‘old way’ appears now to be the ‘only way’.