Working towards accessibility for all

I’m the General Manager for Project Management in Melbourne and on a day-to-day basis I’m responsible for overseeing our staff and the delivery of the projects they’re working on across our various business units. That being said, every day is different and varies depending on our clients' and my staff’s needs. Curveballs definitely aren’t unheard of!

At the moment I’m focused on the work I’m doing with the National Disability Insurance Agency which is aimed at providing new offices both here in Melbourne and up in Canberra. I think it’s a fantastic opportunity to be able to work with the NDIA and lead a team with disability and access requirements at the forefront of their minds. It will help us deliver on the promise that NDIA makes, which is to be an all-inclusive workplace and take that knowledge and philosophy onto other initiatives and clients.

We’ve also started on a new program of work with the Victorian Schools Building Authority called Kindergartens on School Sites. The objective is to bring modular construction to existing school sites so that we can add kindy facilities to existing schools while reducing construction times and the health and safety concerns surrounding those developments.

And of course, our largest projects are orientated around our biggest client, the Department of Defence. We have two of our business units working with the Department actively navigating the complexities of capabilities and construction, especially during a pandemic, and helping them solve real problems.

I think the biggest opportunity, both currently and going forward, will be the infrastructure space. It’s already taking off and we’re looking at infrastructure in a much broader sense, so that we can assist clients in delivering fantastic projects on a massive, massive scale. Not just in the traditional infrastructure space of roads and rail, but within energy and water too.

But, I think the most important opportunity over the next 12 months is dealing with the environment and making sure that we’re doing the right thing by it. We’re lucky at RPS to have an in-house Remediation Project Management team who we are helping clean up the mistakes of the past and work on bettering the environment for the future.

Thinking about my first day walking into a builder’s office and trying to wrap my head around that professional environment, I’d probably tell myself to trust my gut instincts a lot more. Your gut is usually right and if you’ve got good instincts, you’ll usually get good results.

A dream project for me would involve leading a team of people within an environment that gives people the opportunity to learn, the space to fail, and then the ability to learn from those failures. I’d also want to work with a team that fosters respect and allows for a robust conversation to deliver the best outcome for the project. Whether it’s a small $50,000 fitout or a billion-dollar multi-site project, good people make a good project.

Our diversity! Melbourne is amazingly diverse – it’s one thing to encourage individuality but we really live and breathe it. I also appreciate our resilience, we can deal with whatever gets thrown at us.