https://ie.linkedin.com/in/colette-o-shea-8178391a

MORE INFORMATION

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Engineers Journal AMPLIFIED is produced by DustPod.io for Engineers Ireland.

QUOTES

"While there are rules in engineering, it's about applying them to the situation in front of you, which is different all the time". - Colette O’Shea

"I don't know if it's a problem. I think I prefer to think of it as a challenge". - Colette O’Shea

"We need to make the industry sustainable, and certainly in the infrastructure space, to make it attractive for companies". - Colette O’Shea

"One of the main things that I learned from burnout was that having it and experiencing it was the complete opposite of failing at my job". - Colette O’Shea

"You can make any mistake once and we will learn from it, but if you make the same mistake twice and don't learn, we'll have an issue". - Colette O’Shea

KEYWORDS

#Infrastructure #engineering #procurement #inclusivity #wellbeing #visibility #water #AI #burnout, #energy

TRANSCRIPTION

For your convenience, we include an automated AI transcription

Dusty Rhodes  00:01
What happens when a nation's infrastructure ambitions outpace its engineering capacity?

Colette O'Shea  00:07
So Ireland, Inc, we have an amazing business plan for the world to invest in. We're just not the best in the world for coming together and selling that business plan, and that's what's happening at the moment.

Dusty Rhodes  00:19
Hi there. My name is Dusty Rhodes, and you're welcome to AMPLIFED the Engineers Journal Podcast. Today, we're exploring how Ireland can overcome critical delivery challenges, from evolving procurement strategies to building inclusive teams. We're looking at the importance of staff well being and to the barriers that still exist for women in engineering, along with why visibility, well being and collaboration matter more than ever. Our guest is a chartered engineer and one of the youngest ever fellows of engineers Ireland with over 20 years of multidisciplinary experience plus a passion for people, policy and progress. It's a pleasure to welcome the head of Strategic Procurement for Ireland at AECOM. Collette O'Shea Collette, how are you?

Colette O'Shea  01:00
Hi, Dusty, I'm good. How are you?

Dusty Rhodes  01:01
Excellent. So listen, let's kick off and tell me what sparked your interest in this wonderful career of engineering we find ourselves in.

Colette O'Shea  01:10
Well, I'm going to blame my dad, so it'll go go right back to being a child. So my dad works in construction. He's a quantity surveyor, not an engineer, but we won't hold that against him. So he worked, I suppose, in construction my entire life. So I was always around it. My brother works in it as well. So that kind of mindset, and My poor mom had to listen to that at the dinner table every night. So it was that kind of problem solving, and both of them work in buildings. So it was always the iconic so like steam is green Shopping Center. My dad worked in the square and Tala and stuff like that. They did a structural steel so I could always visualize it. And he was always really good at explaining how things go together. Now, his dad, my grandfather, was an engineer as well. So it's kind of in the family. So that's where it came from. I understood, and I think that's a woman, what helped me. I understood from a very early age what an engineer actually meant, and it wasn't digging holes, and kind of maybe the dirty, cold vision that a lot of people have of being out on site. I could see that it was iconic buildings, and I could see the output.

Dusty Rhodes  02:22
So you knew, you knew from a very early age what it was that you wanted to do, which is a blessing in life. 

Colette O'Shea  02:28
I think I did, but I didn't,

Dusty Rhodes  02:33
All right, but engineering was one of the top ones anyway, when you were in school then, did you have a problem with trying to get the subjects that you needed in order to progress onto engineering, and if you did, how did you get across? How did you get around the teachers?

Colette O'Shea  02:49
Luckily, again, I was my parents. My parents fought the school in terms of allowing me to study science subjects for my leaving cert. So I did the three science subjects, chemistry, biology and physics, but the school were very hesitant to let me do that, even though the timetable allowed. They wanted me to do accountancy or Home Ec, or, you know, something else, and accountancy, like they made me sit it for two or three weeks, and I was just brain dead. It was like, I can't sit here. And I No offense to accountants, but it just didn't work with my brain. So luckily, my parents fought the school, and also luckily that my parents could afford to send me to grinds for honors maths and Applied Maths, because the honors maths level and the school was wasn't particularly great. There was six of us, and all six of us went to the same grounds teacher and applied math wasn't offered whatsoever. So I suppose I was lucky that I had the support of my family, and my family had the resources to support me on what I wanted to do.

Dusty Rhodes  03:53
You also mentioned Colette about how being an engineer is more than digging holes. What do you mean by that? When, when you're talking to people?

Colette O'Shea  04:03
So for me, I suppose I describe myself as a creative person, so I write, and that's saying and stuff like that, which is very important to me, and that's what has helped me in my engineering career, because it's all about solving problems. There's no project in the 20 plus years that I've worked on that's the same, maybe similar. So you need to be able to kind of apply knowledge, take what you've learned from one project, and think about it in a creative space. So it's if you're very much kind of like, well, no, these are the rules, and I stick to the rules, and I can't think outside that. You may struggle to be successful in engineering, because while there's rules and engineering, it's about applying them to the situation in front of you, which is different all the time. So for me, like that creative streak and that being able to kind of like think laterally as well as like straight down, has helped hugely. In that space.

Dusty Rhodes  05:00
Well, rules are there for a reason? Aren't they to be broken?

Colette O'Shea  05:06
Well, not all in engineering. There's like safety issues that we have to work with.

Dusty Rhodes  05:12
You said that you like a challenge, and you've got very involved in kind of water engineering, which is like one of the if you're looking for problems. Hello, water. What? What attracted you to that side of engineering?

Colette O'Shea  05:25
It was, I suppose, because I could see maybe how it was going to help and kind of improve things. So I love water as a person. So I'm attracted to it, and I love like I live close to beach, the beach, and I love, you know, spending time near it. So it was that, I suppose, greater greater good, if you want to put it like that. And it also made sense to me. I deal a lot, and I don't know whether it's a bit strange for an engineer, but on my senses and what makes logic to me so, understanding how water is treated, how it flows, how and I worked in flooding for a number of years, too. So how it does destruction and kind of countering that, but keeping it within the natural environment, so is always conscious of all the projects that I was doing while we were like water treatment and wastewater treatment while we're improving the environment, it was great to work to kind of maybe put in a cycle path, or, you know, things like that, and improve the environment that we were building something quite hard and structured in at the same time. So while you're improving the environment that maybe people can't really see, you're also giving back a little bit and restoring the nature of it.

Dusty Rhodes  06:41
So that's how it meant a huge amount to me that's kind of going over and above what the project is do. I mean, like, you're kind of, like taking a step back and you're looking at it as a whole, and there's a certain amount of creativity in there that, I would say, or a bit of imagination. Do you think creativity is an important skill for engineers?

Colette O'Shea  06:57
Yes, absolutely, because you need to be able to take the knowledge that you learn and apply it differently. Because no matter what area you work in, like I've Well, I specialized in water. I ended up doing some structures. I did some roads. You do some energy, and it's trying to connect the dots, and they're not the same dots on every project. So you need to be able to go, Okay, that sounds like it was that and or it might connect to that, or we might be able to do like on the energy space at the moment, you know, we might be able to use some of the processes that are running in treatment plans to generate energy to run the treatment plan. So therefore taking it off the grid. But it's kind of thinking that way and trying to apply ideas that you learn to the problems that are facing you. But it's not, and it sounds stupid, because someone will go, it's the same treatment plant. It's like, it's not, it's slightly different. It's different this. You know, there is variances. It's not just one size fits all.

Dusty Rhodes  07:58
So you're kind of taking an engineering problem, and you're looking for a solution, and you're also kind of saying, Well, how can we make this better? That's very easy to say. To do that. Where do you get your creativity from? I mean, how do you keep your mind so open?

Colette O'Shea  08:12
Just by, I suppose, reading new ideas and like spending a lot of time reading articles, talking to my colleagues and my friends. So I have a wide network of friends and colleagues across all the different areas. So just having a chat like that coffee, you know, that coffee at lunchtime, or what are you working on? What are you doing? I'm doing this. I think we could do something together, but I don't know what, and sitting down and having those conversations and being open to learning. So lifelong learning, for me is something that I drive continuously, and that I think for any engineer, needs to be part of your progression, because the world changes and the problems change, and you need to, kind of like my learning is like chatting to people, seeing what other people are doing, certainly in a company like a calm looking worldwide, and going, what are we doing in like Paraguay that might be of use, or what are we doing in LA that might be of use in Dublin, or something like that.

Dusty Rhodes  09:12
And do you back that just being curious about what's going on elsewhere in the world, in general, and in engineering, do you kind of combine that with like, actual formal learning or getting extra qualifications.

Colette O'Shea  09:25
Yeah, and the queen of getting extra qualifications.

Dusty Rhodes  09:32
Well it seems to be working for you. So go on to tell me more.

Colette O'Shea  09:35
So as well as my engineering degree, I have a master's in business based project management. I have qualifications and law, commercial contracts, procurement law, and I'm an executive coach. So I have a coaching business as well as my engineering career. So like, as soon as when I find something I'm interested in, I want to learn as much as I can, and if I'm going to do. It. I'll do the best I can at it, but I need to slow down.

Dusty Rhodes  10:03
Has all of that extra effort in getting all of those extra qualifications on a score out of 10? How has it helped your career?

Colette O'Shea  10:12
Probably nine out of 10, if not 10. Wow. Yeah. So there was a strategy behind it, and I've moved into contracts now. So I specialize in contracts.

Dusty Rhodes  10:25
So that's all the law qualifications you were talking about when you're chatting to people. I found this is somebody told me about this one question, and I said, You can't ask that. You can't ask people that. And they said, try it. So I did. And actually, do you know it's an amazing question for learning about people. I'm going to ask you that question now. Okay, complete stranger, you're at a drinks party, whatever. Blah, blah. How are you do? What do you do? I do? Blah, blah. So listen, what's, uh, what's the big problem you're working on this week?

Colette O'Shea  10:51
I suppose the big problem I'm working on I'm trying to help some of my clients with at the moment is that you mentioned at the start. It's, how do we service the national development plan without with the resources that we have in the country. And I think that's the hot topic at the moment. We're like, what are the most ambitious national development plans in the world, and the funding and the drive to deliver it, but it's trying to find the resources, whether that's people, whether that's materials, whether it's time, that's what I'm working on at the moment, cool.

Dusty Rhodes  11:21
Well, let's, let's, let's get into that and chat about it, because I mentioned it in the in the introduction. Do you think Ireland, Inc really does have a problem where our infrastructure ambitions are? We don't have the engineering capacity for it.

Colette O'Shea  11:35
I don't know if it's a problem. I think I prefer to think of it as a talent, because there's lots of solutions to it, and lots of organizations are working. So lots of our government organizations and infrastructure organizations are working to resolve it, and are coming together and kind of delivering in a more programmatic way, which is instead of like historically, we looked at individual projects, or we were more inclined to look at individual projects, and how are we going to deliver those? Now we're looking at right this client has X amount of spend. We have all these projects to do. How are we going to do it? So clients themselves are starting to pull together to kind of look at that, and that allows you to plan between projects look and say, Well, look Project A is the most critical. If we do that first, and then project p, b can come in, and the resources can roll over, whether that's people. And now what's starting to happen, and it's the critical piece for me, is that it needs to roll up above the client organizations into like, country. So Ireland, Inc, as you say, has like, we have an amazing if we were a business, we have an amazing business plan for the world to invest in. We're just not the best in the world for coming together and selling that business plan. And that's what's happening at the moment. So the kind of introduction of the infrastructure, section or department and deeper and things like that, it's approaching the country like a business and selling us because, like, if we can get people interested and get them like, there's a huge portfolio work to get invested in, and we need to get them to support our indigenous kind of industry to keep going and deliver so

Dusty Rhodes  13:18
Coletta Shea, You're in charge of everything.

Colette O'Shea  13:23
Yes. What another thing off my bucket list?

Dusty Rhodes  13:29
What? What do you change?

Colette O'Shea  13:33
Um, it's not so much. What I would change? I would write, I would approach it as a business. I would write a business plan. So, and that's what's going on at the moment, but it's bringing all the organizations together who are doing really good work, and approaching it as like we do, kind of in maybe a private business where you have all your different sectors and your departments doing different work, but we all come together as a unit, as the company to sell and to kind of go out to the industry. So that's what I would do, kind of set and get the people who are the leaders and kind of the decision makers in those companies or the those public bodies, and just write that business plan and then go out to the world, like, go out and market it, because, like for any business, you're looking at the longevity of investment. So if you can go right, well, here is 10 years, and we guarantee there's funding, and here's all the different projects across all the different sectors, because very few companies will move and invest if there's only one sector. But like, we have housing, we have commercial we have schools, we have, you know, everything, infrastructure, roads, busses, you know, we have a full portfolio that would create a solid business plan for someone to invest in Ireland.

Dusty Rhodes  14:47
And the trick is getting all of those large bodies of people to all come together and agree on on something. So it's not an easy thing. Yeah,

Colette O'Shea  14:55
I don't know. I think, because I suppose I worked with a number of those kind of senior. Of people, and they're all very progressive. It's time. All of us in the industry are so pushed for time, and it's trying to get time and people's diaries to sit and agree. I think that's the one of the main struggles across the industry, for everybody at the moment, I would

Dusty Rhodes  15:16
I would have to agree in my own industry as well. Let me get back on to procurement strategies, because you do advise people on that. What do you see as the most common pitfalls to avoid when it comes to procurement strategies?

Colette O'Shea  15:29
Um, well, one of the common ones, and it goes across everything, is that we tend to keep doing what we've done before, because it's safe. And we're talking about, certainly, the procurement strategies that I'm lucky enough to work in. You're talking about billions of euros. So nobody, our people are very hesitant to kind of be the one that steps outside the box, because we're all aware of maybe the one project in the country who's in the news at the moment and not going so well. So we're working slowly to kind of get confidence. And some organizations are have got their confidence, are taking a slightly different route. One of the other things is our, I suppose, our adversarial nature around contracts and we need to work together in terms of trying to share risk under contracts, rather than just transferring it and hoping, hoping for the best, I suppose, is the best way to put it. So we need to, like to make the industry sustainable, and certainly in the infrastructure space, to make it attractive for companies. Because we're up against, like the data center clients. We're up against huge big business and big pharma, who treat, maybe there it's more of a relationship, because they can, because they're not governed by, you know, procurement law. So they can kind of do side deals, they can do handshakes and stuff like that. That's not how public procurement works. But if we don't share the risk properly, we end up in that adversarial battle, because the companies need to make money. If something wasn't clear, there's the argument over whose responsibility it is, and it's not always, you know, the client's fault, but it just ends up in that kind of adversarial space. And I think to move forward, we need to kind of look at that a little bit.

Dusty Rhodes  17:17
So let's talk about the engineering market, then in general, because you're in quite a unique position to observe the Irish infrastructure landscape. Where do you see the engineering market heading over the next five to 10 years?

Colette O'Shea  17:31
I think it's going to, I suppose, Bloom, if that's the right word. There's a lot of work has been going on in the last couple of years to kind of get projects aligned, get, like our major infrastructure projects, off the ground. We're bringing in kind of expertise from the globe to help with those major projects. So the likes of Sean Sweeney, who's joined Metrolink in recent times, you know, we're looking outside or looking outside the box. We're applying that creativity to write. Instead of just doing what we're doing within the box of Ireland, we're bringing it in. So I think we'll see the fruits of that, and also that push with the infrastructure department and stuff like that, to kind of grow and sell ourselves. So I think a lot of the blocks that are there at the moment we'll see them slowly move now the infrastructure space is a slow moving animal. It's never going to be like overnight. It's never going to be quick, but I think we'll see the roadblocks moving and progress happening in the next couple of years. It's a very exciting time to work on infrastructure, because there's so much going on.

Dusty Rhodes  18:40
It can be a little bit frustrating when it's moving that slowly. But it also means that it's not necessarily affected as much as other areas of life by what might be going on elsewhere in the world, shall we say. But also it's very reliant on, I like looking at slow moving things all right, because in radio and with podcasting, every, you know, week or every month, or certainly in radio, every three months you get your radio ratings in we all hear about in the news, and everybody's number one, and it's great, all right. But for a presenter, it's like getting your leaving cert results every three months. You did great. Oh, hang on a minute. No, you're down. Do you know what I mean? It's, it's a nightmare. But what I always kind of looked at numbers and stuff like that, was to look at the trend. Do you know what I mean? So, like, you might be down a little bit this time, up a little bit the next time, but are you overall, moving upward is always the thing. So when I'm talking about slow moving things like infrastructure and stuff like that, you're also able to see trends. Because you're looking at things over the last two, three years, you're looking ahead the next 510, years, what trends or technologies do you think are going to shall I say, shake up, be radical about it, the engineering practice in Ireland. 

Colette O'Shea  19:51
I think the most radical one is going to be AI, so we're saying that coming into a lot of things at the moment, and kind of that. This kind of space, it's really, I suppose, worrying in some respects, because a lot of people are worried it's going to take their jobs. Am I going to be replaced? Am I going to but like, what we're saying is that's not like it's augmenting, it's helping grow those resources and that get rid of that resource constraint that we've been talking about, but it also is a computer, so you need to check comes out of it. And for me, it's like, in 20 years, I've seen a number of things, like email was just about being introduced when I started work. So like, things have progressed. There's been a number of technology progressions even in my career. And I just see this as the next one, like the last big one was, like BIM building, information modeling and stuff like that. This is just kind of the next step in that, and it's helping us do our jobs more efficiently and also safer. So the introduction of AI into the likes of tunneling, where people don't necessarily have to go into the tunnel as much, where we can do things like in a safer method, so that people can go home safely. You know, I think, like for me, while it's I'm nervous of it, because I don't know if I'm not, I think it's a great tool for progression.

Dusty Rhodes  21:15
Can I ask you about that tunnel? Are you able to tell me more about that example?

Colette O'Shea  21:20
A little bit, I don't know, huge it was, again, it was one of my evening lectures that I attended.

Dusty Rhodes  21:27
Oh, cool. Tell us what you remember. Then tell us what you remember.

Colette O'Shea  21:29
So what I and I may, hopefully I don't remember this wrong. But what they were saying is that on a tunneling machine like technology has progressed a huge amount, where a lot of it is done remotely. But there are still certain areas where people have to go check or go do a certain amount of information. But what they're using is they can take the information that's now been read back, so the hardness of the rock, the soft spots, the kind of geotechnical information, using AI, they can determine, Okay, well, if we move like slightly this way, or if we reduce the speed on this head slightly, it won't get stuck, or it'll move, the productivity will keep going. So it's that analysis that can be done very quickly and to stop kind of issues with the head getting stuck or getting hitting something that's going to slow down productivity. So I may have gotten hope

Dusty Rhodes  22:23
No, but I get the gist of the example that you mean. But that is an actual, that's a real world implementation of AI, and it actually helped. And that these things, the one thing I constantly hear about AI is that's the you look at something that AI is doing, and he kind of that's not great, but we have to remember is that's the worst AI will ever be. It's just constantly improving.

Colette O'Shea  22:44
It's just like and like. It's huge for us in the industry when you're trying to analyze huge volumes of data. So traffic data would be the other thing. So like our roads and people always think there's speed traps, but if you're driving along the road and you see two little cables going across the carriageway. That's traffic counts, so just counting traffic, but taking information like that, or off cameras that are doing the same, so that you can model and say, well, that junction, you know, we need to change the traffic light signal, because that particular road keeps getting stuck for no particular reason, and the other one is quiet. It's things like that that you don't, don't see going on, that AI is helping us with.

Dusty Rhodes  23:25
Imagine applying your brain to try and figure that out across the city like Dublin, which is not the biggest city in the world. It's not small, but it melts your brain getting away from Ai. But another thing that is affecting our working life is we had COVID, and everybody's working from home, and now there's this whole return to the office mandate that seems to be kind of not going down too well. Do you think it's hampering the industry's ability to deliver the national development plan? 

Colette O'Shea  23:53
I think so. I don't think it's I suppose in a calm what we've done is we have quite a flexibility around it. So our focus is very much on creating the community and the team culture and stuff like that, rather than you must be in the office three days a week for no particular reason. And I see a lot of my friends working in organizations, either in engineering or otherwise, where they're getting quite annoyed at having to go in for no reason. And I know myself, some days I go in, I'm like, I'm sitting here in a meeting room on team calls all day. I might as well be at home, because all I'm doing is getting to wave at my team as I run to the loo or something. So I think there needs to be again. We need to think outside the box during COVID and certainly the years afterwards, our productivity did increase, and our ways of working got better. And you know, there are certain things that we need to work on, the connectivity, but in terms of the actual output, I would imagine if you did a kind of a study now on the productivity versus what it was a. In, maybe just just after COVID, as kind of we got out of the worst of it, I would say our productivity has dropped probably by 20%

Dusty Rhodes  25:09
And is that because people are returning to the office, or is that because people are kind of more used to the idea of working from home? 

Colette O'Shea  25:16
I think it's you're more used to working from home, but also, if I'm in the office, I'm concentrating maybe in the evenings, because I have a class, or I have to get home for my kids, or something like that. So I'm going, right? I have to leave at a certain time because I have travel in between that I need to might be a commute of an hour. Then I need to get home. Well, if I'm at home, I can go all right, well, I don't need to be wherever until six o'clock so I can, like, work at 10 minutes up the road. I can work until like, quarter six.

Dusty Rhodes  25:47
Okay, now that that brings up another thing, because then you're overworking. All right, the commute is actually a space for your brain to go, oh, okay, all right. Do you think then, when you're looking at that much quality working bunched into a day that people will experience burnout?

Colette O'Shea  26:04
I do think so, and you need to be very careful in terms of boundary setting and things like that. Like I've experienced burnout myself, and it's a very kind of I try to be. I wouldn't say I'm very good at it, because it's still a skill that you have to learn. But it's about recognizing and watching yourself and like that, making sure you're taking lunch just because I work an extra half hour, like a lot of the times, you'll find people working on the train on the way home anyway, so the commute isn't actually a break. It's just more of a hassle to figure out how to get from the office to the train, to turn back on the laptop or the phone to check emails or reply. Like a lot of the times, you'll find people doing teams calls, oh, I'll call you the train on the way home, and

Dusty Rhodes  26:49
I hate people who do that.

Colette O'Shea  26:53
We need to work like it's a personal thing, and I haven't gone through it. For me, it's a very much a personal skill of managing my time and putting in boundaries, but it also needs to be supported by the organization. Because if you're working with an organization who doesn't understand that you need to look after yourself, then that becomes very, very stressful.

Dusty Rhodes  27:14
I want to ask you about that in a second, but first tell me you've been through burnout. How did you know you were burning out?

Colette O'Shea  27:22
I'll be honest and say I didn't. It took my family and friends probably two years to get me to realize it, and I was in a very, very bad way when I kind of finally listened to them, because I'm, I suppose, a very driven person, very ambitious. I And, I suppose, capable. I was like, I just keep going, like, I know what I'm doing. I can do this. I was doing it. It wasn't that I was failing at anything, but I just, I went from like, having, I suppose, being able to see my friends in the evening. I used to run and, you know, do five ks and stuff for the time to working maybe 6070, hours a week to make something successful that I was very passionate about. But I lost, I lost myself in the process. And I just, I talk about it in terms of having two colettes. Now, there's like, professional Colette and there's Colette, and I lost Colette, and professional Colette took over completely, which for two and a half years is not something that's sustainable.

Dusty Rhodes  28:28
What was the straw that broke the camel's back and made you realize that you were burnt out?

Colette O'Shea  28:34
Um, it was actually COVID. So having the headspace in COVID to realize that I was just so exhausted, and all of a sudden, you know, I was, you know, I remember, at the beginning of COVID, everyone was making an effort of like friends were doing, we were doing zoom parties and everything. And I had moved house just before, like, six months before COVID, I had moved from, I lived outside for 20 plus years with all my friends, and I moved to the north side and left them going, it's only a half an hour drive of a grant. And then I went for six months not seeing somebody that I knew in person because of all the restrictions. So it was that headspace and that realization that I don't I'm not just my work. I'm good at my work, but it's that connection and that kind of person to person, stuff that I want.

Dusty Rhodes  29:23
So you've mentioned that to combat the burnout, realizing it was one thing, and then having your professional hat and your personal hat, and then doing simple things like, you know, making sure that you have time for lunch or getting some exercise, whatever happens to be, all of these things combat it. But how does it work with an employer where all of a sudden you're doing 70 hours a week, and now you're going in and go, I know it's all new Colette. Now I only do 38 from an employer's point of view. Do you know what I mean? How does that work?

Colette O'Shea  29:56
Well, I suppose it is. It's depending on the organization. And I can only maybe speak about it from where I am today. So with the company I'm with, with a calm at the moment, so we have a freedom to grow policy, which was one of the things that attracted me, and it's very much it was in place. And I knew it was in place before COVID. And I knew about it because certain friends worked in a calm so I knew they were using it, but that allows you to kind of, it's focused on getting your work done whenever it suits you and suits your clients. So like on a Friday morning, I do a creative writing class or group, and I work. I don't take time off. It's a half a day, but I don't I work it within the rest of my week, and there's no pressure or kind of going, Oh, why isn't it just accepted? I don't work Friday mornings and lots kind of having structures like that that you can kind of go, You know what? It's acceptable. It's actually set out in policy, so I don't have to stress about it. And seeing people do it. So I try and act as a, I suppose, an example within the organization, and talk about what I do, and other people talk about it. One of our directors, energy leads in the UK does like BASE jumping and stuff like that, and he'll put up and pictures that it was a gorgeous afternoon and I needed a break. I'm, you know, after going off for a couple of hours and doing my thing, and that's celebrated. So we very much celebrate bringing your whole self and taking a break. And you'll get called out like, I have a great team who'll tell me, collect, you're exhausted, you've been working. You know, we saw emails from you. You need to turn off. 

Dusty Rhodes  31:41
It does, yeah, for somebody who's listening and they're feeling stressed at work and feeling like, you know, oh god, there's nothing I can do about it, this is quite common, especially with human resources, where there are rules and regulations about things that are available. You said that you had looked into the regulations in your own place, and you availed of it. For somebody who's kind of sitting there and stressing I can't read them, or I don't feel comfortable, or if I go in, they're going to say, no. What advice would you give to them about raising that issue or just asking for help?

Colette O'Shea  32:13
I think the hardest thing is asking for help, and it's something that I even all the stuff I've gone through, I still sometimes struggle. The hardest part is going and sitting with somebody and going, I don't This doesn't feel right. I'm stressed. I can't do it. I feel I need, need support. I suppose the best advice is finding somebody that you can trust and somebody you feel comfortable and acknowledging that it's a very vulnerable situation that you're putting yourself into. So it will feel scary. It will feel certainly from a professional side, I always felt like I'm making a mistake. This is going to impact me. This they're going to think I'm not capable of my job. But one of the main things that I learned from like studying burnout and getting over it was having it and experiencing it was the complete opposite of failing at my job. It was because you're kind of outperforming. You're doing a huge amount. So it's not failure. It feels like it, and your brain tells you because you're not getting to everything that you want to do, but it's far from it. It's the complete opposite of my experience. So it's trying to have that vulnerability and speaking to somebody, even speaking to somebody like in my coaching and stuff like that, and to the work I do with women in engineering and engineers Ireland, like, I have people just like contacting me, looking for that advice. So I can advocate on their behalf. If they want some people, I, you know, I coach them through the conversation and just help them. Have, you know, what's words? How can I say it? And just a lot of the time, it's a sounding board, and it's, it's the same for myself kind of going, I'm going to do this. Does this sound or what do I do? Or how do I say this, so there's lots of resources out there that can help, and it you can have that conversation before you have the conversation with your employer.

Dusty Rhodes  34:11
If that helps, let me just ask you very briefly on women in engineering, despite all the progress that we have in 2025 as we're speaking, what barriers do you still see facing women who are entering or even staying in the profession?

Colette O'Shea  34:27
A lot of it is there's still, surprisingly, a lot of old mindset out there that. And again, it comes down to kind of breaking barriers and doing things kind of differently. So in the industry in general, there's a lot of progress, but when it comes to kind of addressing like, we organize conferences and things like that, and you get barriers for, oh, why would you put all the women in the same room? Like, because we actually want to talk, and you're very welcome as a man to come. We would love if you did. And we try very much to have balance, but it's that kind of perception that we're it's some kind of secret society, and while it would be nice if that was the case, but like, the reason why, I suppose we we started that, and kind of set up, and it's still going, is to create that network, because a lot of us either work in industries or in companies where there might be only three or four women in the company, or, as some of them certainly like we there's a number of members who work in the likes of manufacturing and the very heavy male dominated ones, and they can be the only Woman there. So like it's creating that network, and it's trying to break down the barriers, like we can't do this, that we can't change things without every without the guys. So it's not a them versus us. It's like we're trying to gather our thoughts, to communicate it, and we're not trying to do anything. And like, if you talk to any woman, nobody wants a job just because she's a woman. It's like, you know, those quotas and stuff like that, that's not what we're fighting for, but we're just trying to raise awareness and just kind of, you know, bring that to the fore.

Dusty Rhodes  36:12
And it's like you have said all through our chat today, it's getting all the parties who are involved in whatever happens to be, to come together and work together. You know, we're not all individual little camps that doesn't serve anybody. It's, it's when we come together, we can do amazing things. A lot of engineers who listen to the podcast are people who are thinking about their future and they want to progress with a career, or maybe break out and start their own firm or stuff like that. For engineers who are starting out or looking to progress. Where do you see opportunity?

Colette O'Shea  36:45
Um, well, just in the industry in general. So the main growth in the industry, like a lot of it, is in the energy space at the moment, and that's there's some really interesting kind of initiatives around your alternative fuel sources, like hydrogen and things like that. You see the growth of the solar farms. So it's looking at spaces, and it's finding what you're interested in. So I suppose in my coaching, what I always try and get people to understand is you'll burn out very quickly if you're working on something that's not aligned with your values and not aligned with kind of who you are. So if I'm chasing like, if I'm chasing money, and I'm going right, I'm going to be ca CEO, just because I want to guess salary, that's fine if that's your ultimate driver, and that aligns with who you are. But a lot of people are aren't. Again, me personally, that's not my ultimate driver. We want to be financially secure, of course, but not, yeah, I don't. I don't need to be mega rich, but it's finding what aligns with you. So whether that's energy, whether it's some people go back and do lecturing and teaching, because they find that that's what gives them joy, and that's what gives them purpose in the morning. So for me, it's finding that, and that's, I suppose, in my career, what, what I've worked through in the different steps, and that's how I've ended up in, kind of the legal, law side of it. And it's finding that bit that you're doing kind of on a day, you might do it in five minutes in a day, going, oh my god, that was just so much fun. And then you're trying to expand that, and it's trying to work to expand that. And there's nothing wrong with saying what you want. So employers and as a you know, Team Lead. If someone comes to me and go, I really want to do X, I'd really love to try it, my first thing is like, absolutely but it might take me time to find something. So just hang on and give me a bit of time. I don't have, you know, don't have a mega project in hydrogen to show you onto immediately. But people forget and are afraid to tell their managers what they're actually interested in. And my view is, and I tell my team the whole time, it's like, I'm not a mind reader, unless you tell me I can't align it. And there's so many opportunities that end up on my desk that if I know that, you know, Joe wants to work on this, or Gabby wants to work on that, when they do arrive, I can make them align. But if I don't know, I will just go, oh no. Well, you know, I'll just pick yo Mary instead of because I don't know what anybody wants to do for people who are listening, kind of going, that's interesting.

Dusty Rhodes  39:22
I can tell you, with my own career, that is amazing advice, and I have done it, and it has worked, and it was years ago, and somebody said, Well, if you want to do such and such, tell the people above you. That's where I want to go. Amazing advice. Colette, now to wrap up, a hard question, and it's not going to be, where do you see yourself in five years time? But it's similar on a beach in the Bahamas. Here it is, if you had a magic wand to fix one two. Challenge in engineering tomorrow? What would it be?

Colette O'Shea  40:07
Oh, one of the things that I would love to fix, because something that happened me really early in my career, and it's something I've tried to evaluate, try to live up to, is when I was like very young engineer, about three to three years experience, I majorly messed up and to the point where my company got a letter from the government, so major wrestle, but my director and company at the time didn't like, I remember like it happening at me, terrified I was like, going to get fired and everything. But I remember being sat down by the managing director at the time, des Barry, and he's like, you can make any mistake once, and we will help you, and we will learn from it, but if you make the same mistake twice and don't learn, we'll have an issue. So that gave me such freedom. Now, I took a lot of responsibility, you know, and kind of made sure I was doing things right, but it also gave me a lot of freedom to kind of learn, and once I had a solid, logical reason for why I did something, and it also helped me think things out, because you were, you know, you'd sit down with your line manager and explain why I'm doing this, because x, y and z, so that as a young engineer, helped me kind of grow in my confidence and grow in my space and take ownership for my decisions, while also being supported. And I would love for people to have that experience. I would love for that to be kind of the norm in the industry. Because, as we're working with you, described engineering as a creative space, like we need to try and fail. Because if we keep getting told, like children, you don't do that, you don't do that, you don't do that, we never learn why. And the why is an engineer is a fundamental of who we are. So we need to kind of create that space for people to thrive, and that's how we'll get more people into the industry. That's how we'll get more people to stay and being engaged and progress.

Dusty Rhodes  42:11
That is not just a great thing to think about, but that is a brilliant summary of almost everything we've been talking about in the podcast and and it's just genius. If you would like to find out more about Colette and some of the topics we spoke about today, you'll find notes and link details in the description area of this podcast. But for now, Colette O'Shea, head of Strategic Procurement for Ireland, for AECOM. Thank you so much for your time today.

Speaker 1  42:37
Thanks, Dusty. I enjoyed it.

Dusty Rhodes  42:39
If you enjoyed our podcast today, do share with a friend in the business. Just tell them to search for Engineers Ireland in their podcast player. The podcast is produced by dustpod.io for Engineers Ireland. For advanced episodes and more information on career development opportunities there are libraries of information on our website at engineersireland.ie. Until next time from myself, Dusty Rhodes, thank you for listening.

GUEST DETAILS
John Gavigan joined PJ Hegarty in 1996 as a graduate engineer. He progressed within the company, embracing new responsibilities and roles, completed several projects as Contracts Manager and was appointed as Regional Director in 2023. John’s experience includes projects across several sectors: pharmaceutical, city centre commercial, healthcare, semi-conductor, logistics, education, retail and PPP bids. He was the site lead for 10 Molesworth Street and Tropical Fruit Warehouse in Dublin city centre and the Zoetis project in Tullamore.

Engineers Journal AMPLIFIED is produced by DustPod.io for Engineers Ireland.

QUOTES
"The challenges are the things that you remember. That's what keeps it interesting." - John Gavigan

"Getting concrete trucks into the city centre location in the middle of the day during business hours was very challenging." - John Gavigan

"It's knowing how to judge when there's an opportunity." - John Gavigan

"As an engineer who has evolved as a project manager in my career, you learn different problem solving techniques, you develop analytical skills." - John Gavigan

KEYWORDS
#Engineering #City #ProjectManagement #Construction #Logistics #TrafficManagement #Safety

TRANSCRIPTION
For your convenience, we include an automated AI transcription:

Dusty Rhodes  00:01
Building in highly dense city sites is not easy. 

John Gavigan  00:06
Getting concrete trucks into the city centre location in the middle of the day during business hours, was very challenging. We used Stevens green as a holding area in consultation with the guard E for our concrete trucks.

Dusty Rhodes  00:20
Hello, my name is Dusty Rhodes, and welcome to AMPLIFIED: the Engineers Journal podcast. Today, we're discovering some of the challenges of working in highly dense areas, usually in highly crowded city centres. Our guest has quite some experience in this area since joining PJ Hegarty as a graduate in 1996 he's worked across several sectors, from pharmaceutical to semiconductor and city centre, commercial to retail and PPP bids as well. It's a pleasure to welcome to the show. PJ Hegarty, Regional Director, John Gavigan. How are you, John? 

John Gavigan  00:51
I'm good. Good afternoon Dusty, glad to be here.

Dusty Rhodes  00:58
I always start by asking people what sparked your interest into getting into engineering?

John Gavigan  01:05
Well, I grew up on a farm, and there was always a little bit of concrete to be mixed, be it for a standing a gate post or doing bits and pieces of repair work around the place. So there was a natural kind of progression. I liked studying the science subjects and mathematics at school, and kind of indicated, from my chat with my career guidance teacher that engineering might be a good route. And ended up studying engineering and getting a job in the construction side of the industry, and kept going for nearly 30 years now.

Dusty Rhodes  01:39
It sounds like you were kind of like you just fell into it by accident. No huge draw for it, but you are still in the business 30 years later. So what, what do you find fulfilling about the work?

John Gavigan  01:51
Yes, that would, that would be fair. It wasn't something that I wanted to do, and was clear in my in my destination from from a young, young age. But since working with PJ equity, I found that there are a wide range of diverse projects out there, and every project is different in so far as every project will have its own specific challenges, and the challenges are the things that you remember. You know, one reinforced concrete frame building or one steel frame building might be the same as the next post. The nuances that you remember that keep that keeps it interesting. It's been, it's been said to me that to be, to be a good project manager, you have to have knowledge that's a mile wide and an inch deep. So it's fairly diverse, that the scope of knowledge that you have to have things from, like I said, concrete and steel and pure engineering, right down to the to the finishing of a job, ceiling tiles, ceiling finishes, tiles, carpets, all of that type of stuff. So it's fairly broad.

Dusty Rhodes  02:52
So you say a lot of jobs are, I would don't want to say standard, but you're able to handle kind of most of the work. But there are occasional jobs that are extra challenging. Any any particular ones that pop into mind?

John Gavigan  03:04
Yeah, I mean, I remember the downturn in kind of 2009/2010 there was much work going on in 2010 for the following years afterwards, and we won a project on Molesworth Street. It was the old passport office, and the job entailed demolition of the existing structure and deepening the basement. It was already a two-story basement. There, we had to construct a third story, all of which had to be done in a live city center setting, immediately adjacent to a Georgian building built in the 1700s and we had to excavate, you know, 11 meters below that, unaware of what footings were built in the 1700s and we had to make sure that everything was carried out safely.

Dusty Rhodes  03:52
Obviously, I know the building, you mean, on 10 Molesworth Street, because I remember, got my first passport from there. But what kind of rules and regulations and planning and everything do you have to go through when you are building a modern building, besides something that's 200 years old.

John Gavigan  04:07
The standard way of ensuring that you can excavate a basement safely is to install a secant pile wall around the full perimeter, which basically means you're coring. You're coring down with a large, 70 ton machine and placing a column of concrete 10, 12, 14, meters, and you're reinforcing every second pile with a reinforcing steel cage to give it the strength to withstand the pressure of the soil and the traffic driving by in the adjacent the adjacent street, so that allows you to excavate without the risk of either the soil collapsing in a top or, in the case of the Georgian building, the Georgian building been undermined and and settling and cracking and having failure start now where, where you have buildings immediately adjacent to an excavation for a basement, you would carry out an. For level of assessment, we engaged a specialist design engineer with experience in temporary works design like this. So in addition to the second pile wall, we put in a considerable amount of extra thought and effort and concrete underpinning and also raking, raking steel anchors, which are basically steel steel rods drilled in at typically 45 degrees and grouted in place with a like a weak concrete mix of cementitious grout to give extra hold and extra strength to the ground and to ensure that there's no no slippage. And obviously, you can imagine a 1700s building if there's any sort of movement at all, you're potentially going to get serious cracks or even more catastrophic failure.

Dusty Rhodes  05:47
Now, somebody came up with the design creative for the building and the plans for that, and then when you eventually arrive on site and you see all of these problems that you have to solve, did that change the initial design at all subtly.

John Gavigan  06:02
Yes, typically, we inherited design and and we build it, but we do advise on on ways to improve the project for all parties involved. And if there, if there is a way that the design can be subtly, subtly changed to make it easier or better, then we do that. I mean, there was, there was a quite a large concrete slab in the in the basement. Getting concrete trucks into the city center, location in the middle of the day during business hours, was very challenging. It was designed with, you know, several slab bores in mind, because typically the size, the size of the slab, is determined by how quickly you can get the concrete deliveries to the site. So we discussed with the consultant about increasing the slab pore sizes. The reinforcing was amended to suit and we had with bigger pores. As it happens, we and we chose to do them at night time. So we used Stevens green as a holding area in consultation with the guard E for our concrete trucks. We brought them down with traffic marshals as needed, and we hit, you know, three, three stations set up to pump the concrete from around the perimeter of Molesworth Street, Setanta place and Frederick Street, for anyone that knows the area. So we had three, three angles of attack, whereas that just wouldn't be possible during business hours.

Dusty Rhodes  07:25
It sounds like an organizational nightmare. Was it okay dealing with various authorities to be able to close off streets and to get the trucks in?

John Gavigan  07:33
Yes, um, Dublin City Council or the local authority, and any work outside of ours had to be, had to be done with their approval. Permits were generally issued, and it was a requirement that we consulted with neighbors. We did have a good relationship with with the neighbors. We engaged with them from very early on in that project. In fact, I can remember the very first Christmas that we were there, myself and two of my colleagues, and we spent two afternoons knocking on doors and shaking hands and actually meeting people. We handed over our contact information, and I have to say, you know, we didn't get any spurious complaints. We did get a number of inquiries over the course of the project. The project was three, three years. We made some good friends. We got to know a few people we didn't always have the the answer or the explanation that the neighbors wanted, but I think they always understood, and we certainly had. We left, we left there with no complaints. And it worked. Worked very well. The local authority wouldn't tend to issue permits for subsequent out-of-hours work if you didn't comply with their conditions for the early ones. So that worked very well.

Dusty Rhodes  08:42
There's an awful lot of development going down, or there has been the last, certainly, 10/15, years in the Dawson Street area. I know that developing the corner of Dawson Street, just at Trinity College, the bottom of Dawson Street, from your experience, when you are literally in the beating heart of the city center. What are the biggest challenges in the project for you, working in that dense area?

John Gavigan  09:07
It's the logistics of getting material in and out. Most of the workforce are accustomed to starting early, so it's not unusual to have 100 guys at the site for 7am, the key to servicing the project is getting deliveries in early ahead, ahead of the traffic. So they would often be in, especially if they're coming from overseas, or particularly challenging logistic deliveries that would be that required the big the big trucks, the big Arctic, 13-metre trucks, or even longer, if there are specialist items that has to be brought in and brought in early. If there's any any traffic movement, it has to be managed with traffic marshes at the periphery of the site. Any interaction with pedestrians or public traffic really has has to be managed by, typically two or three specialists, trained traffic marshals. So the experience of those guys is. Is really what we rely on. It's knowing how to judge when there's an opportunity. It's professionally designed by a traffic management consultant, and the plan and the vehicle movements will all be tracked with with software to verify that where we designed for a pull in area will actually work. So there's, there's, there is science behind it, and then the local authority then have to issue their permits for these pull in areas, if they take off, you know, footpath areas or whatever. So it's, it's something that is thought out, that that is, that is the key to it. Building is typically easy. It's as easy to build in a green field site five miles out outside of the city centre as it is in the city centre, but it's getting the material and service, and it is the key.

Dusty Rhodes  10:39
What lesson did you learn from that project that you would apply to future developments?

John Gavigan  10:43
Well, that's an interesting question. The project immediately after that actually was an equally challenging one. Is an office development on the keys, and it was more challenging and so far as it only had one entrance, a narrow entrance immediately off the keys. So while Molesworth Street was very busy on three sides, the three Busy, busy rows were on three sides of it. This one on the keys only had, in fact, one entrance to it. So the logistics challenges and tricks that we had learned on Molesworth Street were useful in the follow-up project immediately afterwards.

Dusty Rhodes  11:21
Are you talking about the tropical fruit warehouse? Are you? That's right too. That's a go. I mean, for people who don't know it, it's a beautiful red brick building, and I believe, from the late 1890s and it kind of contract. What I love about is, when you walk across the Samuel Beckett bridge, you see this beautiful, old red brick building, and then it's just surrounded by modern glass, left, right and center. But getting into that site was particularly hard for you because it was only the one at one entrance. So what did you learn then from Molesworth Street that you were able to apply then with the tropical fruit warehouse?

John Gavigan  11:56
Yeah, it's it's been able to have the same guys that were managing the traffic. One team moved from one job to the next, and it's a matter of making sure that we had the guys that knew, knew how to knew how to deal with it very challenging, and everything had to be scheduled, but to within an inch of its life. You know, it was all look ahead, daily, daily coordination to make sure that deliveries arrived. If deliveries didn't arrive on time in the midst of slap by a few minutes, then unfortunately, they had to. They had to reshape it,

Dusty Rhodes  12:28
from the sounds of it. It's the logistics of getting everything to the site. But once everything is there, construction goes on as usual. I can imagine, with a nice I'm going to call it a simple construction where you have a space and you're pulling up a building, but with the tropical fruit warehouse, you have to keep the original building from the 1890s and build over and around and behind it. That must have presented some unique construction challenges for you.

John Gavigan  12:55
It sure did. I mean, as you've described it there is pretty accurate. So it's an existing two-storey warehouse. It had a slated roof on timber trusses. The original timber trusses were there from the 1800s, typically a 14-metre span or thereabouts. The timber trusses themselves had evidence of a lot of decay at the ends of them. Think 12 of the 30 trusses required significant refurbishment, so the roof was stripped, the slates were all stored and salvaged for reuse, and the timber trusses were taken carefully off-site and sent for refurbishment, where the ends, where there was decay present, were removed. All the joints were tested and refurbished, and a special splice detail at Timber resin splice was installed to replace the bearing ends where the timber had decayed. And that was actually carried out with timber that was salvaged from an old church in Leeds in Yorkshire. So the specialist company that we used use this recycled salvage timber, because modern timber wouldn't have the same engineering properties as fully seasoned timber that had been used in a similar application. So that was the roof, part of it, and once the roof was taken off, we had to construct a six-storey new reinforced concrete core. And that was one of the one of the timber, one of the concrete towers that you'll see poured around typical project in the city center. But what was different then was we constructed a two story steel frame that was basically hanging off this central core. So it's a cantilevered steel structure, you know, four and five floors, plus a plant room on top for the sixth floor. So in order to safely construct a hanging steel frame, we basically had to build it up from the ground. So we built a six story steel structure, but when it was complete, then removed floors, one to one to three. Inclusive below, if that makes sense. So we had to build fill it up to support it, and then when the permanent connections were in place, we controlled the removal of the temporary steel frame underneath it, which was three stories.

Dusty Rhodes  15:16
Did you have the confidence to know that when you removed it, everything was still remain standing?

John Gavigan  15:25
I mean, there was, there was so much attention given to that that there was never any any concern that anything was going to go significantly wrong. But we were obviously concerned that everything went 100% right, as it happened, it did. I mean, there was a whole, whole series of transfer of weight. So if you can imagine that the propping steel, the temporary steel, removed from from the permanent structure, initially, you're going to get a sagging under the self weight of the steel, steel frame when you remove the temporary, temporary support. So it is going to it is going to psych the next stage was we, we poured concrete slabs, and that's going to introduce yet, yet, further settlement, extra weight. And then the not insignificant weight of the glass cladding on the on the facade is going to introduce more weight and more deflection. So at each of those three stages, we measured deflection to verify that the structure was doing what it was supposed to do. The consultants who designed the steel frame had included predicted deflections for each of these stages, and we monitored them in the world within the expected range, thankfully.

Dusty Rhodes  16:41
Do you remember what the deflection was?

John Gavigan  16:44
Yeah, it would have been 25 millimetres, and slightly over that in some, some instances, I mean, there's quite, there's quite a significant distance from the point of support to the to the edge of the structure. The cantilever was 14 meters. I think that's the highest point.

Dusty Rhodes  17:01
Working with the tropical fruit warehouse and with 10 Molesworth Street, you are working with very, very old buildings. Besides, you know, brand new modern constructions. How do modern building codes and regulations work with such old buildings? It's like you were talking with the roof and the struts, and everything do you have to maintain the originals?

John Gavigan  17:22
That's that's a very interesting question, and that's something that we discussed at length at the start of the project, because the and you've actually hit the nail on the head there with the timber trusses. So the timber trusses were whatever 18, 1870s and we know they were fit for purpose, because they've been supporting the roof for the last 100 and whatever it is, well over 100 years. Yet, when we took them off, refurbished them and put them back on, the designer is responsible for certifying that they can withstand the future loads and comply with modern building codes. So in order to do that, initially it was thought, well, there's a lot of iron fittings, wrought iron fittings connecting the various node points of of the timber trusses. Like I said, these timber trusses were over a ton in weight, 14-metre span, you know, eight feet higher there. But lots, lots of interconnecting struts and different timbers, timber sections and compression and tension and lots happening at all the joints, so that the engineer responsible for the design and start to find it wanted to be satisfied that the timber was sound and the metal fittings were sound. So one way of doing that is to dismantle the fittings and the joints, carry out analysis of the timber to check for the presence of rot, and make sure the fibers are all in good condition. The timber is performing well. Carry out X-rays of the metal fittings to make sure there's no micro cracks and future potential for failure. But the specialists advised guys, if we do that, we're likely to damage a lot of the fittings and possibly the timber and the chances of being able to reinstate using the initial materials is is slim. You know, you're looking at potentially more than half, half of the joints having to be redone, which goes against the conservation ethos of the project. And you know, there's other other complications as well, like costing more money, which is often the consideration point. But in order to satisfy ourselves, there was a quite, quite an innovative testing regime set up. None of the none of the people involved in the project had come across it before. It came from a specialist consultant from the UK who was working with the refurbishment contractor that we were using, and when I've gone into it in too much detail, it was a dynamic loading rig was set up, and a sample number of the trusses were put through their courses with loading to mimic the permanent scheme. And all of the trusses that were tested were found to be well. Capable of carrying, of carrying the loads that they'd be subjected to, much better performing than if they were designed for new and modern. Trusses will be designed to perform much more efficiently. There's a lot more redundancy, a lot more spare capacity in these trusses. So there was a lot of effort went into checking and making sure that all the trusses were were performing well, and a good sample of them were load tested, and that got us over the line. So that means that everybody can sleep at night knowing that the structure is performing and will comply with modern building codes.

Dusty Rhodes  20:33
With the tropical fruit warehouse and again, Molesworth Street on the Georgian buildings there. Do you ever sit back and consider the work that some other engineer had done on that site 200 years ago.

John Gavigan  20:48
Yes, I mean that tropical fruit warehouse. When we took possession of the site, there was an old masonry wall that had a significant build-up of whitewash, or at least white paint. Over the years, we removed that as part of the scope to clean it up and expose the masonry. And became evident that this was an historic wall from an even older building on the site of the photographer warehouse there had been the Hibernian school, and that was used to educate orphan children of sailors who perished at sea. And it was built in the in the 1700s so there was quite a sizable chunk of this. This wall had been used as as the external wall of the warehouse that was built 100 years later in the 1800s so this was worth saving. So unless this was discovered, the project was actually redesigned, went back for revised planning, where this wall was made a feature of fabulous walls, but 20 meters long, had a few of the the windows and door openings were still still evident in them. They had been blocked up with modern block work. So they were they were cleared out, opened up again, and new suitable windows were put in as part of the conservation effort. And this was exposed. So yes, I did often think, chatting with our own crew there, you know, do you think there's anything that we're building now is going to be refurbished in 100/150 years time? Probably not.

Dusty Rhodes  22:22
Let me ask you about your mind space, about something that engineers of 200 years ago today, and I'm sure in 200 years time, the impact of deadlines and budget changes and all that kind of stuff, when you're hit with uh oh, that's going to add another six months onto a project, or that's going to cost us an extra 250, 500 grand on the project build. How do you handle it? Do you sit back and you very cool person to kind of go, right? We'll work through it. Or do you panic?

John Gavigan  22:52
Try not to panic. That's for sure. As an engineer who has kind of evolved as a project manager in my career, you learn different problem-solving techniques. You develop analytical skills where you can assess a different problem in many ways. That's, you know, an engineer solves problems, and that's, that's, that's a lot, a lot of what we do.

Dusty Rhodes  23:15
And I think that's probably what I'm asking you, John, is kind of what, what is your problem-solving thinking. Like, you know, when you, when you're hit with something, do you have a process of of how you handle that?

John Gavigan  23:27
Well, I won't give you away all of my secrets, yeah, just look, I mean, when we, when we're managing a project, there's, you know, 100 or 200 people will be on those sites that I've just described there. So my number one responsibility is the site lead is to make sure that all of those, all of those people, go home safely at the end of every day. And that's not to be understated like there's this huge heavy equipment, there is a lot of potential hazardous activity goes on to build a 4050, 60 million euro project in the city center. As I mentioned, there's a lot of vehicular movement as a lot of kids going on that that has to be the primary concern, coupled couple with that responsibility, you need to deliver the project on time, but that can never supersede the the importance of doing it safely. So in fairness to the industry, then the client based in the consultant base that we would deal with, there is generally an understanding of that. I mean, there is an understanding of that so that that's a given. How do you improve a project when there's something new, some curveball gets, gets sent to you that requires extra time. You know, you can, you can put additional resources on the project, you can work longer hours. You can start doing night shifts if, if needs be. There are ways and means, and typically it's it's additional resources. But that's not always straight, straightforward. The best answer I would have to avoid that situation is communication and lots of planning and lots of discussion to. To make sure that any changes can be incorporated. There's lots of lots of knowledge and lots of skill in the industry. If something is landed on you, if not time to think, then that's, that's, that's when problems arise. But if there's communication across all stakeholders, it's generally possible to find, find the solution. The other element of every project we have to have to consider, as you mentioned, is the commercial side, which that generally happens. And one of my ex-bosses once told me, he said, people will always remember if there was a serious accident on the site. People will always see the quality of a job when it's when it's finished, because it's there for years after, he said people, generally, only very few people, will know if a project has made money or not, if it's commercially successful. And he said people will forget if it was a few weeks or a month late. The most important elements of a job are safety and producing a good quality, because people will be walking by the front door of it for years to come, and we'll always see what it looks like. I've always remembered that, and I think there's a fair amount of truth in that.

Dusty Rhodes  26:05
Well, listen on that, on that scale, and that's great advice you've got. Is there a piece of career advice that you wish that you had received earlier that you could now impart?

John Gavigan  26:16
Well, and if somebody was to come to me and asked me about a potential career in the construction industry. I would definitely promote it. And as I mentioned earlier, it's it's very diverse. There's no There's no such thing as ever having a boring day. But like I mentioned there, every every project has, has its challenges. The timber trusses on on the roof, on the on the keys, there's a triple basement excavation with the special attention to another Georgia. Georgian building is the cantilevered and controlled deflection of a two story steel, steel frame up at four and fourth and fifth stories. There are things that definitely take the potential for boredom out of your out of your day. There's never a dull moment. Every project is different, and every project is effectively like a new job. So if you're, if you're working with a group of people and things, things are going well, that's great, but there's always difficulties. You know, there's light at the end of the tunnel. Most projects are only on site for, you know, 1212, to 18 months. I would encourage anybody coming to the industry to do what they like, study something that that you like, and if that takes you down the construction route, then great. I mean, there, there are opportunities to work, work in design, work for a consultant, work for a building contractor, and you can specialize in any number of areas. Sustainability is a continually growing part of the industry, and we've, we've a lot of people. We have a full team of people working in that whereas 10 years ago, that was a relatively new part of the industry. So there's lots to do.

Dusty Rhodes  27:55
Very true, very true. If you'd like to find out more about John and some of the topics that we spoke about today, you'll find notes and links in the description area of the podcast and I'll make sure to include photos and links to the two projects we were talking about which was 10 Molesworth Street and also the Tropical Fruit Warehouse that we were talking about earlier as well. But for now, John Gavigan, regional director of PJ Hegarty. Thank you so much for chatting with us. 

John Gavigan  28:17
Thank you very much. 

Dusty Rhodes  28:18
If you enjoyed our podcast today, do share with a friend in the business just tell them to search for Engineers Ireland AMPLIFIED in their podcast player. The podcast is produced by dustpod.io for engineers Ireland for advanced episodes and more information on career development opportunities, there are libraries of information on the website at engineersireland.ie. Until next time from myself, Dusty Rhodes. Thank you very much for listening.

Our guest leads one of Ireland's most progressive engineering and design consultancies, and is a chartered engineer with a passion for change. It's a pleasure to welcome AtkinsRéalis Managing Director, Martina Finn.

THINGS WE SPOKE ABOUT

• Meeting impossible deadlines on huge projects
• Necessary disruptions to provide long-term infrastructure
• Promoting diversity and inclusion in engineering
• Embracing AI with correct policy implementation
• Self-development and the power of reverse-mentoring

GUEST DETAILS
Martina Finn is Managing Director at AtkinsRéalis and a Chartered Engineer with over 20 years' experience in the construction industry. She has been with Atkins since 2001.

MORE INFORMATION

Looking for ways to explore or advance a career in the field of engineering? Visit Engineers Ireland to learn more about the many programs and resources on offer.

Engineers Journal AMPLIFIED is produced by DustPod.io for Engineers Ireland.

QUOTES

"With every major progression we do, there has to be some disruption and some sacrifice." - Martina Finn

"The percentage of women in engineering globally has fallen since 2020 from 15% to 13.7%." - Martina Finn

"The more diverse our workforce is, both culturally and in gender diversity, then the better solutions we can deliver for our clients and our communities." - Martina Finn

"For anybody entering a company, get into a mentorship programme." - Martina Finn

KEYWORDS
#Engineering #Diversity #Inclusion #Mentorship #CareerDevelopment #AI #ProjectManagement #Education #Gender

TRANSCRIPTION
For your convenience, we include an automated AI transcription.

Dusty Rhodes  00:00
Equality, diversity and inclusion is at the forefront of management minds more than ever. Yet, women are still under-represented in certain industry areas.

Martina Finn  00:09
Believe it or not, the percentage of women in engineering globally has fallen since 2020 from 15% to 13.7%

Dusty Rhodes  00:21
Hi there. My name is Dusty Rhodes, and welcome to AMPLIFIED the Engineers Journal podcast today, we meet a chartered engineer who is driving the way forward for women in engineering. We discuss how to empower more women to reach leadership positions, the role of mentorship in career growth, and how companies can foster truly diverse and inclusive teams. Our guest leads one of Ireland's most progressive engineering and design consultancies, and is passionate about driving real change. It's a pleasure to welcome AtkinsRéalis Managing Director, Martina Finn, Martina, how are you?

Martina Finn  00:52
Very good Dusty, thanks very much for having me on the podcast. Very delighted to be here. 

Dusty Rhodes  00:59
An absolute pleasure to have you. Martina, Listen. Tell me. How did you get into this wonderful world of engineering in the first place,

Martina Finn  01:06
I happened to go to a careers evening in my school. It was in the mix school in Monaghan, and there was someone who was studying engineering in Dundalk Institute of Technology. And I spoke with him on the evening and decided, pardon me, I was doing technical graphics in school, and, you know, aptitude towards maths and technical graphics. So I applied to do civil engineering in Dundalk, and I did a certificate and diploma there, and then I went on to do my degree in Ulster University in Belfast. So something haven't I haven't I haven't regretted since, because it's given me a very, very varied and great, fantastic career to travel with. So no, it's been a fantastic career choice for me.

Dusty Rhodes  01:52
You also like to work to some incredible deadlines, and I love the fact where you know a client will go, well, I need to have this done by January 2035, or whatever it happens to be. But you've worked on two very notable projects where there was no shift in the deadlines, and one of them was the 100th anniversary of the 1916 rising, and you were involved in the military archives there. Can you tell me more about what you did?

Martina Finn  02:16
Yeah, so we were the Civil and Structural engineers on that project, and I was the lead engineer for a country Alice. And essentially it was building a new military archives, which was a sunken basement with a double storey height. But it had to be very sympathetic to link into an existing protected structure on the old cattle Brewer army barracks. So we had a number of challenges there, in terms of just getting with a particular height of building that we had to obtain, to have the, you know, heights of storage required for the archives, the type of building environment, but you also had to consider, then the neighboring properties, which were predominantly residential, and then, as I mentioned, to tie into the sympathetic protective structures, you Know, of the fantastic and the beautiful campus of the cattle Brewer barracks. Then in relation to the program, you know, we had to be finished for the 2016 commemoration celebration. So we literally had a nine month program to get that project built. And with a fantastic, you know, design team and lead architect, along with the contractors, we literally all did just a really collaborative approach to the project. And it was a real can do attitude across the board. And we got the project delivered, you know, on budget and on time, and it was opened by our president, Michael D Higgins, for the commemorations for 2016 and a fantastic project. If anybody gets the opportunity to go down, you can actually go in. There's a visitor's area in there. And if you have had, you know people in your family who are in the military before, it's a, I suppose, a central repository for Ireland, for all of the military archives. So beautiful place to visit if you get the opportunity.

Dusty Rhodes  03:59
So if I'm going down to visit, okay, what should I watch out for? That was a particular challenge for you, and how did you overcome it? Just those little insider thing to look out for.

Martina Finn  04:12
Probably one of the things you won't see, which was one of the biggest challenges, is they're literally part of the whole archives building. So the new part of the building is sunk into the ground, and it literally butts right up against the existing protected structure. Building, which has older buildings have either very shallow foundations or no foundations, so they're very, very thick walls, but literally with no foundation, so there's a lot of underpinning, which essentially is putting in concrete underpinning columns essentially along the existing structure to allow us then to dig down for this new basement structure as part of the military archives. The other thing, then, is with a lot of the. Again, sympathetic refurbishment to do to the existing protected structure a lot, and along with the architects, who are fantastic on the conservation side of things, you know, it's turned out to be a lovely job. Another

Dusty Rhodes  05:14
project that you're working on with a deadline that could just not be moved was the London Olympics. That must have been wildly exciting. What memories do you have of that?

Martina Finn  05:25
Oh, it was a fantastic project to be involved in. And, you know, at that time, we weren't still out of the recession here, yet we were probably starting to maybe see some green shoots. But the big thing for us was to, you know, pick up work where we could to keep our core teams going in Ireland. So essentially, it was keeping people in jobs, you know, over that period, and you know, because of projects like the London Olympics, we came out of it with a stronger portfolio, and also just with a greater rounded experience. That project in particular, we were looking after 1000s of temporary structures across the whole venues for the low cog committee, and right up until the deadline, like literally the night before the opening ceremony, we had people on the ground so we would do the design of the temporary works, and then we had people on the ground who were supervising The construction of them, and, you know, making sure it was all signed off and certified, literally, right up until, you know, the night before the opening ceremony, we got, you know, a fantastic commendation from low cog on the day of the opening ceremony. And it's a project across a country, Alice, we're very proud of. And you know, for myself and leading the Irish team, very, very proud to have been involved in it. And I said, we literally worked 24/7 together. So there was a lot of lot of bonding. And you know, the team did fantastically well on it.

Dusty Rhodes  06:55
And you were coming, as you say to the night before the London Olympics, are you the kind of person who's able to just sleep well and go, it'll be fine. I have everything under control. Do you feel the pressure is there and adrenaline rushing through your blood?

Martina Finn  07:12
I probably didn't appreciate the temporary structures on these type of events before the Olympics. And you're a little bit not nervous, but you just, I suppose, of a bit of apprehension. But no, no, I slept very well. Maybe some of the nights in the weeks beforehand, I didn't sleep so well, but I slept very well that night.

Dusty Rhodes  07:32
Well, listen, that was then. This is now. What kind of projects have you got in the pipeline at the moment that Atkins realized that are kind of lighting your fire, getting you excited. Are you kind of going, This is good?

Martina Finn  07:43
Yeah, we're very fortunate at the moment. You know, we've grown very well over the last number of years, and we're working with, you know, a number of key public and private sector clients in Ireland. I suppose some of the exciting projects we're working on is the Metrolink advanced Works Project, which essentially is the enabling works to allow the Metrolink being contracted. I mean, you know, we've been talking about Metrolink in Ireland for 20 years. Yeah, 20 years. And you know we're seeing it being realised now, you know we're involved in it. It is going to happen. It will be a fantastic project to link up, you know, we're the only city in Europe without a rail link to our airport. So it'll link up, you know, North City to Dublin Airport, to, you know, our rail lines as well, and run to South City. So a fantastic project to be involved in.

Dusty Rhodes  08:36
So where are we sitting with that project at the moment? Has the last 20 years of planning and rails and discussions and funding and not funding and all that, have all the kind of the problems been sorted, and now it's just kind of getting down to putting the preparation works in place and then doing the actual construction.

Martina Finn  08:53
I'll say it's been worked through at the moment, but it's worked through very proactively, because there still are processes to go through in relation to, you know, planning and so forth. What it is, it is underway and it will be realised.

Dusty Rhodes  09:07
Are you able to say, from an engineering point of view, what you, in your opinion, will be the biggest challenge in delivering that project?

Martina Finn  09:16
Gosh, I suppose you always have to consider everybody along that route and along the line. And, you know, nobody likes to see, I suppose, disruption in their backyard. But equally, it's such a critical infrastructure project, I think, collectively, and particularly for people in in within Dublin, but also outside of Dublin, it'll help with that connectivity, and it'll help, you know, ease maybe some of the pressures on on the streets and the greatly enhance the public transport within Dublin, and I say that connectivity to the airport, but also to the rail lines as well. But you know, with every major progression we do, there has to be some disruption. And some sacrifice. So unfortunately, at times, we all have to experience that, but it is important.

Dusty Rhodes  10:08
Let's move on to a topic that comes up quite regularly on the engineers Ireland amplified podcast, and that is equality, diversity and inclusion, which is at the forefront of our minds even more than ever, yet I can't believe in 2025 that women remain under-represented in engineering. What needs to change, in your opinion, to bring more women into the industry?

Martina Finn  10:31
It's something I am very passionate about. You know, obviously being a female engineer and passionate about engineering and it being a fantastic profession to be in, believe it or not, the percentage of women in engineering globally has fallen since 2020 from 15% to 13.7% in Ireland, we're probably maintaining in around the 14 to 15% but I suppose some of the initiatives that myself and my accent realised colleagues do would be, you know, mentoring, reverse mentoring, helping develop our current females in engineering, but a really, really big focus, and I know it is for engineers Ireland too, is the Steps program where we get The opportunity to go out to schools, and that's both at secondary level and primary school level. We've done initiatives where we invite in female students of 15 to 16 years old and teach them what engineering is, the type of career you can have just the varying types of engineering. So, you know, I'm a structural engineer by background, you have structural, civil, mechanical, electrical. Nowadays, you have sustainable initiatives and sustainable engineering that you can do, biomedical, telecoms engineering, power and renewables. There's just so much you can do. And what a diverse career. Again, as I mentioned, the great career to travel with, but there's so many misperceptions for young females on what engineering is, and I think particularly they feel probably either not confident to go into it, because it's a male-dominated industry, and also just very self-conscious. So we try and break down the barriers around that also. The other thing is, we try and make them understand that at any level. And this applies to, you know, young males and females, their entry levels into engineering, from apprenticeship courses through to level seven, you know, level eight, Level Nine, across the board. So at country, Allah started an apprenticeship program last year. And again, people think you need to have honors maths and, you know, honors technical graphics, English and different, different maybe a science subject, but the baseline for, for example, for an apprentice, for our level seven course, is ordinary level maths and ordinary level English. So it's trying to break down some of those barriers. And you know, I would always be keen to present. I live in Dublin, so you know, some of the schools in inner city Dublin, and I, myself, was very lucky to go to university. But some people think they won't get the opportunity to go to university because maybe of social barriers, or that they might not be able to afford it. But it is. There are entry levels at all different levels. You know, from school through apprenticeship programs. There are scholarships through, you know, we're doing a scholarship this year in UCD, and you know, across the board, there are different entry levels that students can uptake. And you know, particularly, to again, to encourage female students to come into engineering.

Dusty Rhodes  13:46
Do you think that engineering is made to sound too complicated? Because, as you said, people imagine that you need to have, you know, higher level English or mathematics or science subjects and stuff like that, which maybe you don't necessarily mean, should there be more emphasis put on what engineers build?

Martina Finn  14:09
I think one of the things, and even, you know, I've been into schools, probably a great age to get children at, and particularly, again, if we're looking at females, is that seven, seven years old, take nine. And when we go into schools at that age, you literally, engineering is literally in everything that we do, from your phone to the headphones we're wearing to the cosmetics, you know, the you know, kids were, you know, on their face to, you know, their nail version. It's people think of it as buildings and bridges and, you know, big roads projects, but it's in, you know, biomedical science. It's literally in every single thing. So particularly when I go into, say, the national schools, I would show them, you know, a picture of a normal street scene, and from the electricity poles. To somebody riding their bike down the street, to, you know, the woman pushing the buggy, to somebody you know, on their phone, the satellite TV. All of that is engineering. And you know, a lot of the, I suppose, a lot of the educational institutions now have a common level entry. And after year one, you can do, you know, a diverse range of courses from that base here. So it's just try and break down those barriers and get a greater understanding of exactly what engineering is. And again, to show it isn't a scary world to go into. You have to be robust as in anything. But you know it is, again, a great career to go into, and particularly for females.

Dusty Rhodes  15:39
And when you're talking to those kids, I mean, they know very little, really, between seven and nine, but what's the reaction when, when, when they're listening to you? Or they kind of go, Yeah, that sounds cool.

Martina Finn  15:51
Oh no, they love it. Absolutely love it. One of the things we do is, and it's, it literally applies to what we do. We bring in a little exercise. So roll sheets of paper with some tape and a book. So if they have a book, we say, right, who can use the least amount of sheets of paper and tape? So you give them a little length each to you know, support this book. And for that age, some of the ideas they come up with just and it really opens their minds, it's just fantastic. And again, you know, you come in with your hard hat and hive is best, and let them try it on. They just get great interaction, great excitement. And you know, I'm really passionate about it in some of the schools, you know, and particularly in around Dublin, some of these kids, you hope they'll even stay on in school. But if they can get the opportunity to go to university or to go to do an apprenticeship or just do another step, you know, in their education, it'll make such a difference in society as a whole, and you get such great satisfaction back from encouraging these children in their education.

Dusty Rhodes  17:01
Martina, you're a very well placed person in this area, because you're very passionate leader of a very large organisation. Tell me about AtkinsRéalis and how you're approaching diversity and equality and inclusion within your own company. Listen

Martina Finn  17:18
dusty, particularly at senior levels across the board. It's a challenge because, you know, when I was coming out of when I graduated from University of Ulster, I was the only one in my year who graduated at the time, and you know, that probably has improved a bit. We're very fortunate in that at the moment, in AtkinsRéalis, we're really targeting, you know, the early careers and mid careers level. And a part of that diversity is attraction of, I suppose, candidates from abroad. So we have a lot of staff from, you know, from Europe, from things like Albania, Portugal. We've a huge South African and South American contingent. And within that, then we've got, I suppose, a large number of female engineers. And I suppose the great thing it helps, both from a cultural point of view and a diversity point of view, is the more that we have that in place. It broadens all of our thinking. It brings more innovation and creativity to you know, engineering is about solving problems for our clients, and you know, for us, delivering our purpose as a country, which is engineering a better future for our planet and its people. And you know, the more diverse our workforce is, both culturally and in terms of, you know, gender diversity, then the better you know solutions, and the better we can deliver for our clients and our communities.

Dusty Rhodes  18:49
As you're working your way through your career and kind of going up things, most things change because you go from solving problems on specific projects. Do you find now that you're solving problems with people and organising, and

Martina Finn  19:05
it's a mixture across the board, yeah. So a lot. I mean, we've got in around 400 people in Southern Ireland. There's another 200 plus in Northern Ireland. The big, big thing for us is, you know, delivering for our clients. What who is delivering for our clients, it's our people. It's our people using technology to deliver. So we have to our people are our biggest asset, and we have to look after our people, and we have to look after the development of our people, and again, the Edna and the more diverse we are, and if we help everybody to come to work being their true self, their authentic self, then it helps with attrition. You know, it makes a great work environment, and it ultimately then delivers the best we can to our clients and keeps our people, you know, happy in their work and getting work satisfaction.

Dusty Rhodes  20:00
Martina, can I ask you to pull out your crystal ball? And I love looking into the future, because there's no right answer. But how do you see it from you, from your position, how do you think engineering is going to evolve over, say, the next decade or so.

Martina Finn  20:16
We definitely will be using, we're already using a lot of digital technology, we need to embrace AI but in the right way. So we do need, you know, a lot of policy in place for that. It's common, whether we like it or not, so we need to utilize it in the right way.

Dusty Rhodes  20:33
And what do you mean by that? I mean, can you give me an example of the wrong way to use it and the right way to use it?

Martina Finn  20:40
We have an AI policy in place within AtkinsRéalis, so there are certain, there's one, I'll not name it, there's one AI program that we use. Others are not allowed to be used in the workplace. But there would be also strict controls around the utilization of that as well. You've probably seen AI generated videos and so forth. So in one of our we do a safety moment at the start of all of our meetings based around our values. So safety, integrity, innovation, collaboration and excellence. So we'd always do one around that, and one recently was our global CEO, and it was an AI generated version of him, and it was him presenting it. And he then told us that this is not him, you know, delivering a message. So it's, it's to look out for those type of things and to have those controls it's going to apply to, you know, all companies across the board. And I think maybe it's still so new to us all, a lot of that maybe policing it still isn't there.

Dusty Rhodes  21:47
I was going to say, how do you form a policy and something that is that new?

Martina Finn  21:51
Yeah, well, within our own intranet, there would be literally strict things. So those are huge it, and data protection teams behind this. So there are the, you know, the internal controls in place. And again, staff can't just upload any program to their their laptops or their work equipment. It's all controlled, so that kind of stuff.

Dusty Rhodes  22:14
Yeah, a lot of people, when they think about AI, and they get very scared, and they kind of think like, you know, oh my God, in 10 years time, or five years time, or whatever, an AI is going to be doing my job. Where do you think AI, I mean, and I'm talking like, think of an Arnold Schwarzenegger sci fi movie kind of a thing. AI in engineering, what do you think the possibilities are?

Martina Finn  22:36
I suppose. Listen, we've had, and I'm a structural engineer, as I mentioned earlier my background. It doesn't matter what software you play. So I'll take AI as another software if you don't understand the fundamentals of what you should be designing and getting out on the other side of it. So anything AI generated needs to be validated, and all of the references behind it need to be checked. So it's the check and processes and review processes that need to be in place. So it has a place, but it has a place with all the checks and reviews and anything we do in engineering, you know, you would have a manual so as a structural engineer, you would do a manual check, and then you would do, you know, a software which will give you a more efficient outcome, but at least you have a good idea of what you're expecting on the back end of it. And for young engineers, and particularly, you know, early careers, it would be something as I'm developing them through, you know, less so now more in a mentoring role, that I would always insist do that by hand, manually, and then do it in your software. You have to understand what you're going to get out on the back end or there, there. But we listen, we have different rules of thumb, etc. But if you don't understand what you're expecting out, and then that's building on your experience and so forth.

Dusty Rhodes  23:58
So, really kind of AI is, a lot of people say that AI will not take over your job, but somebody using AI will, which I think is a great little summary for people who are listening, kind of at the moment, getting into engineering, or early in their engineering career. What kind of skills do you think that they're going to need to thrive?

Martina Finn  24:20
I suppose, again, for anybody in their career having a development path. So I would always say, Have you got a mentor for anybody entering a company? Get into a mentorship program. Talk to your mentor about your development. And it's not just your career development, it's your technical development, but also personal development. So we would do, you know, by yearly reviews with our people, and then there's a development plan that's checked each year. And basically, you know, you will get out of it as much as you put into it, with the support of know, your team. So definitely have a development plan and to get it. Get involved. The more you get. Get involved in engineers Ireland, or the ACA, or your chosen, you know, professional institution. Be involved internally, but also be involved externally. So again, a brilliant example is, you know, steps, we go out and visit the school. There's lists of schools on the engineers Ireland website who would love somebody to visit them. And it's really get involved because, you know, it's fine. It's fine someone like me talking. But I think young people really love hearing from young people, particularly earlier in the careers, and it's good to get that balance across, and at least then the students can see how, you know the career evolves.

Dusty Rhodes  25:46
You mentioned that about getting involved with a mentor or mentorship program. Did you ever have a mentor yourself?

Martina Finn  25:53
Yes, no, I've had, I've had a mentor coming up through I currently have a mentor within a country, Alice, someone at a very senior level. And it's it's bits, fantastic experience. The other thing we have done in the last couple of years is reverse mentoring. So last year, I was mentored by a colleague, reverse mentored by a colleague from South Africa. What does that mean? So essentially, it's someone senior in the organisation been mentored by someone more junior in the organization. How do you take that? It's it's so rewarding, because you learn so much from them, just even, you know, I learned, I suppose, culturally, but you can learn what's on their mind. So then it helps, from a senior leadership point of view, for us to make better decisions, more informed decisions for the whole company. So it is, it's very interesting. And it's, it's, it's a great program. I have a new reverse mentor now this year, which is, you know, a young female within our organisation. I know I'm really looking forward to, we're actually starting our first session next week, but it's a very rewarding one. And I will encourage you know, all of our seniors to be involved, and it gives, you know, our early careers or mid levels engineers, exposure, again, to maybe some people that might meet within the organisation too. You know, we work in different disciplines and sectors, and so we'll give them an opportunity to understand maybe another sector as well. 

Dusty Rhodes  27:23
I think it's interesting with the viewpoints, because you're talking about, I mean, we were talking about the difference mix of people and experiences and cultures and the whole thing when you get that together, but then reverse mentoring, I suppose, is you're learning from somebody younger, and somebody younger is also learning from you.

Martina Finn  27:41
Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. 

Dusty Rhodes  27:43
Nice. Okay, well, listen, let's leave it there. If you'd like to find out more about Martina and some of the topics that we spoke about today, you'll find notes and link details in the description area of this podcast. But for now, Martina Finn, Executive Director of AtkinsRéalis, thank you. Thanks very much, Dusty. If you enjoyed our podcast today, please do share with a friend in the business. Just tell them to search for Engineers Ireland AMPLIFIED in their podcast player. The podcast is produced by dustpod.io for Engineers Ireland. For advanced episodes and more information on career development opportunities there are libraries of information on our website at engineersireland.ie. Until next time from myself, Dusty Rhodes. Thank you for listening.

GUEST DETAILS
Alasdair Henderson is BAM UK & Ireland’s Executive Director of Ireland. Alasdair joined BAM as a graduate engineer in 1996 and has worked his way up through a variety of operational and business leadership roles across BAM. 

He is well known as an advocate of purpose-led business, believing that the best and most sustainable financial results are achieved when the things we build add value to society.  He holds safety, quality, inclusion, and collaboration as key tenets of what makes a good business and is delighted that he sees all these things on a daily basis at BAM.  

Alasdair is actively involved in policy development in the industry and is a fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers, a fellow of the Institute of Quarrying, and a visiting professor at the University of Strathclyde.  

Connect with Alasdair on LinkedIn 

MORE INFORMATION
Engineers Journal AMPLIFIED is produced by DustPod.io for Engineers Ireland.

QUOTES
"The time you spend thinking most about safety is normally immediately after an accident." - Alasdair Henderson 

"It's one of the largest buildings in Europe." - Alasdair Henderson 

"If you start with a misaligned scope, it never gets better. It just gets worse and worse and worse." - Alasdair Henderson 

"You can absolutely make those environments safer, warmer, more welcoming by changing the way you design that infrastructure." - Alasdair Henderson 

"Our industry is addicted to concrete and steel. If we want to get to net zero, we're going to have to do something around that." - Alasdair Henderson 

KEYWORDS
#Engineering #Construction #BAMIreland #NationalChildrensHospital #PublicProcurement #Sustainability #Diversity #Digitalisation

TRANSCRIPTION
For your convenience, we include an automated AI transcription.

Dusty Rhodes  00:04
Hi there, my name is Dusty Rhodes, and you're welcome to AMPLIFIED the Engineers Journal podcast. Often engineering is focused on the technical, logistical and production parts of a project. Today, we're going to hear from a leading engineer who believes that the best outcomes are reached by focusing on the people. 

Alasdair Henderson  00:22
The reason the construction goes wrong is that the expectation of the customer and the belief from the contractor of what they're providing starts misaligned. So that's scope misalignment, it never gets better.

Dusty Rhodes  00:33
Our guest today has almost 30 years of experience with one of Ireland's leading construction companies, where he's worked in business operations and HR before moving on to the C suite.

Alasdair Henderson  00:43
The time you spend thinking most about safety is normally immediately after an accident. 

Dusty Rhodes  00:49
It's a pleasure to welcome BAM UK and Ireland's Executive Director of Ireland. Alasdair Henderson, Alasdair, how are you?

Alasdair Henderson  00:55
I'm fine. Dusty. Good to meet you.

Dusty Rhodes  00:59
Now, listen, I always get wild and varied answers to this first question, how did you get into this wonderful game of engineering? What was the little thing when you were a kid that went, 'whoa, I want to do that'?

Alasdair Henderson  01:10
Well, I had a head start Dusty. So my father was a civil engineer, still is a civil engineer, retired, but it's just not, it's a lifestyle choice. It's not something you give up. So as we I'm one of four boys. As we went around on various holidays with the family, we were perpetually standing up beside various structures for Dad to take photographs. We thought he was photographing us. He was there. He had us there for scale. So it sort of becomes a way of life. And so I've got a very vivid memory of when I was about five years old going to one of the projects that Dad was working on. It was a tunnel project in Aberdeen. Of course, five years old, I had a hard hat that didn't fit me, and we went down a shaft in a Ricky old cage, sharing the cage with a box of nitroglycerin explosives, and then went out along the tunnel. And when you're five years old, boy, does that make an impression on you. So I think it was, I wouldn't say it was predestined, but it was pretty well set up. So that's how I got into it.

Dusty Rhodes  02:08
So you just kind of went through secondary school and then on into university and everything. And when you came out, then as a new graduate, you pretty much joined, BAM, straight away, and you stayed there your whole career. What kept you there?

Alasdair Henderson  02:20
Well, we do fantastic, interesting things, and I've moved around in the business, doing a lot of different things. So when I joined, I actually joined as a student. I did two years of summer work as a student and did some just extraordinary jobs. Again, working in tunnels, working in ground, investigation and characterisation. I studied civil engineering with geology, which is a slightly odd thing. It's civil engineering infrastructure, as you would expect engineering to be taught, but with this wonderful little thing of geology thrown in there, which normally engineering is very analytical. You know very much about the answers, very much about things having definite answers. And then you throw in the natural world and all this ambiguity that comes with it, and you start to realise just how you know how much we deal with it through engineering. You know, that has natural variability to it. We'll come back to that because it's a really interesting subject as to how you deal with ambiguity generally. But that got me into that got me into ground engineering. So I joined BAM as as a ground engineer. And gosh, every, every three or four years, I was doing something different in BAM. So interesting, nice, big business with huge opportunity.

Dusty Rhodes  03:21
You have a particular fascination with tunnels and being underground, and I believe you were involved in quite a big underground project in London at one stage.

Alasdair Henderson  03:31
I was, yeah, look, we have spent a lot of my time underground. It's, it is a thing that either thrills you or horrifies you, and you know, so Crossrail is the project you're talking about. We as a business, we did a lot of the tunnelling in Crossrail. My particular part of the business was looking after how you deal with the settlement in the ground that happens when you make these tunnels. So if you can imagine, when you bore a tunnel, which is what we were doing in London, the ground around it relaxes, and as the ground relaxes, the structures on the surface start to settle down. Now we were, we were tunnelling under Mayfair in London, you know, the highest value property in London, banks, jewellers, you know, amazing places. You know, it's just an... it's a natural factor of making those big horizontal holes in the ground that the ground relaxes. So the predictions were that we would have settlement of maybe up to 200 or 300 millimetres in some places. And of course, you can't have that with a building. So we have this technique called compensation grouting, where we inject liquid cement above the tunnel to jack the ground back up again. So you don't get 200 millimetres of settlement all at once. You get 10 millimetres, and then we push it back up by 10 millimetres. Then you get another 10, and we push it back up by 10, so the building stays in the same place, the tunnel stays in the same place, and we sort of fill in the gap with compensation graduating. It was wonderful.

Dusty Rhodes  04:50
That sounds logical, but explain to me the scale that you're doing that on.

Alasdair Henderson  04:56
So we would sink a shaft. And you know, I would love to. Take people on tours around Mayfair, because I can say we had a shaft there. We had a shaft there, but we would, we would have a vertical shaft, and then we would drill out horizontally up to 90 meters. So we'd be drilling, and the head of the drill would be two or three streets away with, you know, hundreds of 1000s of people every day walking above these things, traffic, going, businesses operating, absolutely unaware that that's what was in place. And we had these arrays, these beautiful arrays of grout pipes in the ground that allowed us to access every point where we needed to put crowd. And we could just inject every time the monitoring system said we're seeing some settlement here, we could go to that particular location and just push it back up again.

Dusty Rhodes  05:38
Are there any other particular projects that kind of bring back good memories like that for you.

Alasdair Henderson  05:42
Oh, sure, I did one in called Locky tunnels, which is in the Northern Highlands of Scotland, which was hydroelectric tunnels. So these are aqueduct tunnels that allow water to be collected in one part of the hillside and taken through this tunnel and put into a reservoir, and then they're used to generate hydropower. These tunnels are typically between about two and a half to four meters in diametre. Two sets of tunnels here totalling 24 kilometres long. So you know, going going through mountains in Scotland. Now it's from a technical standpoint, it's wonderful, it's interesting. It's all those things they were bored in the 50s, and we were in there repairing them, stabilised, and then doing rock bolting, hard rock tunnels, so they're unlined. And you go through the middle of this mountain and you see these, you see the rock all around you, and it's beautiful. I mean, it's you just, you know, you see this fresh-looking rock. But there's something that's even better. I mean, you've taken an ultraviolet light, and this is the geologist in me. You've taken an ultraviolet light, and you switch off every other light, and you switch on the UV light, it causes some of the minerals in the rock to fluoresce. And it's like, I don't know, it's like being in a movie. It's things just shine and sparkle. It's, it's like diamond mines that you might see in a Disney film. And it is just the most stunningly beautiful natural phenomenon. So, yeah, look, there's, there are so many things in that kind of length of career. One of the real pleasures of working in infrastructure and engineering, particularly as a contractor, is you go to some incredibly interesting places, and you see things, and you go to places that nobody else is allowed to see or see, so wonderful.

Dusty Rhodes  07:15
So listen, tell me about your career then, because you've kind of pivoted through all of those like, hands-on engineering projects, and then you kind of got into business roles, and then on to people and culture. Just tell me briefly, the story of your journey.

Alasdair Henderson  07:27
So I went to university fairly young. That's just the Scottish education system I studied at Glasgow. So I say, I've got, I've got three brothers at that time. You went to your local university because, well, you couldn't really afford to see anything else. That's where you went to, yeah, turned out to be a very good university. I really enjoyed my time there. Came out, and as I say, I'd done two years of working as a student, as a contractor, and I think as a young engineer, I had done what was a very theoretical degree. So the view was, you know, I'll do maybe five years in contracting, and then I'll move off into consultancy, and I'll be a consultant engineer for the rest of my life. Yeah, it didn't happen. I went straight into contracting, into a part of the business which was focused on ground engineering, a sort of specialist contracting business on ground engineering, and it was a really interesting way to start your career. So one of the things about specialist businesses is that they are very close to their customers, and they're very close to the doing of things. What a lot of people don't understand around the contracting industry at Tier One is there's a lot of subcontracting. There's a lot of management of subcontractors for us as a business, a lot of direct delivery as well. But a lot of the activity and construction happens within that specialist supply chain. So people are employed there, and they do the special things that once you add it all together, makes construction. So as a young engineer, the first thing I did was went out onto projects and started to run them. And you were given a project. It had to be planned, it had to be priced, it had to be won. And then when you landed on the project, you had to deliver it, which meant organising your own resources, understanding what they cost, making sure that you are applying for the money that you are earning, working with the customer. To understand, is the customer satisfied? Are they getting the thing they need? Managing your workforce and then reporting all that back, forecasting where you're going to end up, all the other bits and pieces that come from the business, the commerce of contracting and of course, as a young engineer, you don't really you respond, you don't think, think twice about anything like that. You're just doing the things that people have said, No, do this. Now, do this. This is the process. Get on with it again. As a young engineer, you you're looking to do the most exciting and exotic things you can, because it's technically interesting, it's engaging, and it's very self-centered, and it's very much experience built, and all those sorts of things. You know, you know. You learn that working with customers. You learn the the the same management of a workforce, rather than leading a workforce, because at that that stage is still very much management, and you learn commercial management, which are from any business perspective, are brilliant things to learn. So that was a real plus in being in that specialist business. Yes, you know, after a few years of doing that, you start to a few things start to dawn on you that that idea that people are looking to you for their cues, that you've got this workforce that are really talented, really capable, don't come from the same background that you do. Haven't gone to university, aren't like the circle of friends that you're used to and you because of the work you do with them and working really closely with the group of people that you need in order to deliver a project, you really see how they contribute value and how they make their own contributions, which is an interesting realization for a young man from a privileged middle-class background, which is exactly what I was. So you start to think about leadership, not consciously, but it sort of happens, the idea that you've got to motivate people, that you've got to explain to them why they're doing the things they're doing, what it is that is important, and why we're trying to achieve the thing we're trying to achieve. Not just dish out instructions and expect people to deal with them. And you also come across some other stuff. I mean, you get tested in a way that's quite surprising, the as I say, the surprise of shifting from managing to leading and realising a that that's a thing and B is a really, really important thing, but also the surprise of having to cope with the unexpected. You know, it's a it's a regrettable fact of construction still much, much better as it is now. It is still an industry where there is significant hazard and managing safety is a real problem. And the first time you have an accident, or you're exposed to an accident, and a real human being, somebody you're responsible for, is injured, that's a that's a real moment of change for you as an individual.

Dusty Rhodes  11:31
When you talk about that, do you have a particular incident in mind that you can share?

Alasdair Henderson  11:36
I have to say, the I've got a lot in my history, unfortunately, where we you know very minor incidents, and you can look at them, you can understand how you prevent them in retrospect, and a very small number of more significant incidents, and they all leave an impact on you. And they all leave an impact on you because you learn a very interesting thing. The time you spend thinking most about safety is normally immediately after an accident. You look at it, you understand that. You think, if only you know, here's the things we could have done that would have prevented this. And a lot of what we do now, actually, within the business is is about trying to find better ways to do that, to get people to think about safety without them having to go through the consequences of having an accident in a curious thing. And this is a really interesting thing about the business right now, as as you get safer, and the accidents become further and further apart in time, the opportunities for learning get further and further apart in time. So you need to find a new way of learning. You need to find a new way that allows you triggers that. How do we make this better? And we do that through a particular way in the business now, which is really, really successful, but in those days, you know? So that was the that was the 90s, the first thing you injure somebody, or somebody's injured on your project, or you have an incident, something happens, you know, it is unplanned. It's surprising, and you are the person you have to cope.

Dusty Rhodes  12:50
How does that make you feel?

Alasdair Henderson  12:54
It's a huge mix of emotions. Again, I think engineers are trained to be very analytical and very pragmatic and get things going, even more so in contracting. So when something happens, it's full activity mode. Stop this change that make it safe. Do this. All the activity comes out around how you deal with the immediate aftermath of something, whether it's safety, whether it's technical, whatever it is to stabilise the situation, and then that period of reflection happens, and it happens at the same time as investigation and improvement and all those things, but the personal reflections that come from that, particularly around safety, build up. I won't say that on day one, when you've, you know, when you've the first day after an accident has happened and something you're responsible for, you're immediately changed. You are, but not in ways you recognise, but over a period of, you know, a few years of not very many of these things happening, but enough that it has that impact, you start to understand the nature of that responsibility and how that compares with some of the other responsibilities you have. There's a really interesting thing. So I became a I became a dad when I was Gosh, 28 or 29 something like that. And you know, prior to that, work was absolutely everything. The biggest problem I could think of as a work problem, all those sorts of things. And I now say to my staff, you know, until you've stood in a pediatric A and E at two o'clock in the morning with your child in the arms, you don't really know what a problem looks like. And after you've done that, then it gives you a different perspective, and it allows when something happens, say, an accident happens. My first question is, is anybody hurt? And if the answer to that is no, the rest we can deal with.

Dusty Rhodes  14:24
It's really interesting how you say there's a difference between managing a project as an engineer and then leading people. And it's something you seem to have come through kind of quite naturally, because as you are managing then you become a leader, something you didn't realise you can learn by experience, which is one way of doing things, but obviously it's better to learn from others experience before you, and to do some kind of, you know, kind of professional or personal development on on that were you able to learn about leading people as a result of those incidents and experiences that you had?

Alasdair Henderson  14:58
Yeah, and through both. The mechanisms that you've just mentioned there. So, you know, as an organisation, we've always done lots of very good individual development. Early Career Stage used to be very focused on technical development and leadership didn't come until later on. We've changed that a lot in the business now that leadership, as soon as people are being exposed to the idea that they are managing groups of people, we help them into leadership training, because it's such a positive impact and it makes such a difference. Commercially, in our business, it makes a huge difference, because you end up with better managers and better leaders before those individuals it, it accelerates the way they think about those things. But informally, and I think certainly my early career, that was the most profound thing. I had some really inspirational people that I worked with who without, without formally teaching about leading, or without even perhaps knowing that they were doing it through leading by example, visible leadership and just the way they conducted themselves and the humanity of them actually allowed you to recognise that this is a good way of doing things. I had a particular line manager, a chap called Ian Walz. She's retired now, but Ian, I still keep in regular contact. And I think Ian, I would say, allowed me to understand that you can run a big business, a complex business, like a contractor that has lots of commercial concerns, that has lots of activity going on all at once. You can do all of that without being a monster, without being a table banger. You can do that and still be a human being and that, if you know, I can pass on any lesson. That's the one I want to pass on to people humanity and being, you know, being authentic and true to yourself and true to human beings that you're working with is much, much more powerful than the whole command and control trying to tell people what to do. Most often when you try and tell people what to do, number one, they're a bit suspicious of it. And Number Number two, at least some of them don't do it. So it's really not a great method of how you get things done. I

Dusty Rhodes  16:50
think the point you're making about people and the importance of people is stuff that you don't really realize until you're, as you say, in the middle of a job, and there's all kinds of which you're very experienced that now with diversity and inclusion and all kinds of things, which I want to talk about later, but firstly, I want to just pivot and talk about BAM for a few minutes, because BAM Ireland is known for delivering ambitious projects across all kinds of sectors, and one of the biggest and most well known recently is The National Children's Hospital. Big projects like that always have changes. Can you tell me, firstly, how big is the National Children's Hospital project, and why is there always changes when it comes to these things?

Alasdair Henderson  17:31
So it's, it's one of the largest buildings in Europe. And I think perhaps some of the commentators on the project or on the outcomes the project, don't necessarily understand just what a scale a project. It is six and a half thousand rooms. You know it is. It is going to be the envy of not just European, but, you know, Western Hospital pediatric care across the world, really. It's, it's an extraordinary facility. It's a brilliant facility for Ireland, the whole island of Ireland. And it will transform pediatric care with a shadow of a doubt. But of course, it's not at that stage yet. It's at the stage where people see it as a project. They see it as government expenditure. And of course, they're quite rightly concerned about those things. I think, as you zoom out from that, and I've been involved with lots of major projects, you start to see patterns in some of them. And one of these patterns that you see around major projects, and let's not, you know, let's not apply this absolutely to Children's Hospital. It has its own particular features, but generally speaking, with major projects, one of the things you notice is that, and I'll be clear, major public funded infrastructure projects, they are, you know, they're huge, so they tend to only be affordable by governments, and immediately, then you have the value for money, public expenditure questions being asked, which takes you into political arena, and quite rationally, society are interested in that these projects are hugely complex. They are so complex that, in reality, being able to understand the scope and delivery at the start, before you've done anything, becomes almost impossible from a just from a sort of philosophical standpoint. They are so complex, and the complexity can't be seen until you're in amongst it. But of course, we have ways of dealing with that, and one of the ways of dealing with that is detailed, rigorous engineering planning. The more time you can spend on that before you start building, the better the outcomes are. And that's a lesson from major infrastructure construction everywhere. Unfortunately, that tends to conflict with a political desire that once you've got permission, planning authority, budget for doing something, you really want your start now shovels in the ground, Bill, build, build, because they the the political capital that comes from having started something, the visibility of starting something, and the public's need to see that progress is being made is a physical need rather than a, you know, rather than a sort of practical need. And so often these projects can be started before they are actually ready to start. And the result of that is that change happens as you go through the project. Again, I'm not going to say that specifically what's happened at Children's Hospital, but it's a thing that you see the other really. Interesting, recurring theme that happens with these major infrastructure projects that are hugely impactful on, you know, creation of opportunity in society, creation of wealth, provision of service, whatever it looks like. But the benefit is, once that benefit starts being provided the day you start treating a child in the Children's Hospital, everything that's gone before is forgotten. I mean, if I talk about Dublin, specifically, Port tunnel. Remember port tunnel? You look at infrastructure that deeply problematic and complex in its time, was an absolutely essential piece of infrastructure now Dublin, Dublin Airport, terminal two. You know, it's you wouldn't imagine Dublin airport without terminal two right now. But you know, another complex infrastructure project that had its own challenges.

Dusty Rhodes  20:41
I want to get back to this particular topic of public procurement because public procurement and contracting models is something you will be very familiar with, right Can I ask you, what is your view on identifying the best procurement model for Ireland, which is focusing not just on the cost, but on delivering the right outcomes for the country.

Alasdair Henderson  21:01
You've nailed it just in that sentence. Outcome focus is the thing that's here. Now, you know, Ireland's had all sorts of challenges, as every country has, in how you procure infrastructure effectively, and there's a lot of moving parts in that you've got. You know, how well funded is the country? How are you procuring that money? Is it Is it money that's in the treasury? Is it money that's coming from external financing? What's the risk appetite for the organisations that are delivering this? Because, you know, fundamentally, risk starts with the person who wants to develop it. If you want to, if you want to build a tunnel somewhere, let's say you want to build a tunnel for a metro system in Dublin, for example, right now, that's a government problem, and all the risk sits with the government. At some point, they'll contract to some organisation to do some construction, and the purpose of that contract is to pass risk. It's to deliver scope, but it's fundamentally a risk-sharing model, if you like. You ask somebody to do something, they commit to do it, and they take certain risks in doing that for a commercial price. That's changed a lot in the past. In past five years, actually, never mind the past 10 or 20 years that the level of risk associated with the business model of contracting has changed enormously, and the ability of contractors balance sheets to sustain that, or I'll put that a different way, the willingness of contractors to sustain those kind of risks on their balance sheets has reduced enormously. The construction industry knows very well what it's doing. It absolutely can deliver these projects well. And actually, Ireland is good at delivering these projects. There's a narrative that says we don't know how to do this in Ireland, not true. We do know how to do it. We just sometimes choose to do it in a way that is different, and you end up with the wrong outcome. But jumping back to what you want from this, anybody who's procuring fundamentally, they're looking for something around budget, something around program and something around the expected benefits. So let's call those outcomes. If a procurement model that you're currently using doesn't take you to those outcomes, then it can't be right. So single stage, lump sum contracting are offering up complex projects to say before you know, we conceptualise something for six years and put it out to the market for three months to have it priced, which is automatically a rush. And therefore, you know, information poor and time poor, tell me right now, without knowing anything about the future, what that's going to cost. And you can't charge me any more, by the way. You know, how do you expect that model to deliver a rational outcome. And that takes you to thing we call two stage contracting. The two stage contracting has unfortunately got a bit of a poor reputation in Ireland from a couple of implementations. It is, right now, the best way, and it's demonstrably the best way. And it does two things. You you have a first stage which is has to be competed for. So you have the market competition thing, but the first stage allows the customer and the contractor and other interested parties to work together, paid to work together, to develop the scope, the planning, the risk profile, and get to the end of the first stage, where the customer knows what it is that they're going to be paying for this that everybody has talked about what it is we're doing, that the design is fully developed, the risks are understood and properly allocated, and crucially, the scope alignment. So the understanding of what the customer thinks they're getting versus what the contractor thinks they're providing is perfect because you've been working collaboratively together to do it. If at that point, the customer says, this is the right answer, let's go. You move into phase two, and that's building the customer. Can also say, actually, having gone through all this detailed phase, I can see I don't want to do this. Or this isn't to you know, this isn't the right price. We need to do something else. Most commonly challenges that happen with construction. Or the reason that construction goes wrong is that the expectation of the customer and the and the belief from the contractor of what they're providing start misaligned, so at scope misalignment, and if you start with a misaligned scope, it never gets better. It just gets worse and worse and works. So, you know, it's a real challenge. One of the challenges that people throw at two stage contracting is, well, you do this first stage and that that just increases the cost these. Jobs, it's much more expensive because everything's getting lumped in there and adapt. What actually happens is it gives you a much closer view of what the likely outturn cost is. If you want to compare procurement methods, to say, give me your best guess of what you think is going to cost. So your best tender price for the start? Yes, you can compare those. You can compare those all day long, and you can go for lowest price, or you can go for some other most economically advantageous model. But that's just the price that's proposed at the start. It doesn't include anything that might happen, or anything you could foresee happening if you had a bit more time to spend on it. And it's certainly not a brilliant guide to what the outturn cost is going to be.

Dusty Rhodes  25:38
No so procurement is a complicated area. And as you say, it's about budget, and then it's about benefits. Another thing that I think you must be considering is sustainability, because it's a huge focus for for engineering today, and there's a lot of kind of rethinking and change going on in the construction industry around that. Bam says that it's committed to building a sustainable tomorrow. Sounds great. Lovely Little Yeah, very corporate explain to me, as a human being, exactly what that looks like and how it's being implemented.

Alasdair Henderson  26:12
So you'll have heard of net zero. Yeah, everybody talks about net zero. So this is about getting to a place where the carbon emissions of the way we live our lives have there's no net emissions of carbon. There might be some emissions of carbon, but there's something else that offsets them. If you understand it, 39 40% of carbon emissions come from the construction or operation of the built environment, whether that's infrastructure buildings, the house you live in, the way you heat your house, the way you travel. 39 to 40% of anthropogenic CO two emissions come from that if you can't deal with the built environment, which is the construction industry, then you just can't get to anything, to net anything. So you have to deal with the way that construction traditionally gets done, and the way we operate, the built environment, the buildings we have, and the infrastructure we use. So very straightforwardly, there's two parts to that. There is the capital build phase. That's the bit that I suppose I'm very involved in as a contracting business. What does it cost? What do we emit in doing these things? And then there's the operational phase. What does it cost to run your building, power, water heating, particularly the operational phase is very strongly guided by how the facilities are designed. How are they designed to operate. So things like putting an air source heat pump into your house or into your building, instead of a gas boiler or an oil found boiler, zoom out to building scale. You know the kind of buildings you see in central cork, central Dublin, central Galway, big, impressive buildings, and of course, they are heated in different ways. Efficiency is important. How they're insulated, things like lighting, making sure that the lighting is efficient and well designed. Energy consumption, water consumption, trying to limit the use of water. There's some other interesting aspects in sustainability as well that aren't just about consumption, but the way that the building deals with the environment. So we we take a green field and we turn it into something hard and concrete or aluminum or whatever. When rain hits that it runs straight off it and into the into the drainage system. Instead of soaking gently into a field. When rain hits a field, the water flow is attenuated. It's slowed down. When rain hits a building, it's speeded up and it rushes down into the surgeon. Get these flood surges that happen. So now, when we design buildings, just as a case in point, we've done one in southern Dublin, we have what's called a blue roof, so it has a green roof. You're probably familiar with that, a roof that looks sort of grassy. It's actually a different kind of plant. It's not grass, but it looks nice. It's not like a hard roof. So water comes into that, but beneath that, we also have a water storage layer so it attenuates the rainfall. It doesn't just hit the building. It goes straight into down pipes. It hits the building and is slowed down so that the peak flows in the outfall into the sewer are much, much slower. Come back to the construction phase. It just, just to be absolutely, uh, sort of final point in this, the construction phase. One of the biggest things you see in civil engineering construction is diesel being burned to construct these things. You know, big equipment fueled by diesel plumes of smoke. CO two emissions. Two years ago, I switched our business to using hydro-treated vegetable oil, certified hydro treated vegetable oil. That's a that's a really important distinction. So this is not HBO that comes from palm oil or or first virgin sources, if you like. It's comes from used waste oils that recycled to make a fuel that has a huge impact on our CO two emissions that come from from liquid fuels. The thing that everybody's doing our car fleet. So we have a fairly big car fleet, three or 400 cars, moving those over to EV over a period of three years. By the end of 2026 our fleet will be 100% EV. So you know, we really are stopping doing the things that we said we would still do.

Dusty Rhodes  29:43
Also on planning projects, while we're talking about these things, how is BAM handling the challenge of supporting biodiversity that may be interrupted by sites

Alasdair Henderson  29:52
biodiversity is one of the most interesting, most productive challenges for us. Actually, it is. It's really hard to measure, so we don't yet have a great. Measure of what improvement in biodiversity is in a, you know, purely numerical sense, but conceptually and qualitatively, you can absolutely see it. So imagine what you you know, if you imagine the motorway, what a motorway looks like, and how the in the engineering profession says this is how a motorway should look. You know, it's strips of tarmac and at the side, sometimes you're in a cutting where you've got slopes going up from you, and sometimes you're on an embankment where you've got slopes going down from you. So you have this alignment of the road, and it doesn't just follow the land. It cuts through the land, sometimes cutting, sometimes embankment. And you'll Picture those embankments and those cuttings, and you'll see long planar surfaces that are covered in grass, the same kind of grass. And it's very neat. It's very geometric. Is exactly how an engineer would draw this. This is, this is what good practice looks like. Make it neat, make it tidy. It's easy to maintain, easy to construct. So from engineering standpoint, that's been best practice for many, many years. And from a biodiversity standpoint, it's catastrophic. It's monocultural grasses, the roads and indeed, Rails, long, linear infrastructure is a real problem, because it interrupts, interrupts the movement of animals. So animals that are naturally migratory are animals that are territorial. So as they produce offspring, have to expand their space. These long bits of linear infrastructure block that. So what do you do about it? Well, there's a few things you can start using, things like green tunnels. It's just one solution, but it's a solution where you allow these spaces, green tunnels and green bridges at these crossing points at regular intervals on long linear infrastructure to allow natural migration of animals. But you look at those long linear slopes, those planar slopes with monocultural grasses on them, what we actually need there is some decay and decomposition. Positive decay and decomposition now saying those words and the word positive in the same sentence sounds nuts, but it's that is how nature works, that you need that you don't want to be cutting the grass all the time. You want trees that fall over and rot and they support insect life and they create nutrients and all those sorts of things. So the way that we manage those landscapes changed. Don't make a mistake of thinking they're not managed. This is people are it's very popular to talk about rewilding as a solution. Rewilding is just another way of managing a landscape. These are now managed landscapes, and we have to deal with them. If you look at the global biodiversity loss, and you look at a map of that, the Ireland and the UK are in the bottom 10% the most biodiversity, the most sort of loss of natural biodiversity across the globe, largely through land use. This is about how we've set up our infrastructure, but also how we use the land that we've turned over to farming. This is not farming as bad. This is just we have to find ways to manage the landscape in a different way that support all the things we need as a society, infrastructure and farming amongst them, but also all the things we need in order to continue. What are we doing as a business? Well, we're starting to feed this into the way we design these projects, the way we conceptualize them, the way we advise customers about them, and the kinds of things we leave behind through our monocultural landscapes, more active biodiversity, where we manage motorways, and we do plenty of that in Ireland, thinking about the way that we manage verge cutting and things like that. Less of it allow wildlife to grow, allow plant life to grow, variations in plant life, even sometimes things you know that are a little bit twee, but you know, bug hotels and beehives and things like that all make an important impact. But the biggest single thing we can do is change what we think the best practice in constructing long, linear infrastructure looks like.

Dusty Rhodes  33:22
Let me get away from the environment and back to people. And one thing I hear over and over again on the podcast is about engineering and diversity and inclusion within the industry, from your point of view. Why is it important?

Alasdair Henderson  33:39
Well, you know we we are of society and in society as an organisation. If you honestly believe that we can construct the right things for society in the right way and not include the viewpoints and contributions from part of society, whatever that part looks like, whether it's gender, race, whatever it is, then you're kidding yourself when you look at the way the infrastructure is designed. And let me, let me give you an example around public transport. If you are like you and I are, you know, a white male of a certain age, confident in our space, the world has been designed around us. So the world has been designed to suit us because it's been designed by people like us and built by people like us to be operated. So when you walk into a, I don't know, a railway station in Dublin, or you're sitting in Kent station in Cork, or Kent station down in Galway, which we are rebuilding, by the way, you're standing there, it's an environment that you're completely comfortable with. If you're standing there at 10 o'clock on a Friday night, and it's not terribly well lit, and there's not very many people around, and you're a woman, you've probably got a different experience with that. You've certainly got a different experience of that. And how can we deal with that? Well, that is an environment that's been created by engineering design. You can absolutely make those environments safer, warmer, more welcoming by changing the way you design that infrastructure. And unless you've got. Insight at design stage and at construction stage, then you're not going to build the right thing that works for the rest of society.

Dusty Rhodes  35:07
So this is why you're saying we need a more diverse people included in the industry, at the design site, in engineering, because they will bring these different perspectives, and the projects will be better as a result.

Alasdair Henderson  35:20
Exactly that. Let me give you another example. You're wandering around city centre cork. Somebody's doing some work on something. They've put a hoarding up. It's blocked off a bit of the pavement, so you have to step off the pavement into a temporary walkway. Now, you and I can manage that. You know, we're able-bodied. We can walk and all the rest of it. If you're a wheelchair user, if you've got a buggy if you know, if you are not of that group, then that just that simple change has a really profound impact on the quality of your life that day, or your or actually your ability to do something. Those insights are necessary for how we think about infrastructure, even a temporary sense. And then, of course, from a from a business perspective, this is dead, dead obvious. You know, even if you don't believe the moral case for including people in your business. We are sitting here in Ireland with basically full employment bar structural factors. So we have not just a skills crisis, but a total availability of population crisis. Is the Civil Engineering and Construction Industry sufficiently attractive that people are rushing towards it? No, not really. So we need to make sure that we have access to all of the people, the potential talent that could come into our business, and make sure that they feel that this is a welcoming environment for them to come to and stay.

Dusty Rhodes  36:29
Do you think there are kind of preconceptions then about how engineering works that's creating barriers?

Alasdair Henderson  36:36
Oh, yeah, absolutely. When we do when we do student placements or school placements, one of the things we try and do is get the parents in on day one, because more often than not, the parents are hugely influential in how children choose careers or feel about a certain industry. And often the parents have a view of construction. If they're not exposed to construction or infrastructure, indeed, engineering, more broadly, directly, they tend to have a view on it that is sometimes a bit dirty. It's about manufacturing, or it's about digging holes and stuff, and it looks a bit I don't really want my daughter to go there. And then you bring them along and you show them the the really high-quality professionals that we have within our business, the money, amount of money we spend on incredibly productive, modern equipment, the use of digitalisation. I mean, it's, it's Minecraft, RIT, big, if you like. And the parents see this, and they see the care and attention, sophistication, understanding and the support of culture around what we do. And I have to say that parents absolutely love our industry when they see it, and they're very happy for to say, you know, my daughter, my son, yeah, go do your placement there. But before that, contact, yes, there's absolutely preconceived notions around mucky, dirty, you know, not very nice industry.

Dusty Rhodes  37:45
Listen. Let me wrap up our chat today by talking about something we love. Talking about the podcast, the future from your point of view, though, looking towards the future, how do you see engineering evolving in the next 10 years?

Alasdair Henderson  38:00
Well, look, we're sitting here today. There is a force 11 storm across Ireland. We've just come through a Christmas period where one of the principal freight transport links came out of action. You start to understand that Ireland is in a place where it's its infrastructure is fragile, and the infrastructure that supports the rest of society needs attention, needs to be built. And on top of that, when you look at the challenges that Ireland as a country faces, and the world generally faces, these extreme weather events that are challenging the infrastructure that we have now, buildings, you know, where the cooling systems aren't enough to keep them cool in the peaks of summer heat, railways, where we have the rails that buckle in the peaks of summer, heat, cold weather snaps that freeze and land snow on us that we can't clear for a week. Those kinds of events are coming now, and they're coming more regularly, and our infrastructure is not shaped through it. So we need to update the infrastructure we've got, and we need to new build, new infrastructure that helps society work. And the positive around this is you can see this also from the way that government policy is shaped around it. Is shaped around this. People really now understand the value of that infrastructure and how it creates opportunity and employment for a future Ireland. So I would say, if you're thinking about coming into engineering, generally, construction, specifically, it is probably the most important 50 years coming in construction that there has ever been when you look at the challenges that the world has to deal with. We are the organisations. We are the industry almost uniquely that has the capability to deal with that.

Dusty Rhodes  39:29
It's happening, and it's changing so fast that the next 10 years is going to be particularly important. Aside from that, on the technology side of things, you know, we've got aI everybody's talking about, you've got more and more and more use of robots and stuff like that. Are you excited by any of those new technologies?

Alasdair Henderson  39:44
Oh, hugely. And you they're making a big impact in our industry already, efficiency, effectiveness that we've gone through quite a long period of productivity not really enhancing. And then you start to see how some of these automation techniques are really enhancing our productivity, and whether that is modularisation for house building. I. Whether that is about much clever, more expensive capital equipment that we buy, but it's much more productive, and therefore it's worth it. You know, those things are changing. What you will definitely see in construction over the coming years is there will be fewer people in construction, which is, it's a bit like the the Genesis that farming went through. It becomes more productive, and it's not because it doesn't mean that fewer people are employed in the industry. What happens is there is a bigger industry because it's able to do more. So by increasing our productivity, we get away from some of the skill challenges that mean that we just need more people to do things and with the people we've got, but we do need people, let's be clear, but with the people we've got, we can do even more. It's a huge opportunity. And digitalisation is just extraordinary. What we do now compared with even five years ago, absolutely amazing.

Dusty Rhodes  40:46
And my favourite expression is when you look at these new technologies, you have to remember that this is the worst they will ever be. What about Finally, on materials? Because materials are changing all the time. Lots of innovation. There have you seen any that excite you?

Alasdair Henderson  41:02
Yeah, and we're actually doing a lot in that space. So concrete and steel, our industry is addicted to concrete and steel, both very, very high embedded carbon content with content materials. And of course, if we want to get to net zero, we're going to have to do something around that. So one of the technologies we've been working on biocarbonisation, it is about how you treat the ground in situ using bacteria. I'm not going to bore you about it now, but it's an extraordinary use of natural resource that you can use bacteria to improve the strength of the ground. So instead of doing that traditional construction thing of digging a hole, dumping the soil and then filling the whole field of concrete, you can actually treat the soil so it's got a higher strength and is more usable as a construction material, but we must start using more effectively, ceramics, fiber based materials. Get away from our absolute addiction to concrete and steel. Aviation has been doing this for many, many years. The materials are well understood. They absolutely have application in civil engineer.

Dusty Rhodes  41:55
Last question for you, Alistair, and a little bit of advice for everybody who's listening today. You've got a very interesting point of view on what engineers should be interested in. Explain to me.

Alasdair Henderson  42:07
So I when I talk to people about the things that they should be developing in their career. And of course, you do get lots of people come and say, How do I get your job? You know, how do I become like you? Not many actually, but people who want to progress in their careers. And the thing I say to them, I suppose, is a little bit surprising, but the thing I value most is bread, and that's for a few reasons. You know, breadth of understanding of the world that you're working in. As I say, we are in society and of society, if you don't understand it, then the decisions you make around how you do things will not be good decisions.

Dusty Rhodes  42:37
So you're talking breadth, breadth, yeah. So, all right, yeah, maybe the Scottish, Scottish accent sounds like bread. You see the toast? Sorry, the breath, yeah. And that's, you

Alasdair Henderson  42:47
know, that's everything that is. It's culture, it's society. Why do we do the things we do? Why we talk? Why do we exist? Philosophy, you know, philosophy. You should absolutely be interested in philosophy, understanding what it is, where we've come from, where we're going. Those things might not sound like engineering, but they change your perspectives, in your Outlook, and help you deal, help you engage with stakeholders who are relying on you to do good work and help them meet their requirements. All of that feeds into a sort of critical thinking mode, if you one of the challenges that we have in the modern world is lack of critical thinking, and it often comes from an inability to see perspectives from other people, if you if you work to improve your bread, apart from being interesting and self-fulfilling anyway, it also allows you to be a better critical thinker, because you are able to see and understand more perspectives. Helps you reduce your, you know, Availability Heuristic biases. It helps you reduce your confirmation biases, all those things that constrain critical thinking, and goodness knows, we could do with so much more critical thinking in the modern world.

Dusty Rhodes  43:50
What a fantastic point of view to wrap up on. If you'd like to find out more about Alasdair and some of the topics that we've spoken about today, you'll find notes and link details in the description area of the podcast. But for now Alasdair Henderson, Executive Director of BAM Ireland. Thank you so much for joining us. 

Alasdair Henderson  44:06
Thanks, Dusty. It's been a pleasure.

Dusty Rhodes  44:08
If you enjoyed our podcast today, do share with a friend in the business. Just tell them to search for Engineers Ireland in their podcast player. The podcast is produced by dustpod.io for Engineers Ireland for advanced episodes and more information on career development opportunities. There are libraries of information on our website at https://www.engineersireland.ie/Resources/Amplified

Until next time from myself, Dusty Rhodes, thank you for listening.