All it took was a 90 minute flight for my City Rail Link world to turn upside down. On Saturday, 21 March, I took off from Auckland. When I landed in Queenstown, my phone “went nuts”. During those 90 minutes in the air, the Prime Minister announced we would be moving to the newly defined “level 2” immediately and a full lockdown within days.
Shifting the whole City Rail Link project into full lockdown in two working days was a challenge so remote, so foreign that nothing like it had ever been on my radar during a life-long international career as a project manager.
How do you safely stand down six active construction sites in such a manner that they will be able to quickly and safely able to be restarted and back up to full operational capacity within days??
How do you seamlessly migrate a team of 800 designers to a “work from home “environment and continue the vital task of delivering 400-odd construction design packages.
How do you transition the whole management of New Zealand’s biggest-ever infrastructure project in the space of two days so that the overall management and direction of the project is maintained during transitioning into lockdown, working during lockdown, and then efficiently and safely exiting lockdown.
All I can say is this: “Thank God we had an Alliance form of contract for our main tunnels and stations work!”
We advised our Link Alliance partners on the day of lockdown that we would work with them ensure that they were essentially “kept whole”. This enabled them to make significant decisions to ensure the project would keep progressing. Nothing was written down; verbal assurances were given and responded to with verbal assurances. Everyone followed through on the assurances they had given, there was no reversion to contractual risk adverse positions which suck the oxygen out of the room and make rapid pragmatic solutions impossible
The whole team (City Rail Link Ltd and all its contractors) moved heaven and earth to shut down the sites and keep all the design and planning work proceeding seamlessly. Many in senior management worked 14 days straight from the lockdown announcement to ensure that everything kept going.
A significant key to success was our small and dedicated IT team. They kept the technology wheels and cogs working somewhere out in cyberspace allowing a seamless transition to a “work from home” mode. We all quickly became proficient at conducting business via MS teams or Zoom.
Some of our French-based Alliance partners were already in lockdown (in France) and gave us all advice on what worked and what did not. Focus shifted quickly to how could we maximise lockdown time and how could we plan to exit lockdown very quickly and very safely.
Once the announcement was made to shift down to Level 3 we were already deeply into the planning of our construction restart. It is an enormous credit to the Link Alliance that they were able to get their sites up to ‘the new normal’ full production operating mode within three days.
That was the professional side: there was a personal one, too.
During the early days of lockdown I felt we were heading into war – I know CRL’s health professionals felt the same way.
The normally busy street outside my home was silent - no cars, no people. It was eerie.
This experience was reinforced when I went out to the airport to pick up Melbourne-based family who had decided to lockdown with us. I have never seen a sight like it. The airport was almost empty and some of the few travellers emerged from Customs wearing what looked like “full war- zone PPE”. It was confronting to say the least.
Sitting at the same desk at home for about 45 days was an experience I had not had since University. Most management groups, including my Senior Leadership Team, decided to have daily MS Teams hook ups from their homes. This was a very valuable lockdown lesson learned – the importance of keeping connections and helping each other. There were times, especially at the start, where there were real fears for many about where this was all going.
CRL Ltd’s Comms team published a daily newsletter full of news and quirky facts, and staff volunteered cryptic clues from their past leaving the rest of us to try to guess who it was. It is fair to say we all learnt a bit more about each other and probably became closer as group. I even trialled weekly webinars with staff – talking to an empty computer screen was certainly a step outside my communications comfort zone.
Together, we all made a deliberate effort to bring our whole person to work - not just our work face. It has brought a subtle and positive change to the organisation – as a team we’re now more flexible and more tolerant.
What’s come out of this?
The project’s quick construction restart, acknowledged by the Prime Minister, even with stricter health and safety regimes; we’ve increased work hours to maintain construction momentum, and the first tranche of our workers waiting overseas are now in New Zealand and self-isolating.
Longer term, investigations are underway to measure the overall impact of these remarkable few weeks on our timetable and costs.
I believe the project, along with every New Zealander, should be proud of how we united as a ‘whanau of five million’. No matter what your views were on the lockdown, 99.9 percent of us followed the rules. We achieved something remarkable.
New Zealand and the wider world is now different. But while we assess what the new ‘normal’ looks like, we should remind ourselves that our grandparents dealt with more in two world wars. We have shown we are capable of great change.
Reinforced by lockdown lessons learned, all of us at CRL remain committed as a better and more flexible team to driving forward our transformational project to help create the new future for Auckland.