Harry Leerkes
Employee portrait
Harry Leerkes
‘When systems become too complex, they create risks’
‘Project managers have to deal with increasingly more quality, safety, environmental and information security requirements on projects. My role as Head of Quality is to ensure that they can properly handle them. Because if systems become too complex, they don’t help anyone – they actually create risks.’
Nice challenge
‘I was already working in a lab when I began studying environmental science part-time. I’d always been interested in it, as I grew up in the Veluwe. Later, I moved to consulting, where I became involved in quality management and certification. For several years, I carried out audits at a globally active certification institution. I learned a lot from doing that: you see how different companies approach quality and safety, and you get to know a wide variety of people and visions.
‘I was already familiar with Witteveen+Bos through those audits. I saw an organisation that complied with all the requirements but whose quality management system could be improved. That seemed like a nice challenge to me. A few weeks after I was hired, the corona pandemic broke out. In the first year and a half, I was barely at the office. That gave me time to thoroughly read all the available information, but I also needed to find out how the organisation really functioned.’
Supporting project managers
‘There was a huge quality manual with detailed descriptions of procedures to be followed on projects. I got to page twenty and thought: this needs to be done differently. Project managers are being given increasingly more responsibilities as projects become more complex. If we then force them to read such a huge manual, we’re only making things harder for them. I believe our task is to support project managers: to help them maintain oversight and identify risks quickly so that projects remain safe and manageable. There’s still lots of room for improvement in that regard. But the manual doesn’t exist anymore. We’ve digitalised the entire system. And we’ve moved away from a collection of individual rules and started thinking in terms of processes.’
The most value
‘My interest in the environment and nature has always remained. I can totally lose myself in analysing a CO₂ dashboard: why is this figure so low or so high? Once I start investigating something, I follow it all the way though. But many standards and audits focus on business operations, while an engineering firm’s real impact is on projects. If we can use quality management systems and risk-based thinking to organise projects more simply and effectively, we’ll ultimately deliver the most value.’
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