Unmatched lived experience

I’m Jeff Cheema, MCInstCES, Chartered Quantity Surveyor. When you engage with me, you benefit from a career that began in 1989 when I worked during my gap year in a local firm of consulting engineers in Hove, UK. Here I learned the now extinct skill of pen & ink drafting. This experience inspired me to choose engineering as my career path. I studied Civil Engineering at the University of Nottingham, graduating with a B Eng (Civil) upper 2nd.

I went on to live in Nottingham, joining WSP Consulting Engineers (now a global firm) as a structural engineer designing portal frames, drainage, stormwater detention structures, retail parks and supermarkets all over the UK. I then returned to the University of Nottingham. I completed a Master of Research (Civil), joining a research team that pioneered incorporating recycled aggregates into pavement foundations, now in everyday use.

A working holiday in Australia introduced me to mobile phone infrastructure. I worked as a designer for Aurecon in Sydney on the Optus GSM rollout. This was an industry I remained in when returning to the UK and when I emigrated to Australia in 2002. In the late 1990s, I became a project manager, managing rollouts for all the major carriers in the UK and then Australia.

I left Telco 20 years ago. Since then, I have been a project manager and then project director for Tier 1 & 2 companies with projects spanning bridges, facades, structural glazing, subdivisions, roads, civil works, and post-tensioning. I progressed to remote FIFO projects in Western Australia for iron ore, oil and gas. I returned to the East Coast for heavy & light rail, electrical, tendering, proposal writing and bid management.
I have lived and breathed projects all my life, observing how, over recent years, contractors are expected to slash margins and take on extraordinary risks while remaining subservient to their clients lest they upset the relationship. Unfortunately, more often than not, this leads to costs spiralling and claims needing to be adequately pursued. The relationship is suddenly broken as costs and delays multiply, the client goes to the ground, morale drops on-site, and the situation becomes overwhelming.

This is where professional claims consultants like myself can take the load off your site teams and handle your complex claims. At the same time, they continue to deliver the projects.

I have access to an extensive network of like-minded consultants. I can help you with claims, short- or long-term commercial resources, forensic planning, lawyers, arbitrators, adjudicators, and data analysts.
Contact me using the details below if your project needs commercial rescue.