Abacus adds to leadership team: project and cost management takeaways for engineers
Reviewed by Joe Ashwell
First reported on The Construction Index
30 Second Briefing
Manchester-based construction consultant Abacus has hired former Aecom leaders Steve Kenny as director of project management and Paul Camac as director of cost management, bolstering its 36-strong Manchester team. The move comes two years after Abacus was acquired by private equity-backed Contollo Group, which now has over 230 staff nationally and has consolidated consultancies including MBA, Tace, ESP and Kam. With clients such as Barratt Redrow, Bruntwood, Harworth and Sport England, the expanded leadership signals a push to scale project and cost management capability across complex built environment schemes.
Technical Brief
- Contollo Group now employs over 140 staff in the northwest within a 230-strong national organisation.
- Contollo has consolidated multiple specialists: MBA and Tace (consulting engineers), ESP (M&E), and Kam (project management).
- Client base spans national developers and asset owners, including Alliance Leisure, Glenbrook, Muse and Vita Group.
- Residential and mixed-use exposure includes Barratt Redrow, Capital & Centric, Harworth, McLaren Property and Torsion Developments.
- Integration of project management (Kam, Abacus) with M&E and consulting engineering arms enables single-point consultancy for multi-disciplinary builds.
- For large civils and regeneration schemes, such integrated groups typically de-risk interface issues between cost, programme and design disciplines.
Our Take
With 230 staff across Contollo Group and 140 already in the northwest, Abacus’s 36-strong Manchester team gives the group a sizeable local delivery base compared with many design-and-PM boutiques in our Infrastructure database, which typically operate with sub-20 headcounts per regional office.
Aecom’s repeated appearance in recent UK infrastructure pieces in our coverage – from RAF Coningsby works to the Liverpool Street Station redevelopment – signals that Abacus’s leadership hires with Aecom backgrounds are likely aimed at positioning the Contollo stable for larger, more complex public and quasi-public projects in the region.
Being two years post-acquisition is often when integration and cross-selling start to bite; in our database of UK construction consultancies, leadership refreshes at this point usually precede a push into higher-margin advisory or programme management work rather than pure design-only roles.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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