Jason Kroll, Managing Director, AECOM Qatar & COO, AECOM Middle East & Africa • Interview
MANAGING DIRECTOR, AECOM QATAR & COO, AECOM MIDDLE EAST & AFRICA
What has been your experience over the last year? We have managed through the pandemic relatively successfully. Almost immediately our people started working remotely. Much of our work was already moving to the cloud, and our Qatar business has been one of the leading advocates for AECOM’s cloud-based delivery. In 2019, we delivered and inaugurated the Al Janoub stadium, which used to be called Al Wakrah. Al Rayyan stadium is our other FIFA 2022 project, which is also nearing completion. We have a great proven delivery record on the stadium side. The other real successes were threefold. First, we won the Engineering News Record Global Best Project in 2019 for our Inner Doha Resewerage Implementation Strategy (IDRIS) project. Second, we delivered the bus connection to the metro that brings visitors out into the rapid feeder and into Al Wakrah stadium. We are starting to see the whole fabric of the city coming together and we can see AECOM’s role in that. Third, over the last year, we have been recognized as a four-star supplier by Raytheon’s Integrated Defense Systems business, an American defense equipment manufacturer, for a project in Qatar.
What will drive growth for AECOM in Qatar in the future once the current wave of development is over?
As the country looks to conclude major real estate programs such as Lusail City, we see potential growth there. That might be through partnering directly as a designer or it may be with a design-build contractor, which we are seeing more and more. There are opportunities to partner with top-tier contractors, and that will not go away. In the public sector there will also continue to be significant investment in stitching the fabric of the city together. There is the whole overlay from the World Cup, the legacy after the World Cup, and also what we put in place for the local community. One of our biggest programs for Ashghal is the local roads and drainage program. Some of it is greenfield, and some of it is retrofitting the right level of infrastructure for the community. Qatar has become a mature market so we have to keep close to key clients and identify new im.