Chris Rolison is senior director for progressive assurance solutions with Bentley Systems. Previously, he was the founder of Comply Serve, the UK-based innovator of ComplyPro, which is the market leader in progressive project assurance solutions currently impacting the infrastructure and rail industry.
Rolison’s early background was in electronic engineering and, over the past 30 years, he has been involved in taking several leading-edge technologies to market with various organizations, including GEC, Racal Electronics, Zuken Inc., Gemstone Inc., and Telelogic. He first discovered the need for improved project assurance solutions in the rail industry in the 1990s when his team was heavily involved in delivering systems engineering technology and services to several major rail infrastructure programs across Europe. Rolison and his team developed a strategy to better integrate systems engineering practices with project delivery and supply chain management – a challenging problem area in the industry.
These concepts were highly supported in the industry, so Rolison established Comply Serve in 2005 to devote his full energies to delivering a viable industry project assurance solution. At Comply Serve, he conceived the principles of progressive assurance, which were first employed in the UK on London Overground’s East London Line Upgrade Program – delivered for the 2012 London Olympic Games.
ComplyPro is used across the international rail infrastructure sector by some of the world’s largest megaprojects including Crossrail (Europe’s largest civil engineering program), the UAE’s Etihad Rail program, and the Qatar Rail Development Program, which includes the Doha Metro, Qatar Long Distance Rail, and Lusail Light Railway projects. ComplyPro delivers the core program assurance framework and governance oversight, ensuring that design and delivery outcomes comply with the program specification, progressively, throughout the project lifecycle, improving outcomes and providing unprecedented visibility of the true health of a program, reducing program impairment, and delivering significant program cost savings.
ComplyPro was acquired by Bentley Systems in October 2016 and existing ComplyPro users can be confident of continuously broadened functionality, with progressive assurance a valuable new capability within the connected data environment shared by Bentley’s ProjectWise and AssetWise offerings.