Mega projects often struggle under their own sheer weight, leading to massive budget overruns, stakeholder conflict, and unmanaged complexity. The challenge lies in managing change ruthlessly while maintaining safety and quality across vast, long-term undertakings.
This episode explores the disciplined mindset required to deliver major infrastructure on time and on budget, focusing on "right-to-left" planning, risk ownership, and the crucial role of collaboration. We also look at how digital tools like BIM and AI are revolutionising project delivery and safety in the construction sector.
Our guest is Carl Devlin, Capital Works Director at MTR Corporation. His three decades of experience include senior leadership on iconic projects such as London Heathrow Terminal 5 and upgrading 40 per cent of the London Underground network
THINGS WE SPOKE ABOUT
● Driving career with big goals
● Right-to-left planning and requirements
● Minimising change on mega projects
● Leading rail expansion in Hong Kong
● Using AI for construction safety
GUEST DETAILS
Carl Devlin is the Capital Works Director at MTR Corporation. He oversees new railway projects and major upgrades for Hong Kong's sophisticated transport network. His core expertise includes navigating the immense complexity of mega-projects, balancing technical excellence with strategic stakeholder demands, and spearheading digital transformation in construction.
Connect with Carl:
● Website: https://www.mtr.com.hk
● Social Media: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carl-devlin
QUOTES
● "When you're managing change, you have to look holistically at the whole system, not just at the components that you're actually accountable for." - Carl Devlin
● "Change is the thing that drives mega projects off course, because once you've committed a supply chain... and you change one of the requirements, it can have a huge knock-on impact on the project." - Carl Devlin
● "I keep saying to my team, if you were spending the money out of your wallet, would you do this?" - Carl Devlin
TRANSCRIPTION
For your convenience, here is an AI transcription
Dusty Rhodes 0:01
Right now, on Amplified...
Carl Devlin 0:03
When you're managing change, you have to look holistically at the whole system, not just at the components that you're actually accountable for. And that's, I guess, the heart of project management. And we understand our facility better than the people who are building it.
Dusty Rhodes 0:24
Hi there. My name is Dusty Rhodes, and you're welcome to Amplified: The Engineers Ireland Podcast. Many capital projects can collapse under their own weight, struggling with massive budget overruns, stakeholder friction and just the sheer complexity of modern infrastructure. Our guest today has a wealth of experience in this area as a high-end project manager, he brings experience working on mega projects in London and New Zealand, development of a nuclear power station. And today he's joining us from Hong Kong, where he's working on railway extension projects on Lantau Island and the New Territories for MTR. It's pleasure to welcome MTR's Capital Works Director, Carl Devlin. How are you, Carl?
Carl Devlin 1:04
I'm Grand Dusty. It's great to be here. Thank you for having me.
Dusty Rhodes 1:09
Listen. Tell me you're from Cork originally. What was the specific spark that drew you into our wonderful world of engineering?
Carl Devlin 1:17
Oh, I guess, you know, if I go back to, you know, when I was a young lad, which is a long time ago now, I really enjoyed building things, assembling things, and everything else. That was sort of where I was at when I was at school. I wasn't really a languages person. I was a kind of physics, maths, technical drawing. They were the kind of things that I liked doing. They were meaningful. You know, there were a number of engineers in my family. My father was a civil engineer. He worked in the local authority in Ireland. Many uncles were also engineers. So there was engineering. The family didn't really ever pressurise me into doing engineering, but it was sort of there was nothing else to do. When I filled out the CEO application, I only put civil engineering on. I just that's what I wanted to be. And I think it was really about doing things to contribute to society, giving something back, doing something meaningful. I think there's all of those things that came together, and because that was a long time ago, now, haven't looked back since.
Dusty Rhodes 2:05
You've spent an awful lot of your career abroad. Is that because you always thought big and went Ireland might be too small?
Carl Devlin 2:13
Maybe, I think when I came out of university, I wanted to do something big, so I actually sort of went to the UK and started working in the offshore oil and gas industry, and sort of moved from that into infrastructure. So I think at the time, the early 90s, there was a bit of recession in Ireland, and the kind of opportunities didn't seem big enough. I suppose I always wanted to do big things. I guess going to the UK was the start of me following a pathway which has ended up with me here today.
Dusty Rhodes 2:41
And then, like many people who go to the UK, you find yourself in London.
Carl Devlin 2:44
I did.
Dusty Rhodes 2:45
You did some very big projects there. Tell me about the tube.
Carl Devlin 2:48
After spending some time in London, I worked for a number of companies. I ended up working for Transport for London, by which time, I had been working on mega projects in the UK. You know, I guess you know, I'd come to there after working on the first high-speed railway in the UK, working at Heathrow Terminal Five, where I'd originally been involved in extending the Heathrow Express out to Terminal Five. So it's kind of had railways had sort of been added to something that I knew something about, Transport for London were looking for somebody who could take over a mega project. It was a time after they had been involved in some of their PPPs. They'd taken it back in-house, and it was the biggest rollout of rolling stock and signalling upgrades to about 40% of the London Underground network. So a very complex project to take on, very challenging, but actually was quite enjoyable.
Dusty Rhodes 3:36
Now, you weren't out with the shovel digging new tunnels. I take it. You were on the project planning side of things. What did that involve them when they say, here's the tube network. All right, we need to modernise 40% of it. I mean, how do you even start planning that?
Carl Devlin 3:50
Well, it comes down to looking at, what are you trying to achieve. You know, what? Ultimately, as a project manager, when you're designing and developing a project, you try and set out, what are the requirements, what are the outputs that we're looking for from a project, not about how are we going to deliver it? You know, what are we looking to do in terms of when it comes to railway? What is the headway? What's the capacity? What kind of journey time are we looking for? What kind of passenger experience are we looking for? You need to spend time talking to the stakeholders, the people who are going to actually operate the railway, to understand some of the things that they're looking for. The part of the network that I was dealing with was the oldest part of the underground at that point in time. So we had three different railway lines that had three different performances, and we were introducing new air conditioning, rolling stock for the first time into the underground in London. I was part of one of the things that we were looking to do. We were looking to modernise the trains. The ones we were replacing were some of the original trains in the underground. So again, we were bringing that into use a new signalling system, which meant we had to upgrade certain parts of the track so we could actually get the journey times we were looking for. But you plan all of that, which sounds complex, and it is. But of course, as a project manager, and I'm a civil engineer by background, I use. Lot of people with different specialist skills, and I bring them together into creating a team who understands how to put this together. And of course, you manage them on timelines of things that we need to deliver by point in time. And then you begin to lay out, how are we going to construct this? How do we compartmentalise this into contracts that the market and supply chain can build for us as the project manager, we then integrate all of that in the long run to deliver something like that into service.
Dusty Rhodes 5:27
I think it's really interesting how you say, and I'm sure a lot of people do it, is, you're looking at the result. First, what is it that we want? And then you figure out the how do we get there. One of the big things that constrains the how do we get there is finance. So how do you balance it's the results that we want with. Well, we only have a certain amount of money. What kind of amounts are you dealing with? It must be huge.
Carl Devlin 5:46
It's significant. I mean, here in Hong Kong, where I am currently, I'm looking after a programme where we've already committed to invest the equivalent of about 16 billion euro into the network, and that's a significant undertaking. I mean, at MTR, we finance and take on all the risk when we agree to extend the railway. So it's like taking on a mortgage. We need to be extremely cost-conscious when we're managing the project. I mean, I have ways that I've developed over many, many years of how we allocate budgets down to different cost components, and we are rootless in terms of looking at or expenditure forecasting what it's going to cost on a continuous basis and revisiting it to ensure that we deliver within the timeframe that we're looking for. And of course, railway operator safety and quality and complying with regulations are absolutely paramount.
Dusty Rhodes 6:41
So how do you balance that kind of, you know, trying to make things as best technically as possible, with those financial constraints, especially when you're in the very early stage, making those design decisions?
Carl Devlin 6:52
Bringing the early stages of a project everyone you know, you put an estimate together, and you have ranges of what that might be based on the quality of the design. So it's all about, you know, developing the design, fixing the requirements. We just talked about this whole what I call right to left thinking, which is understanding the end stage, before you've even started, and really driving your whole project through. That's what we have to deliver. And you want to get to a point when you start construction where you're minimising change. Change is the thing that drives mega projects off course, because once you've committed a supply chain and you've got a standing army of people building different things to a timeline, and you change one of the requirements, it can have a huge knock-on impact on the project. So again, one of my mantras in my project management locker is no change.
Dusty Rhodes 7:42
And how often does that work out for you, Carl?
Carl Devlin 7:45
Not as often as I would like. If I'm being brutally honest, I think it's a better mindset, because no change doesn't mean absolutely no change, but it means that you challenge the changes as you go along through a project much more rigorously than maybe people have in the past is about understanding, do you really need to do this? Is this preferential? Will we actually get the benefit out of this that we expect? I mean, I've been doing this for a long time. So, I mean, we know all our contracts, we talk about value engineering, and we look to our supply chain to help us optimise the costs as we go forward. But I mean, I've worked in many, many projects where actually, through value engineering the unintended consequences, because whoever is engineering maybe a civil structure doesn't understand fully how you're going to use it in an operational context. And there are other things further down the line that actually become much more complicated. So when you're managing change, you have to look holistically at the whole system, not just at the components that you're actually accountable for. And that's a I guess, the art of project management, you've got to balance all of these things. And as the client's project manager, ultimately, we understand our network, or we understand our facility, better than the people who are building a forest. So actually, it's about having that holistic understanding and being not afraid to say no, when some people say but this will save you some money.
Dusty Rhodes 9:09
You mentioned that you were working with Heathrow and T5 and the light rail station there, and also the extensions across the tube in general. Can you give me an example, then, of change that might have happened there that you had to deal with?
Carl Devlin 9:20
So when we're at Terminal five, you know, I looked after Originally, the extension heat Express, then air traffic control tower, and finally, one of the satellite buildings at Terminal five, very late on into the project, we did have a change that all the security requirements and airports changed, which required us to change all the X ray machines that we're putting into the terminal buildings now, this was not something that we could say no to, because it was a regulatory requirement from the regulator that had a significant impact on our project as a whole, because we had to manage introduction of the new machines while we were testing commissioning the facility and looking to see how we could. Would continue to drive the opening days that we have in our mind. You get a lot of other changes and projects in the underground, you know, we get changes to track layouts that would be done for good reason, changes to lower level. So they come from very high level, which are driven by external sources. So you must do to internal changes to where we're looking, to optimise the structure, remove some of the facilities. To say, does the end user really need all these extra facilities that they say at the start of the project that they need?
Dusty Rhodes 10:30
So when it comes along to something where regulator is changing the rules, and you know that you can't change them, basically, you're looking at everything else along the line in order to still make it work, is that it absolutely so.
Carl Devlin 10:42
I mean, the thing is, we lock in on a lot of projects. We lock in completion dates at a very early stage, and before you've gone through detailed design, before you've even procured your supply chain. And of course, you're continually as a project manager, looking to see, how do I achieve that end goal? And here in Hong Kong, it's actually, how do we make sure if we can bring it forward, we can bring it forward. So when you get a change that you can't say no to you, then got to go and re look at the whole planning of the project to say, actually, where else can I squeeze What else can I do differently? How else can I recover the time that I'm going to lose on this particular task by doing things differently as I go along? At another point in time, as I said earlier, don't really like change after we've started, but change is inevitable, and it's really about what's the culture and mindset. So when these things do come along, how do you work together with your supply chain? How do you collaborate to make sure that actually, you can still all focus on the win, win, which is actually delivering the project that you're set out at the outset.
Dusty Rhodes 11:40
To do no change is great. But as you say, change is inevitable in one way, or especially when you're looking at mega projects, because they last so long. Do you build that into the budget? Do you have, like, kind of, okay, well, 5% for, you know, mess ups that happen along the way?
Carl Devlin 11:54
Yes, I think everybody builds a certain amount of contingency into their budgets. The question is, how do you know was there's enough contingency for the kind of project that you have, you know, and you know, I've worked in different jurisdictions. I guess every jurisdiction has a slightly different way of doing it. There is no fixed rule as to what's the right number. Some of it comes back to, how are you financing? Where's the funding source? How much can you afford to build in? What does it then do in terms of your approach to, how do you actually go and procure the project and bring on your supply chain promise? How do you incentivize people? Because on mega projects risk, you know, you come across all sorts of things, things happen that you've got to deal with them. So you've also got to incentivize everyone to be focused on the end days, you know, doing things in an optimal way. And, you know, I've over the years, and here in Hong Kong, currently, I'm using the new engineering from a contract, something I've been using a long time in the UK. And it's very much about collaborating with your supply chain, working on what we call a target cost, paying people, cost, paying the supply chain to manage the risks on your behalf, in rather than, you know, getting into a fixed price mentality, where you're saying, you know, if that's my price, and if you change anything, I'm going to raise a claim against you. It's a different form of contracting, you know, and it does require, you know, a strong client, a client who wants to work with their supply chain. That's very, very important.
Dusty Rhodes 13:20
And how is it working with the suppliers then, in the supply chain, do they show flexibility, or are they kind of fixed, then in their own costs? Or how does it work?
Carl Devlin 13:29
Well, look, I think it's like everything else. When you engage a supply chain on the picking and big project as a client, you want them to make a return. Having your supply chain making money is better than the supply chain that's losing money. Because if they're losing money, they're a business, so they're looking for every way possible to recover. What they expect is because, like every business, once they want to tender a project, they have to go to their board, they have to get approval. So this is the bid, and these are all the reasons. So if they're losing money, they will be looking for ways to recover that which is not always in the best interest of the project as a whole. So it's really about working with your supply chain. Now, of course, if they have done something wrong and you as a client growing cost, well, why should you? But you've got to have set the contract up in the wrong way for people to approach us in the wrong way, and it requires as the client to be quite fair when you're dealing with things that have changed or different, because in many cases, as a client, you let many contracts, and they're all interfacing, and it's up to you as the client to manage the interface. So you've got to be fair.
Dusty Rhodes 14:33
I'm quite sure a lot of engineers listening to this are kind of they're identifying what it is that you're talking about and in their own various projects, but you've had experience on a project that nobody in Ireland has ever done. Right? So when you're thinking about project management and CAPEX investment, how does this apply to the job you did in Gloucester, where you were working on the investment for a nuclear power plant? Is it the same, or is it different?
Carl Devlin 14:56
It's similar and not exactly the same, not exactly different. Because, of course, the. Way nuclear power gets funded is quite different to maybe sort of railway infrastructure or roads infrastructure. So in the UK, the nuclear power station, there's a whole regulatory framework. And when you've built the power station and start supplying power to the grid, you get paid effectively a fixed rate, and that's all agreed when you're going through the arrangement to deliver the project and sign up with government and the UK happened at the UK Government, the challenge of nuclear power stations is working out what the right budget to construct them is in the first place. They haven't got a great reputation around the world of being delivered on time or within any close resemblance to the original budget. Now, the project I was involved in, in the early stages I got involved. I was the construction director. We were investing a significant sum money in advanced works, compared to, you know, the amount of money we invested was bigger than the cost of many other projects. Or challenge was landing on capex that we could get the right investment model far. And while I was there, that was proving to be quite difficult, my sense was, when I joined that particular project, was that the capex was going to be a lot more than what they thought that was the reality, and that meant the investment model was hard to sort of square that circle. I left that particular company before they'd kind of concluded financial sort of discussions. One of the challenges we actually had was getting planning permission, and that is one of the things that meant that power station never proceeded.
Dusty Rhodes 16:31
Well, if you've nowhere to build it, what's the point?
Dusty Rhodes 16:36
Yeah, I mean, it's a basic question. I'm thinking about an engineer who's listening today and thinking, I would like to get involved in the planning of bigger projects or just overall planning. How do you go from, you know, kind of engineering and working at the coalface, as it were, into project management? Are they two completely different sets of skills?
Carl Devlin 16:56
They are and they're not. I mean, I'm a civil engineer. I'm always a civil engineer. I've worked on nuclear power stations, I've worked on high speed railway. I've worked on underground, I've worked on airport travels, I know, running the capital works business units within MTR and Hong Kong. I'm doing this because I'm a civil engineer. Civil engineering gives you a broad range of skills. You can choose to become a very specialist engineer doing design work. Or you can choose to become a more generalist engineer, using your civil engineering skills and pursue a management pathway. And ultimately, technical engineers need to have people managing them, so you end up being a specialist from a technical side. Or you can begin to move down the road of managing projects. It all depends on, I guess, what you want. I knew when I was a young engineer that I wanted to be a project manager. That's what I wanted, so I pursued opportunities that would give me more exposure to managing projects and also taking a risk on certain times. Okay, so I think I'm able to run this project and pushing people to give me more experience, because it's only through learning on the job, but that you actually know learn the skills that you need to become a project manager. You have to try and occasionally and make mistakes and work with people. I mean, I've had the, I guess, the fortune of working under some great project leaders in my time, and learning different things from them and picking up ways as to what you should do and what you shouldn't do. And probably by now, I've taken influence from three or four different people in my career to sort of shape the kind of project manager, project leader that I am today. Because most of what I do is about leadership, and you know, I have others to do the management.
Dusty Rhodes 18:36
That's an interesting point, though. It's good to have the initial experience before you going to managing others who are doing the same thing? One thing we talk about a lot on the podcast is engineering in an international experience. And like we've talked a lot about what you've done in the UK, you were dragged off, or, dare I say, Were you dragged off to New Zealand and did some work there? How did you end up down under?
Carl Devlin 18:58
Down Under ish, under ish, yeah, they wouldn't be Down Under in New Zealand.
Dusty Rhodes 19:01
Exactly, yeah.
Carl Devlin 19:02
There's three hours between New Zealand and Australia across the Tasman Sea. So I got approached and look at a, you know, an opportunity down there. And I went to Auckland and got quite taken by, you know, it's a very different country. It's very different from Ireland. It's very different from the UK. And decided to bring the family down to New Zealand for a couple of years. And happened to be there during covers, which maybe had his good points and his bad points. But you know, in terms of from a family experience, it was a great place to be for a period of time while the kids were teenagers. The work life balance in New Zealand is probably one of the best I've come across country population is similar to Ireland in terms of size, bigger land mass, but his ability, again, to do mega projects is limited. It can only do maybe one at a time. So I was there for a number of years helping them develop a light rail like metro project in Oakland, before I got approached to come up here to Hong Kong.
Dusty Rhodes 20:00
So if you're working on the light rail, then in Auckland, is that something similar to the Lewis and Dublin? Is it.
Carl Devlin 20:05
It originally started as being something similar to the Luas, but while I was there, I evolved the scheme into Metro scheme, a live Metro scheme, very like, probably like the Metrolink scheme that is currently under development in Dublin.
Dusty Rhodes 20:19
Still talking about it, and what is the difference? Then, for those who don't know, including myself, between Luas and Metro?
Carl Devlin 20:25
The light rail scheme that they were developing was fully above ground scheme. The light metro was going to use metro style trains underground. We underground is the central part in Oakland, and then had it come above ground. But in terms of operating, is a very, very different type of system capacity was higher in terms of its ability to sort of extend and deliver what we saw as a quality service extending to the vast area that Auckland. Auckland is a sprawling city, and we thought it had a lot more potential in terms of the light rail.
Dusty Rhodes 20:58
You thought it had a lot more potential. What changed your mind?
Carl Devlin 21:02
Covid came along and country couldn't afford it.
Dusty Rhodes 21:05
All right. End of.
Carl Devlin 21:09
Yeah, absolutely.
Dusty Rhodes 21:10
In Dublin, we're looking at a rail connection now to Dublin Airport. Did you have a similar thing in Auckland? Because the airport in Auckland is quite a distance from the city.
Carl Devlin 21:18
Yes, I know. I mean, the scheme was going to connect from downtown Oakland to the airport, and that was going to be the first leg. So big part of what I was doing through that development phase was working out how we would guess the light Metro scheme into the airport so that we could actually physically connect in, because it had been designed as an above ground connection. We needed to come in below ground and then surface it. And of course, we were working through how we would underground through the centre of Auckland, which is got complex geology and things like that. So we spent a lot of time effectively developing the business case for very different scheme from a sort of surface level live Ralph that would effectively run in parallel with buses.
Dusty Rhodes 21:59
Can I ask with all of your experience around the world and keeping projects on schedule, what differentiates projects that stay on schedule and budget from those that don't?
Carl Devlin 22:10
I've worked in many projects where, you know, we've delivered them within budget. You know, when I was at Terminal Five, I was part of the management team we had a 4 billion plus Sterling project, we had effectively been a private company. We'd effectively mortgage the company to build Terminal Five. So we understood that as the management and leadership team, so we had a ruthless focus on delivering milestones and managing the budget and managing the risks in a way that very few other projects probably have seen do out here in Hong Kong in a similar fashion. We are financing, you know, 16 or so billion that we've already invested and there's more to come. We are financing all of this on our company balance sheet. So that changes your mindset of because it's our money. So, you know, I keep saying to my team, if you were spending the money out of your wallet, would you do this? So when we've set a timeline, we then manage the teams ruthlessly to deliver the timeframe, deliver it to cost. So there's a very strong focus on these things. I think if you come from a project where you might have that sense of ownership, you tend to let things happen, and you're looking for somebody else then to find the extra finance that you need.
Dusty Rhodes 23:29
We've talked about your experience in the UK, your experience in New Zealand, which is a big spread out city. Now you're working in Hong Kong, which is the opposite of a big spread out city. Tell us what you're working on there?
Carl Devlin 23:40
So here in Hong Kong, you know, work for MTR Corporations, so we run the mass transit system in Hong Kong. Hong Kong is a densely populated city country. It's probably in terms of size. It's probably just a little bit bigger than the county of Dublin, but there are seven and a half million people who live here, and probably 80% of Hong Kong is actually National Park. So every day, we've probably got about 11 million passenger journeys on the public transport system in Hong Kong, and we in MTR have just over about 5 million of them on our system. We run a service that's high safety, high reliability. You know, we run it at 99.5% performance reliability. The public in Hong Kong expect a highly reliable service because rail transport is at the backbone of the public transport system. And obviously, you know, being such so densely populated, not a lot of people have access to cars. The places would clog up very quickly if everyone did so here in Hong Kong, we're undertaking sort of the biggest expansion we have of the rail network, and we're extending many of the existing railway lines to either join existing communities with the current transport network, or we're creating new stations to support new towns that have been developed all over Hong Kong. As well as we're about to commence the kickoff of probably the biggest project we've ever done under the what we call the rail and property model, which is a 17-kilometre underground railway in the northern part of Hong Kong that will connect west and east, and also will have a branch line that goes across the boundary into the Chinese mainland.
Dusty Rhodes 25:19
Wow. That's a lot to take on. And then today. I mean literally today. What's the biggest problem in your head that you're trying to figure out?
Carl Devlin 25:26
I've got many. I've got six projects that are already well underway. We started construction in 2023 we're looking to hand over complete and put into operation the first station next year in 2027 so I have many conversations about where we are in terms of our readiness for that later this year, I'm switching some tracks over on one of our main lines into the one of the new stations that we're building, so we can facilitate the rest of the construction. So we're working our way through all the approvals that we need to give out in place. And I was having a session this morning with my team on another project where we are looking to slide part of a new station that we're building around the viaduct into position at Easter next year. So we've got some big technical challenges. And one of the challenges of building railways extensions here in Hong Kong is we don't close the railway, like they do in other countries. So the railway runs all the time. When we're working around the railway, we get a two hour window every night to do works that require us to have access to the railway. And of course, I can't use these two hours seven days a week, because my maintenance colleagues also need to do maintenance in those two hours. So the concept of shutting the railway or closing the railway for a weekend or for weeks at a time, doesn't exist here at all.
Dusty Rhodes 26:47
Now, maybe just a wee little Paddy. All right, we were kind of thinking that's ridiculous. You can't be having that. But when you're presented with a whole different, you know, kind of country and mentality and stuff like that, I mean, how do you handle that? Do you just kind of get on with it? Or do you think it's better doing that than our way of Ah, of course, you need the whole night.
Carl Devlin 27:04
Hong Kong is one of the most expensive place in the world to do construction. Yeah. And one would argue that maybe some of these expectations from the public drive costs into construction. Now I'm challenged with delivering projects faster than we have in our past, more cost effective than we have in our past, because, of course, we want to do more. So when you move to new country, you've really got to start understanding, sort of, what the culture is, what the mindset, what do the stakeholders want. As a civil engineer, there's so many things that I do that were never part of my civil engineering degree at UCC, you know, using technology, communications, stakeholder engagement, all the things that are really important when you're doing mega projects, but they're the things that I probably spend most of my time on. So I've been pushing my team. You know, one of our projects, we were building a station on top of the railway. The railway runs in a tunnel, and we've been building a station down on top of it. We've had to de water the ground around the railway while we've been building the station so that we could construct a new station, and we had to make sure the railway didn't move when we were doing this. So there's some real technical challenges, but in this environment, this is taken as a given that we'll solve all these technical problems, and we'll do it within budgets that some people would say are reasonably tight, and within timelines that also we'd look at and say are fairly tight. After all, you know, if that is what the stakeholders expect, you've got to find a way to do it, telling them you can't do it, or saying that this is what they do in the UK, or this is what they do in Australia. Doesn't wash when you're in a different country.
Dusty Rhodes 28:31
I had advice from somebody once when I was working abroad. They said, I know what you're like, so don't go in and tell them this is the way we do it in Ireland. He said, shut up. Say nothing. Only ask questions for at least six months. Would you agree with that?
Carl Devlin 28:44
I would totally agree with that dusty I mean, look, I mean, when I came here, I had never been in Hong Kong. So some of the challenges that were sort of thrown at me were, how do you know how to do things you've never been in Hong Kong? But of course, it comes down to the kind of thing is that I think Irish people are good at we do know how to talk. We do actually know how to listen when you come into a new country, particularly this level. I have you got to gain people's trust, so you got to spend time listening to them, understanding how they do things. I didn't just said because this is how they do things. I won't try and change things. It's really, really important to understand you can't ram down another culture. You know what you've done in Ireland, or what you've done in England, or what you've done in Australia, but you can bring the experience you have from other jurisdictions into wherever you are. A lot of what I've done on other projects, I've brought into Hong Kong, and I've evolved them and adapted them to work in this environment.
Dusty Rhodes 29:37
I found that as well. Initially, I was kind of going, well, that's silly, because this is how we do it in Ireland, and why do they do it? And then eventually I had this realisation was, oh, that's actually quite clever. And you learn things the way people do things differently, and it's the mesh of, as you just said, what you're bringing from Ireland and what you're learning as you come along is very, very good with all of the experience you've had the UK. A Auckland, Hong Kong. Is there anything in particular that sticks out that you learned that you would never have thought of if you had stayed in Ireland? You know what? I mean?
Carl Devlin 30:07
Look, other than summer work, I've never actually worked in Ireland. Well, obviously I go back on a very regular basis, because all my kids are in university in Dublin. So I think the thing is, as you kind of develop your career, you get experiences. I mean, my sort of where I am now. I guess this is me bringing all my experiences from all the different projects, all the different sectors I've worked in together. Because this is a, it's a big role. I sit in the executive of MTR in Hong Kong, you know, I look after all the new extension projects, all the new build stuff. I look after all the mega projects in the existing network. You know, I've spent a lot of time here about, how do we how to bring technology to bear on what we're doing? Because to me, you know, engineering in general hasn't changed a lot. It's one of the industries that sort of still likes to do things are how it always did. It's quite traditional. But for me, it's about, you know, one thing I've been pushing very hard on my team is to use technology, technology, using offsite manufacture, using BIM, using AI. It's the future. This is how we make ourselves relevant. This is how we make ourselves be able to deliver even more complex projects, even quicker, and, you know, more cost effectively. So while I probably didn't grow up in the technology era the way it is now. I'm pushing it very, very hard on my team of that is our future. That is their future. That is sort of how I see that we can be even smarter with the way we deliver projects.
Dusty Rhodes 31:33
Can I ask you then, just about that side of technology? Because in my business, the way I see is the basics. Are the basics, and they don't change, all right, and you said about engineering, but technology helps you get to where it is. Is to tool. You mentioned BIM. We've digital twins, of course, off site, manufacturing, all of these things we're all familiar with. AI is something that we are all grappling with at the moment. Where do you use it in your work?
Carl Devlin 31:56
I mean, AI and technology in general is much more than just digitising what we do. So, I mean, I think everyone is using sort of BIM models and everything else. I've now got augmented reality and virtual reality down in my project. So I bring the technology down into the construction site, so we can actually compare what we've built with what's in the model. I've got reality rooms. I've invested in innovation and technology hubs as I've been rebuilding and refurnishing my facilities, so we can actually bring the construction site into the office and actually go and say, you can stand here and you can do your inspections almost live. We're now looking at how we use AI to help us do inspections in the future, how we integrate the model with AI so that you can actually take drones out onto the site, do LIDAR surveys of everything, and actually use AI to compare what you see was versus what you should have. I introduced CCTV onto all our sites from a safety perspective, and again, I insisted that we had aI built into the CCTV so we could start spotting safety misdemeanours through technology. I've now set up control rooms on all my projects, and I've got them sort of from a regional area, and I've got a control centre in my headquarters where we actually have people looking at the CCTV on top of my contractors looking at CCTV and picking up all the alerts that we get from this. And this, you know, has we've already stopped people from having accidents using AI and CCTV, so in many use cases for us, but honest, dusty, I think we're only at the tip of the iceberg.
Dusty Rhodes 33:30
Very much. So very much. So can I wrap up our chat, Carl, by asking you about people who are listening, who are thinking, maybe I want to do something bigger. How do you get into doing something bigger or more mega?
Carl Devlin 33:43
That's a really good question. Because, look, I mean, when I started my career, I never had a plan to end up where I am today. My plan was probably, you know, I want to do big stuff, so I need to get different kind of experience. If I go down the kind of traditional path of working for consultant or working for contractor. I'll do projects, but will I do really, really big projects? So I went into offshore oil and gas because that was big. So I sort of, and then I moved into big infrastructure, and I've sort of, then started adding things. So I started, once I did that, it was one of the other experience I want. So some of it came from pushing my seniors to give me more experience. If you want something, you have to go after it. Most things in life don't come and land in your lap. You have to actually be good at what you do, be in the right place at the right time, and sort of promote yourself. So some of it was me pushing my seniors to give me more opportunity, to give me more responsibility. I mean, when I worked on Channel Tunnel rail link, you know, that was the first time I was project manager for a client running a railway project. Railway project. First time I had tonne of boring machines in the ground. You know, there were lots of firsts, but I had pushed myself to get that experience. And you learn very, very quickly, I then have chosen the path of moving from different companies to get the kind of experience I wanted. There was a point in my career. That the kind of role I'm doing today, I knew that's what I wanted to do. So it was a case of, I want to get there, and this is my pathway.
Dusty Rhodes 35:06
I love the way you say, if you want something, you have to go after it. And the majority of people I know who do go after it either get it or get something very close
Carl Devlin 35:14
Correct.
Dusty Rhodes 35:14
Great words to end on if you'd like to learn more about Carl's work and the massive projects currently on the way at MTR. Check out the links in the show notes in the description area of this podcast you're listening to now for now though. Carl Devlin, thank you so much for joining us.
Carl Devlin 35:15
Thank you, Dusty. It was a pleasure.
Dusty Rhodes 35:30
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