A New Chapter Begins, with Management Changes at RPC

Following the retirement of Keith Hogben at the beginning of June, RPC is delighted to announce that John Lister will be picking up the reins as the new Managing Director of the company.

John is a familiar face on the Oracle Primavera scene. He has been Projects Director at RPC since 2017, and, as a Bradford lad, says that from the outset, being part of RPC felt ‘like coming home’. 

“Keith has left me with some sizeable boots to fill,” John says, “but together we’ve spent the last 18 months planning for this transition and Keith’s done a grand job of handing off his role. He leaves the company in fantastic shape and I’m confident that we’ll continue to grow and flourish, and that we will make him proud.”  

John’s career began as a Site Engineer, working two long assignments in Tanzania and Ghana shortly after graduating from his Civil Engineering degree at Bath. It was in Ghana in 1995 that he first started using Primavera P3 in the construction of an abattoir. Back in the rainy UK, building a Tesco on the outskirts of Manchester, he spotted an opportunity for a warm and dry office job using the Primavera skills he’d learned, but in a training capacity.   

Since 1997, he’s been training, consulting and implementing the Primavera product suite, including 10 years at Primavera, and subsequently Oracle, where he was International Consulting Director.

With 26 years of experience in Primavera, a history of managing large and disparate teams and a famously pragmatic approach to problem-solving and management, John is well-placed to take the helm at RPC. “The leadership team of Peter Gable, Tina Johnson and Dave Hurren is a formidable one,” he tells us. “Between us we have the best part of 100 years of industry and Primavera experience, but all with different and complementary skillsets.” 

RPC has a long, rich and successful history of working alongside Oracle as a Partner, and John is excited about building on that collaborative relationship going forward. “We’ve got big plans to broaden our offering, including building a NetSuite practice and continuing to work with Oracle on new developments and exciting projects to expand on the success of our NEC4 solution and other business-process-related solutions in Unifier.” 

“I’ve known John for a long time,” says RPC Chairman, Peter Gable, “and he’s already a one of the RPC family. Keith’s retirement is going to create a big hole in the office, but I’ve no doubt that John’s the man to fill that gap and I’m looking forward to working with him and the rest of the team as we start the next chapter of RPC.”  

“For me,” John says, “RPC is all about the people and as part of Keith’s departure, I’m really proud that we have transitioned the ownership of RPC into a 100 percent Employee-Owned Trust, giving every single member of our valued team a real stake in the future success of the business. It’s a model that fits perfectly with the ethos of our company, where we are proud that we have always had that culture of high performance, loyalty and longevity. Many companies move to an EOT in order to cultivate this in their staff, but we are fortunate that we already had this in place, and I believe it’s that that makes RPC so successful and will continue to do so for years to come. I’m proud and excited to be part of that.”