Ashley met with NPRE Department Head Jim Stubbins and several other NPRE faculty, and delivered NPRE undergraduate and graduate seminars on April 1. His two-day visit included a meeting with Dean Andreas Cangellaris, as well as faculty and students from CEE and Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). He was also the featured speaker at the Engineering Council Honors Banquet.
Ashley spoke to NPRE undergrads on “Managing Projects with First-of-a-Kind (FOAK) Risks,” using various past and recent Bechtel projects as illustrations. Bechtel’s work supporting mPower small modular reactors is one of the company’s current examples of FOAK projects.
Ashley said companies can mitigate possible risks inherent in FOAK projects by:
- Assuring substantial completion of design (e.g. 90%) before start of construction;
- Performing integrated technical readiness reviews;
- Making sure that what is done on a small scale can translate to a large scale, finished project; and
- Ensuring that all parties involved in any portion of the project are on the same page.
“We’re very good at risk management,” Ashley maintained, but we can always strive to be better.
Ashley declared that coming to Illinois was one of the best decisions he ever made. He added that earning a master’s degree and remaining flexible in his professional life proved beneficial to his career.
Ashley is a Senior Vice President at Bechtel with over 32 years of engineering and senior management experience on nuclear and industrial projects. Bechtel has worked on 150 nuclear power plants worldwide and has provided services on 88 percent of the U.S. nuclear fleet.