From The Trenches: Despatch II

Let me say it again… after 22 years of student life, my professional career has begun. It was baptism by fire from the first day. It started with a site visit – I was witnessing a full fledged industrial site in action. My mind was a mixed bag of emotions – there was this one part of me wanting to go tourist and photograph every incident with wide eyed amazement, then there was this other part nervous as hell taking in the magnitude of the moment (not fully comprehending the amount and depth of work that was expected of me), and finally there was this more “professional” me wanting to appear calm, collected, knowledgable, and in control of the situation. After the site visit and lunch, I was shown my room where I am to spend the next few months. The first thing I noticed was “zero” network coverage. Huh? In this day and age? I was already having withdrawal symptoms. I would rush to the main road every so often to make sure that I got signal and call one of my friends/family just to ’stay in touch’. Did I say that I was in the middle of a couple of thousand people who were working? Still for conversation, I had to turn to my mobile – a sign of the times.

The second day, we had to hit the ground running. Our goal was to run a workshop on Lean Construction and create a plan for the drainable hydro test which was to happen in about three weeks using the Last Planner concepts. I kept getting tips from Kalyan on anything and everything. We also had an adjunct professor from IITM – Mr. Raghavan (an SME) who lent credibility to both of us when we ran the workshop for the day. Pre-lunch was show-n-tell on the theory and concepts behind lean construction to the people on site without appearing preachy. Happy to note that most people were in agreement with what we were saying. After a lunch (more on this in a later post), we had all of the first line supervisors responsible for the hydro test assemble in a conference room and create a collaborative plan together! It was an effort to get the guys to actually walk up and put down the schedule on Post-It notes, but eventually we managed. It was a feat to initially convince the supervisors to give us daily targets to track against. But after three hours, we had a hydro test plan!

Collaborative Planning

Well, if planning is one thing, monitoring is the next. Starting the next day, I had the dubious honor of conducting a daily meeting to get daily updates. Did the hydro test happen on time? Were we making a difference? Find out in good time, keep reading…