CB&I (now McDermott) | Freeport LNG ($2.5B) and Cameron LNG ($5.5B+) | EPC Joint Venture

Situation

Freeport LNG was a three-train development. CB&I executed it under a joint venture with Zachry Industrial and Chiyoda. At that contract value, with complex execution and three JV stakeholders, no one person had eyes on the full commercial picture.

When I joined at project start, there was no commercial management system. Change orders moved by email. A PM would describe scope and estimated hours, send it over, and it became a formal client submission. No standardized formats. No documented assumptions. No way to see what pending changes were doing to prime contract margin.

With 30+ PMs across engineering, procurement, subcontracts, and construction, the exposure compounded with every new change.

Approach

I built the commercial management framework from scratch. The email process was replaced with a standardized submission form: documented scope, stated assumptions, explicit exclusions, and contingency and profit auto-calculated through built-in formulas. Every submission fed a master tracking system that separated cumulative approved and unapproved changes and ran sensitivity analysis against prime contract margin.

Leadership could see how each change affected project economics before making commitments. Dashboards gave them a real-time summary at any point, eliminating the reporting lag that had previously left unapproved changes sitting untracked for weeks.

I rolled it out over three to four months and enforced it through my role as the commercial point of contact on the prime contract, upstream to the client and downstream across project teams.

Outcome

Across both projects, I managed approximately 120 change orders. The structured documentation changed how disputes resolved and how clients engaged. Previously rejected changes were strategically bundled with larger submissions to recover work performed without formal approval, recovering an estimated $50K to $100K in revenue. Disputes that would have escalated under the old process got resolved faster because the paper trail was clear and defensible.

The framework's success on Freeport is what got me pulled off that project and asked to replicate the system on Cameron LNG, a project more than twice the contract value with a more demanding client. The same system scaled.