End of day 4 of my Hunger strike and I’m suspending it.
Will explain later.
First, I’m going to write about Sam, the executive
director of Gammon and the person responsible for the risk management of the
company and our brief, but nevertheless interesting ‘relationship’.
Corporate lawyers should not get too excited about big ‘confidential’
info getting aired here, this post is going to be much more lyrical, and about
what things could have been have we understood each other a bit better…
A sort of a ‘sliding-door’ type of a scenario – though the
real events will be mentioned too.
The juicy parts the industry knows already, better than me,
unfortunately.
Bizarrely, it all started at the lift; what better example
of a sliding door;
I think I was going up to the 28th floor of
Devon House, it was my first day at Gammon, end of May this year. He was coming
out of the same contraption at the lobby level. Turns out just to get a
sandwich from Pret, as I saw him again minutes later why I was sitting still at
the reception waiting for the HR person to come and meet me.
See, Sam cuts quite an authoritative figure, you can’
really miss him.
We did formally get introduced, later that day – though his
limp handshake and detached manner could have been summarised with one word ‘whatever’
and giving the unspoken view of me
being this terribly overpriced woman with a skewed
English accent, brought in as a Head of the Innovation Department, no one really
needed and wanted, especially him, the finance man.
I could have been ‘a
colour consultant’ or a ‘Feng shui’ expert when it came to Sam that day , his
mind was on the money that was invisibly strapped around me as an already wasted
overhead/profit.
Little did he know, or wanted to know, that for years I
considered myself to be one of the best ‘risk-management-tools’ a construction company
could buy on the market, that I had the magic to go through project
documentation and point out all the places delays were likely to happen years
down the track or isolate the sheets of drawings that could form the basis for
the juiciest of claims.
That I knew exactly where Leighton will screw up its
project years ahead of time and have warned of those issues affected directors
and mangers (the CEO too, and to no use, but that is a different story).
On the day I started at Gammon I was given the job to
organise a BIM conference.
Five and a half weeks to get a major event off the
ground, with little inside knowledge of the company, it kept me busy.
The next time I saw Sam was at the conference.
The event was successful, though no better or worse than
many others that get held regularly in the global BIM arena, a field that
probably organises a larger than necessary number of events like these, often recycling
the same projects, same images, same
construction-sequence movies.
To make the event more than just another showcase of ‘we
did this’ and ‘we did that’ – I used the opportunity (with the permission of my
managers) to herald in a new era of BIM@Gammon, where as the first company to
do this in Hong Kong, we would go deep-as-well as wide and get the entire company
‘BIM literate’ in the shortest timeframe possible.
We held a Q&A session at the end of the internal
session – in a fairly full house – Sam was sitting close to the back, reclined in
the chair, asked for the mike:
‘is this BIM just going to be another tax to pay?’ put up the question – and kill me, I don’t remember my answer, but
must have been upbeat, I wanted this guy to feel positive about ‘this thing’ he
neither liked, neither wanted to be part of, but his CEO has assured me the
company was fully backing.
Later on, I learned he was part of some negotiations to
insource BIM capability to Gammon – but somehow got overruled. Overruled but
not forgotten that it happened.
Wind the clock a bit forward, the conference behind us;
I start looking at our jobs that have some BIM components
to them;
3 stand out, all risky in their own right, one with a poorly
set up design development job, based on a shaky BIM structure and already
terribly late; one with a client mandated – highly onerous BIM with strict
deadlines we had not met – the third, the biggest D&B job this company has
ever taken on with a consultant (our consultant!) flatly refusing to do
anything in 3D for it.
I try to get my head around these ‘hottest potatoes’, stretch the very limited resource at hand see
what can be achieved by when.
I plan, I present, I talk.
I get ignored, ridiculed and undermined.
Not by everyone, but by those, that matter, obviously.
Those that have followed my work know that I do look at
BIM (Building Information Managed) as a fundamental risk management practice –
just as project with BInM (Building Information NOT PROPERLY Managed) as a disaster
to happen. As ignorant as it sounds,
forget the building and how we are going to do it, if the project information
is crap and we do not manage it in time, it will blow up.
All 3 jobs were candidates for this.
So, went to see Iain Wink, Group Risk manager. A cheerful
fellow, one eye on the awful rain thumping outside still pretty greenery of his
office window, the other on his impending summer leave he told me not to worry
much about risk – these jobs were in good hands.
Walking out of his office, came Sam to mind again, was he
not the executive director responsible for RISK, surely he would not dismiss my
concerns as easily as everyone else?
Unfortunately, I could never pull to his attention the
risks that were growing under his nose, the next I met Sam, it was at the infamous
last meeting of my final firing where he called me ‘little naughty so-and-so’….
I was sincerely taken beck by his tone of voice, despite
the situation I did not think we two were people with such differing agenda.
Both of us had the company’s good and our own livelihoods at hearts.
Neither had I the opportunity to present to him the plan
I prepared for the Innovation Department, so far a ‘full overhead’ on the
company, to become a thriving business unit.
I worked day and night to get the figures right for the director
that asked me to do it while his colleagues were drafting the letter to fire
me.
Well, Sam, you wanted to save money, I could have done
that for you, and Gammon, but it just was not to be.
When you chose to cut me off that day, screaming at me I still
was for you just an overpaid ‘colour-consultant-whatever’ with a thick folder of "sins" committed to the company recorded by the "trusted" HR director for whose firing
you’ll get a nice pat on the back.
Maybe you should have taken a deep breath, listen me out
and had another go at saving money where it really matters, in the
mid-directorship levels.
Now, there is something really meaty to work with.
…and for those very few interested in the status of my Hunger
strike and wellbeing.
Well, after 4 almost completed days, I quit at 8PM
tonight. Yep, call me a wussy.
I never wanted this to become a personal story, but….
The MTR 65 Bil experiment was of no interest to anyone.
The Gammon lack of Integrity story was of no interest to
anyone.
…I thought maybe a personal story would raise some
eyebrows?
Nope.
And fighting alone and hungry is a no-no, even in the manuals
of seasoned activists, I’m told
So, if this is a blot on my character – you are welcome.
After all, how could I carry on starving, not writing and
wait for ‘sure for God never to come miracle’ when Leightons are finally
getting exposed in their cherished home-country.
See blog:
http://debunkthebim.blogspot.hk/2013/10/birds-of-feather-flock-together.html
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