External service is the work that keeps a discipline running: journals, standards bodies, working commissions, examination, grant assessment, conferences. Almost none of it is a discrete task. A journal does not need someone to review one paper; it needs someone who will still be reviewing in eight years and who knows what it publishes and what it has already turned down. A standards committee cannot use a member who leaves before the revision cycle closes. The unit of contribution here is the term, not the task.
Eighteen years at one end, 2028 at the other
I have reviewed continuously for the International Journal of Project Management, Engineering, Construction and Architectural Management and Construction Management and Economics since 2008, which is longer than most of my published work has existed. At the other end I sit on the scientific committee for the CIB World Building Congress in Beijing in 2028, a commitment already made for work that begins well before the event.
The oldest commitment on this page began in 2008. The newest runs to 2028.
The path into an editorial role shows what those spans are actually made of. I began reviewing for Project Management Journal in 2014 and became a department editor there in 2020: six years of reviewing before anyone handed me a decision. At Built Environment Project and Asset Management the sequence ran longer, from reviewing in 2012, to the editorial review board in 2017, to associate editor in 2025. Thirteen years in one journal before helping to run it. Membership of MB012, the Standards Australia committee for project, programme and portfolio management, has run since 2017, and coordination of communications for CIB Working Commission W122 on public-private partnerships since 2020.
The volume
The counts are the least interesting part of this and the easiest to state. I have reviewed for 55 journals, with 117 reviews recorded on ORCID and 101 on Web of Science; the gap between those two figures is a fair comment on how poorly this work is tracked. I hold or have held editorial roles at eleven journals and have guest edited five special issues since 2022, on public-private partnerships, carbon neutrality in urban infrastructure, artificial intelligence in construction management, and tradition and innovation in project management. Between January and July this year I recorded 35 editorial decisions across the two journals where I make them.
Beyond the journals: external examiner for doctoral theses at seven universities and for final-year dissertations at an eighth since 2015; detailed assessor for three funding agencies; proposal reviewer for Springer, Routledge and World Scientific; scientific or organising committee member for ten conferences and events since 2015; reviewer for ten more, including EURAM, IRNOP and three CIB World Building Congresses; six keynote or plenary addresses; and close to forty invited talks since 2009.
What that volume buys is calibration. Reading several hundred manuscripts at various stages of failure is the only way I know to develop a reliable sense of what separates a paper that needs another year from one that needs a different question, and it is the reason I can now usually tell within two pages which of those a submission is.
The range
The work is spread across systems that do not resemble each other. I examine doctorates at Lingnan University and City University of Hong Kong as well as at Sydney, Western Sydney, Newcastle, Curtin and RMIT. I assess grants for the Australian Research Council, for the National Research Foundation in South Africa, and for Makerere University's research and innovations fund in Uganda. The journals sit with publishers in the United Kingdom, the United States, China and Europe, and the conference work has run through Australia, Hong Kong, mainland China, Sweden, Italy and the United States.
The range exists because my career did. I worked in Hong Kong, then Singapore, then Australia, and my research has always been comparative, so the service followed the same paths. It has a specific value that is easy to miss. A South African rating application, an ARC assessment and a Ugandan research fund application are not the same task in different accents. They ask different questions about what counts as a contribution, they assume different resource bases, and applying Australian expectations to a Ugandan application would be a straightforward failure of assessment. Doing several of them teaches you that your own system's standards are a local settlement rather than a universal one, which is the same lesson I take from comparative research and I am not sure I would have learnt it from research alone.
Standards, commissions and accreditation
Some bodies produce nothing visible for years and then produce something that matters. Standards Australia and CIB W122 are both of that kind. Since 2022 I have also served on onsite visit teams for the Project Management Institute's Global Accreditation Center, assessing programs at other institutions, which is the exercise I go through with our own programs seen from the other side of the table.
In this category the qualification that counts is not expertise, which several people always have. It is having been present long enough to know what was already settled, what was tried and abandoned, and why an apparently obvious change was rejected the last three times it was proposed. None of that is written down, and it is lost entirely when membership turns over quickly.
What none of this proves
Length of service is not quality of service. Nine years on an editorial board can mean nine years of careful work or it can mean not having resigned, and from outside those look the same. Several editorial board memberships in this field ask almost nothing of their members, and listing them beside roles that consume real time flatters the record.
Volume is worse. A review can be fast, confident and useless, and counting reviews rewards exactly the reviewer who writes three paragraphs in twenty minutes over the one who takes half a day. My own counts are self-reported to two platforms that disagree with each other. They also say nothing about the invitations I decline, which in a field this small is often the honest response because I know the authors.
The range is narrower than the list of countries suggests. Of close to forty invited talks, more than thirty were in China. That is a concentration, not a spread, and it reflects a deliberate specialisation in Australia and China rather than any general internationalism. The European and North American work is real but thin by comparison.
Long tenure also carries a cost specific to gatekeeping. The people who have been in a field longest are the most invested in how it currently frames its questions and the least likely to notice what it has stopped asking. Eighteen years of reviewing public-private partnership papers has made me quick at spotting a weak method and slower than I should be at telling whether an unfamiliar paper is unfamiliar because it is wrong or because it is new.
What I have changed is the rule applied before accepting. If I cannot commit to a role for at least three years, I decline it, because on the evidence above anything shorter costs the organisation more than it returns.