Sohaib Wasif and the Real Cost of Bad Project Controls

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I've spent years watching projects bleed money not because the engineering was wrong but because nobody had real control over the numbers. That's exactly what Sohaib Wasif built his career fixing. Project controls isn't glamorous. Nobody puts it on a billboard. But when it's done right it's the difference between a project finishing on budget and a project turning into a financial disaster that nobody wants to talk about at the executive table.

Who Is Sohaib Wasif

Sohaib Wasif is a project management and controls professional based in Canada with a career spanning some of the biggest capital projects in North America. We're talking about work at Rio Tinto. TC Energy's Coastal Gas Link pipeline. Ontario Power Generation. ExxonMobil. Shell. Trans Mountain. Husky Energy. The list doesn't stop there. This isn't someone who read about project controls in a textbook. This is someone who sat inside multi-billion dollar programs and made the hard calls about cost forecasting and schedule recovery.

He's also the director at EMPCON Corporation. That matters because EMPCON isn't just another consulting shop. It's built on the kind of field-level experience most firms can't actually claim.

Why Project Controls Actually Matters

Here's what I think most people get wrong. They assume project management and project controls are the same thing. They're not. Project management is about directing the work. Project controls is about measuring the truth. And the truth is that over 70% of large capital projects globally run over budget or over schedule or both. That number should make every executive uncomfortable.

Sohaib's background at companies like Worley and ExxonMobil means he's seen what happens when the controls function gets treated as a reporting afterthought instead of a decision support system. It gets ugly fast.

What Good Controls Look Like in Practice

I remember talking to someone once who said their project had perfect reports. Every week the dashboard was green. Then the project finished 40% over budget. GREEN REPORTS DON'T MEAN A HEALTHY PROJECT. That's the thing. Controls that are actually working look uncomfortable sometimes. They surface problems early enough to do something about them.

The kind of controls work Sohaib brings to the table means building earned value systems that actually reflect field reality. It means cost forecasting that accounts for scope creep before it becomes a crisis. It means schedule analysis that doesn't just show what the plan was but shows where the real exposure lives.

The Background That Builds This Kind of Thinking

Sohaib holds a Master of Business Administration from the University of Calgary along with a Master of Engineering from the University of Michigan and an MSCE from West Virginia University. That combination is unusual. Most people come at this from one direction. Either they're engineers who learned to manage or they're business people who learned about engineering. Having both at a graduate level means the cost and schedule conversations aren't happening in two separate languages.

That academic foundation paired with decades of hands-on capital project work is why the approach works. It's not theory being applied to practice. It's theory that was already tested in the field.

FAQ

What industries has Sohaib Wasif worked in?

Oil and gas. Mining. Power generation. Pipelines. Infrastructure. The common thread isn't the industry it's the scale and complexity of the capital programs involved.

What makes EMPCON different from other project controls firms?

The leadership experience is real not resume-polished. Multi-billion dollar program management from inside the owner's team is a different thing entirely from consulting from the outside.

What is earned value management in project controls?

It's a method for measuring project performance by comparing planned work against actual work completed and actual cost spent. When your earned value is consistently below your planned value you have a schedule and budget problem developing right now not six months from now.