Of Highways, Runways, and a PhD
A career is a living entity, it needs nurturing. It can’t be left alone. It needs a general sense of strategy and direction and careful maneuvering if things tend to plateau. Writing about my career progression would mean telling a series of very interesting stories. Pursuing a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering was never my first choice, but when I ended up married to it, I decided to give it my best. As my relation with the domain developed gradually, I was able to lay a strong foundation and grow without leaving gaps in the way. Recruitment is a potentially precious feat given the steep competition amongst India’s abundant population. It did require tenacity and high grades to finally land a job with Larsen and Toubro (L&T), India’s largest construction consortium with a significant global presence and the 22-year-old me felt, I had finally done it! Little did I know that the roller coaster had only begun. So, let’s begin with the first episode.
L&T is a major technology, engineering, construction, manufacturing, and financial services conglomerate, with global operations. They have project sites across the globe and headquarters/cluster offices in major cities. So, the million-dollar question after recruitment was which out of these project sites would they send me to or would I be lucky enough to be retained at one of the cluster offices in the cities. After a seven-day orientation at a luxury hotel, I was handed over a transfer slip that mentioned my place of posting and I actually googled to check where the place was. It was a remote location and a greenfield project where we were building a few hundred kilometers of the national highway. Having never lived outside of a city, this was a significant and abrupt change.
What I learned working between several remote construction sites is that working onsite goes by the rules of ‘survival of the most adaptable. My day started and ended way outside of the comfort zone. Not only did it require mental grit, it was physically strenuous with soaring temperatures and incredibly long hours. But it is here that I learned from scratch and matured professionally.
When you start off you realise that ninety percent of the things that you will need to do at your job were not taught in the classroom. There are brand new tasks thrown at you each day, and you need to accomplish them. And this is what builds your confidence beyond formal education. My role was primarily with the planning and quality assurance team. I was in charge of maintaining centralised quality assurance documentation as per ISO 9001. A significant milestone was successfully tackling the Llyod’s Register Quality Assurance Audit (LRQA) for consecutive years. The experience of facing an international third-party audit for a young engineer like me was staggeringly rich. I was carrying out contractual client correspondence as well. It was a pretty large project of order value USD 160m and towards the end, I was looking at thousands of contractual communications. This made me conversant with the construction contract and standard forms of contracts like the FIDIC. A significant milestone was preparing the site’s extension of time claim.
It was a rare opportunity that came my way as an extension of time claim is usually prepared by more experienced staff. I was able to submit a successful claim because of ‘non-traditional’ thinking as some of the others who attempted to build a claim concluded that it would not amount to anything significant.
This is when I realised that the art of speeding up one’s career is solely dependent on how differently one can think from the rest of the crowd.
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This is when I realised that the art of speeding up one’s career is solely dependent on how differently one can think from the rest of the crowd. 〰️
I was invited as the youngest speaker to talk about what it meant to survive a remote construction site for several years. I spoke to about 1200 new recruits at a massive gathering.
As the only woman on site on most occasions, I was invited as the youngest speaker to talk about what it meant to survive a remote construction site for several years. I spoke to about 1200 new recruits at a massive gathering. This is when episode two kick-started. All efforts bore fruit and I was sponsored by L&T’s Build India Scholarship to pursue a Masters in Construction Management from one of the most premier institutions of the country. As a part of my master's, I had to look at improving processes at another very interesting project site, a greenfield international airport. Again another remote location but what an experience to learn how to build a runway from scratch. I developed a participatory Risk Information Based Expert System (RIBES) to crowdsource and chanelise risk information into a database where it would be classified and stored for retrieval. The purpose of this expert system was to automate and transform the risk management process into a cyclic flow of information.
By this time, I had totally fallen in love with my domain of work, and the first seeds of working on technology integration into construction were sown.
After acing my master's, I re-joined as Assistant Manager (Business Development) at a cluster office looking after Eastern India and other SAARC countries. And that’s where episode three commences. I moved up the maturity curve. I started looking at organisational aspects and understanding that at the end of the day we were running a business that seeks top and bottom-line growth. The construction project became the construction business. My role was a hybrid role between tendering and client relations. Working with business intelligence developed my skillset of staying relevant with the latest market information and competitor analysis. Pre-bid risk reviews and strategising into new markets meant playing with a lot of data and analytics.
I realised the importance of data and why we need to speak data to take the modern construction conversation forward. The urge to transition into something where I could work on driving the digital transformation of the construction industry kept growing.
While I’ve never been risk-averse, doing what I did next took some solid courage. On the outside, I was settling in a multi-national corporation with a stable growth curve, but on the inside, I wanted an escape route from rigid hierarchies and bureaucratic communication channels. That’s when Katerra happened. The most interesting episode so far and a career transition like no other. Katerra is a Silicon Valley start-up with the vision to transform construction through technology—every process and every product. What’s surprising is I was working as a part of the software development team in Katerra. I was building, only this time not a highway or a runway, but a construction project management software. A very niche and hybrid role, I had to act as a link between domain (construction-specific) requirements and the technology team. A role that has now become pretty common for the digital transformation teams within construction businesses.
You can never learn better than learning on the job. My takeaway from Katerra is an understanding of the agile software development process. I started drawing parallels between the nuances of a software project’s change management and a construction project’s change management processes. I realised what it was to be agile.
Katerra widened my vision to an extent that I now found myself ready to own what I would do. An opportunity came along to pursue doctoral research at the Centre for Smart Modern Construction at Western Sydney University. Like all the past episodes, this one was also way outside my comfort zone. The reason why I dived headlong into this long and tedious journey was what I’d be researching. Industry 4.0 and the construction industry’s readiness to it. I’m two and a half years down the research journey and it does help me round off all the experiences of the past, of organisational capabilities, of digital transformation, of agility and non-traditional thinking. My research journey here in Australia has been strewn with many milestones. A significant one being winning Constructathon 2019, Australia’s first-ever construction hackathon that aimed to collaboratively solve industry-wide problems in a fast-paced environment. It brought together over 120 leading construction industry and technology bodies across the supply chain to innovate and collaborate. The event’s partners were Boral, Built, Roberts Pizzarotti, Laing O’Rourke, Mirvac, and Stockland. Our digital solution OkayMate crowdsources safety hazards & safety ratings from everyone on site collates the data and makes it visible to everyone on site, notifies the right people of the hazards/issues, and helps address them more quickly. Our idea of changing the safety culture by making safety more data-driven won us the Construction 2019 and we were awarded a six-week incubation to develop a clickable prototype with Fusion Labs, a global innovation consultant.
Since, OkayMate, I’ve been working on several technology products for the construction industry. I’m a regular at various property technology start-up events where co-founders share their products and pain points. The School of Built Environment at Western Sydney University awarded me a special commendation for non-traditional research output recently. I’m always in pursuit of a bigger and better platform to perform. This pursuit is relentless. The fact that we are perhaps experiencing a renaissance in the AEC industry fascinates me and I want to be a part of this transformation. My advice to those aspiring to a career in construction would be to not look at it with tunnel vision. The possibilities are immense. What I started with and what I do now is completely different yet intricately connected. And the industry will only become more and more multi-disciplinary with a touch of digital in almost every process. Equip yourself with knowledge, understanding, and market information yet have a child’s curiosity. And take the plunge.
Priya is a doctoral researcher at the Centre for Smart Modern Construction (c4SMC), Western Sydney University. Her research aims at developing a capability maturity model for construction enterprises transforming in Industry 4.0. Prior to commencing her doctoral research, she worked for Indian construction giant Larsen and Toubro (L&T) for over five years in Transportation Infrastructure Projects such as Highways, Runways, and Elevated Corridors and had a short stint with US-based technology-driven Construction Start-Up Katerra. She was a part of the scrum team developing a construction project management software at Katerra.
Priya holds a Masters's in Construction Management. She was sponsored under the prestigious L&T Build India Scholarship to pursue her master's. Her academic and professional pursuits have created the opportunity for her to understand the nuances of mega construction projects involving an array of stakeholders leading to complex and interdependent uncertainties. In August 2019, she was part of the team that won Constructathon 2019, Australia's first-ever Construction Hackathon. Following which she went through a six-week incubation program at Fusion Labs, a global innovation consultant, developing and testing the prototype 'OkayMate', an application that uses the power of the crowd to improve safety on a construction site.