Faces of the CRL - Russell McMullan
Name: Russell McMullan
Age: 46
Suburb: Greenhithe
How long have you been working with CRL? Nearly four years. Time flies!
What is your role? General Manager, Assurance and Integration. The role is about working with others to make sure the City Rail Link can achieve its operational goals and will be safe to operate for its 100-year design life.
How do you do it? I work with my team and others on practical ways to make the CRL safer and more reliable. Also making sure the requirements for our smaller projects support the main CRL project in the right way and that it will all work together when CRL is completed. My team are heavily involved in the technical aspects of safety engineering, requirements management, and asset management, as well as collecting up all the good work of others to support the rail licencing process. This means getting out there and talking to people and working with the experts to resolve technical issues.
What do you enjoy most about your job? All the people I work with are amazing. Everyone has their own talents and experience and we bring our strengths together to deliver something greater than any of us could individually. This includes the team that I work with, the others in City Rail Link Limited, the Link Alliance, our contractors, consultants, and our delivery partners Auckland Transport and KiwiRail. I really enjoy connecting people and ideas to overcome challenges, and to make things better, easier, and more efficient. Sometimes our partners have international experience that’s different than what’s been done locally and it’s great when we’ve negotiated a common way forward.
Most challenging part? The CRL project is BIG! There are a lot of people involved and they all have a way of doing things that they’re familiar with. The nature of the project sometimes requires them to do things differently, and this really exercises my influencing, negotiation, and mediation skills to help us all achieve a result that is best for the project and best for New Zealand.
Previous jobs? I spent 18 years in the Royal New Zealand Air Force with the early years on the flight-line maintaining aircraft avionics and mission systems, and the latter years in a senior engineering role with a specialisation in avionics and software safety. I was also fortunate to spend four years in the USA with the NZ Ministry of Defence on large integrated systems project, upgrading our P-3K Orion aircraft. All of this provided me with world-class experience around making complex safety-critical engineering projects reliable, safe, usable and mission ready. After I left the Air Force, I spent five and a half years at Beca Ltd working across aviation, maritime, defence, health, and industrial sectors on a range of technical and management advisory projects in NZ and Australia. Along the way I’ve also had a few random part-time and second jobs including working in a commercial kitchen, in general engineering, a golf club, doing event security and working behind a bar.
Hobbies? Low and slow Texan style smoky BBQ ribs cooked for five hours over sustainably sourced pohutukawa. Yum!
What are you looking forward to most about when the CRL is complete? Seeing people come down the escalators at Karangahape Station and hearing what they have to say. Karangahape Station will be 30 meters (nine storeys!) below ground and people will get a real sense of just how deep it is when they descend the escalators. In the four years I’ve been on the project I’ve learned a lot and I’m sure I’ll learn a lot more in the next four, and so I hope to have the chance to share this knowledge and experience with others.
