Built by operators. Built on purpose. Built for this moment.

Two graduates, one corridor

We turned up on the same bp graduate engineering programme in September 1998 — two engineers handed real equipment to look after from day one, a long way from the lecture theatres we'd left the summer before. We were lucky. We worked alongside people who'd spent their lives in refineries, on platforms, in control rooms, in engine rooms; the learning came thick and fast!

That early apprenticeship never left us. It's still the standard we hold ourselves to.

Our careers diverged from there. One of us moved through the technology side of a global energy major culminating as its CIO, then went on to join one of the world's largest ship-management groups as CTO, and more recently founded a maritime software business. The other stayed closer to the steel, nine years at Grangemouth, formerly one of the UK's largest refining and petrochemical complexes, before moving upstream to support North Sea production assets with increasing responsibilities. International operations leadership in the Caspian followed with strategic thought leadership on organisation design and decarbonisation and, most recently digital transformation through discipline leadership of bp's global Production Management Unit.

Strategic and operational. Software and steel. Board-room and frontline. Two very different careers, lived in parallel across the same industry, as close friends throughout.

What we saw, up close

Between us we have been engineers at the sharp end, users of the tools others subscribed to, managers of the teams who had to live with the results, and leaders who had to sign the cheques. We have watched the technology stack evolve through every cycle, historians, SCADA, the cloud, IoT, the digital-twin wave, now the industrial-AI wave.

We have also sat on the receiving end of the big pitch. You know the one. A familiar logo on the slide. A year of discovery. A seven-figure invoice. A transformation programme measured in reporting cadences rather than operational outcomes. Bold claims about what the platform would unlock. And, more often than not, a quieter conversation six, nine, eighteen months later about why the thing still hadn't landed with the people it was meant for.

We don't think the big consultancies are staffed by bad people. We think the operating model is wrong for the moment we are in.

What's changed

Something has genuinely changed in the last two years, and anyone building operational software feels it. AI-assisted development has collapsed the cost of prototyping. A working interface, wired to real data, that would once have been a three-month build is now a three-day build. The question is no longer “can we afford to prototype?” It is “are we prototyping the right thing?”

That shift moves where the value sits. It used to sit in scale, the ability to put fifty consultants in a room for a year. It now sits in judgement, the ability to frame the right problem, design the right solution, and iterate with the people who actually use it until it delivers.

Why now

We didn't plan the arc that separated us and we certainly didn't plan the arc that has brought us back together at this particular moment.

But here we are. Almost three decades in, with two complementary careers' worth of experience, strategic and operational, digital and mechanical, arriving in the same room exactly as AI finally transforms the creation of software systems for the problems that actually matter. Either half of that, on its own, is a respectable consultancy story. Both halves, in the same room, at this moment is a rarer thing!

Technology is incredible. But it has to be applied to the right problems, in the right way, by people who have been there.

That is what The Propel Group is for.