The Control Gap: Why We're Building Strataverra
By the Strataverra Team | March 2026
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There's a question we've been asked a lot over the past two years: "Why build another project management platform?"
It's a fair question. The market isn't short on tools. You can schedule in Primavera P6. Track documents in Aconex. Manage field ops in Procore. Run cost reports in EcoSys. Coordinate design in AVEVA. And somewhere between all of those systems, a project manager is copying numbers from one spreadsheet into another at midnight, trying to figure out whether their project is actually on track.
That's the gap. Not a gap in features. A gap in control.
The industry's dirty secret
Here's something that doesn't get said enough: most large capital projects don't fail because people make bad decisions. They fail because people make confident decisions based on incomplete information.
A scheduler says the project is 73% complete. A cost engineer says it's 68%. The document controller says critical deliverables are still unsigned. The compliance manager hasn't been asked. And the project director, armed with three different versions of the truth, walks into a steering committee and presents a number that makes everyone comfortable.
We've watched this happen on projects worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Not because anyone is incompetent. Quite the opposite. The people running these projects are some of the most capable professionals in any industry. The problem is that their tools were never designed to give them a single, honest picture. Every system holds a piece of the puzzle, and nobody has the table to put it together on.
This is what we mean by the control gap. It's the space between what project teams think is happening and what's actually happening. And it's enormous.
We've lived this problem
Between us, we bring over sixty years of experience across mining, defence, power generation, construction, EPCM, and heavy industry. We've led engineering and reliability teams across national networks of critical infrastructure. We've delivered capital programs worth millions in live plant environments, on time and under budget. We've built and maintained enterprise software systems from the inside, spending more than a decade embedded in the same industrial operations where these tools get used every day.
We didn't come to this from a startup accelerator or a venture capital pitch deck. We came to it from the tools themselves. From SAP work orders and Ellipse backlogs. From Primavera schedules that didn't match field reality. From control system upgrades where the plan existed in someone's head because the system couldn't accommodate it. From cybersecurity programs that exposed just how disconnected operational technology was from the platforms meant to manage it.
One of us spent fifteen years rising from the tools to leading engineering teams responsible for asset reliability across an entire distribution network. One of us has been building enterprise software since the mid 1990s, working inside the same industrial organisations where the control gap is felt hardest. One of us has delivered capital works across power stations, mine sites, and critical infrastructure from Papua New Guinea to the east coast of Australia, managing the full project lifecycle from early planning through commissioning.
Some of us started on the tools, as electricians on plant floors and remote sites. Others started writing code inside the same industrial organisations, building the systems those teams relied on every day. All of us have progressed into leadership, technology, and strategy. That journey, from the ground level to oversight, is exactly what showed us how wide the control gap really is. The higher you go, the less you trust the numbers, because you know how they were assembled.
How we got here
The project controls industry evolved in silos. Scheduling tools were built by scheduling experts. Cost tools were built by cost engineers. Document systems were built by information managers. Each one solved its own problem brilliantly, then threw data over the wall and hoped someone else would reconcile it.
Over time, enterprises tried to bridge the gap with integrations. API connectors. Middleware. Custom scripts. And the result? A fragile web of direct connections that breaks every time someone upgrades a system, changes a field name, or onboards a new subcontractor.
Meanwhile, the compliance burden has only grown heavier. ISO 19650. FIDIC. API RP 75. NORSOK. JORC. APQP. The standards aren't the problem. They exist for good reason. The problem is that compliance has become a scramble after the project is done rather than a practice that's built in from the start. Teams spend months after handover assembling evidence trails that should have been captured in real time, if only the system had been designed to capture them.
And then there's the industry lock in. If you're a diversified enterprise running construction projects, infrastructure maintenance, and IT programs, you're probably running three completely different toolchains with three different data models, three different workflows, and three different support contracts. We've seen this firsthand, working across operations, project delivery, and enterprise IT inside the same organisations. The overhead is staggering. But until now, there hasn't been an alternative.
What we believe project delivery should look like
When we started building Strataverra, we didn't begin with a feature list. We began with a set of beliefs about how projects should be controlled. Beliefs formed from decades of watching what works and what doesn't across some of the most complex project environments in the world.
Progress should be measured by evidence, not opinion. When a project says it's 70% complete, that number should be anchored to deliverable approvals, not status updates. Earned value should be calculated from auditable evidence, not from someone's best guess on a Friday afternoon.
Compliance should be embedded, not bolted on. Standards and regulatory requirements should be part of the workflow from day one. Extracted, mapped, approved by humans, and enforced automatically. Not rediscovered six months after practical completion when someone asks for the audit trail.
One platform should serve multiple industries. The fundamentals of project control are universal: scope, schedule, cost, quality, risk, compliance. A construction work package and a defence program work order and an IT epic are structurally the same thing at different levels of abstraction. The platform should understand that, and the nuance specific to each industry should be handled through configuration, not code.
AI should augment human judgement, not replace it. The most valuable thing AI can do in project controls isn't make decisions. It's surface the information that helps people make better ones. Flag a schedule variance before it cascades. Identify a compliance gap before it becomes a finding. Recommend a workflow adjustment based on patterns across similar projects. And then let a human approve it, because accountability should always belong to people.
Implementation should take weeks, not quarters. The era of implementations that drag on for a year and change orders that cost millions just to configure a project tool needs to end. If the platform is designed right, governed by configuration rather than dependent on code, teams should be productive in weeks, not months.
What we're building
Strataverra is an integrated project controls and execution platform. That's a mouthful, so let us unpack it.
Integrated means one system for schedule, cost, compliance, quality, documents, field execution, risk, and reporting. Not seven systems stitched together with API calls, but one coherent data model where a change in the schedule automatically flows to cost forecasts, compliance tracking, and earned value calculations.
Project controls means we're not a task manager. We're not a communication tool. We're a system that gives project leadership a single, trustworthy view of where a project actually stands. Backed by evidence, governed by workflows, and enforced by the standards that matter to their industry.
Execution platform means the system doesn't just report on work. It helps teams do the work. Workflow automation. Approval chains. Escalation paths. Field data capture. Document control. The gap between "what should happen" and "what actually happens" gets smaller because the system guides teams through the right process, every time.
And we've built it to serve multiple industries from a single codebase. Construction and EPCM. Infrastructure. Mining. Oil and gas. Aerospace and defence. IT and digital delivery. Each industry gets its own configuration pack with its own terminology, work unit types, compliance standards, and workflow templates, but the underlying engine is shared. One platform, many industries, zero fragmentation.
Why now
Three things have converged to make this the right time.
First, the legacy systems are showing their age. Primavera P6 has been the scheduling standard for thirty years, but its interface and deployment model belong to a different era. Aconex was acquired by Oracle and innovation has slowed. InEight serves a narrow segment at a price point that excludes most of the market. The incumbents have earned their place, but the industry is ready for something new.
Second, cloud infrastructure has matured to the point where you can build a genuinely scalable, enterprise grade platform without the capital expenditure that used to require. We're running on modern cloud infrastructure that scales with demand, costs a fraction of traditional deployments, and delivers the performance that enterprise users expect.
Third, and this is the big one, AI has reached the point where it's genuinely useful for project controls. Not as a chatbot bolted onto a dashboard, but as an embedded intelligence layer that can ingest industry standards, extract compliance requirements, assess schedule impacts, and surface recommendations in the context of a specific project. We call ours Verra, and it's designed around a principle we feel strongly about: AI recommends, humans approve.
The road ahead
This blog post is the first in what will be an ongoing conversation. We'll be sharing our thinking on project controls, compliance, challenges specific to different industries, AI in construction and engineering, and the practical realities of building enterprise software in 2026.
We're not pretending to have all the answers. We're building Strataverra because we believe the industry deserves better tools, and because we think the control gap, that space between what teams think is happening and what's actually happening, is a problem worth solving.
If you're a project director frustrated by reconciling five systems every Monday morning, or a compliance manager assembling audit evidence after the fact, or a CEO trying to get a trustworthy portfolio view across multiple industries and geographies, we're building this for you.
We'd love to hear from you. What's broken in your current setup? What would genuine integrated project controls mean for your organisation? Drop us a line at info@strataverra.com or connect with us on LinkedIn.
This is just the beginning.
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The Strataverra team brings together decades of practical experience across engineering, project delivery, and enterprise software in Australia's most demanding industrial environments. We're building the platform we wished we'd had.