SEPTEMBER 2007 ISSUE
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KEYSER FILE
People Make the Difference
In Huge Airport Project
BY TOM KEYSER
Freelance Columnist
Read Jones Christoffersen prides itself in giving good people challenging jobs that allow them to grow. An award-winning, seven-year project for the Calgary Airport Authority demonstrates just where that philosophy can lead
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Impressive Work |
As he looks back on one of the most complex and rewarding assignments of his career, John Charrett, P.Eng., is satisfied on a number of levels. He has seen, after all, a dedicated team grow and develop as a very public and impressive project at Calgary International Airport took shape.
Mr. Charrett, a principal of Read Jones Christoffersen in Calgary, is proud of the awards his structural engineering team earned for an extraordinary seven years they dedicated to a $350-million upgrade and expansion of the air terminal building.
He’s pleased by the way his engineers attacked a number of tricky challenges. They were, for example, asked to modify and expand a bustling airport while it continued to operate round the clock. They had to add seismic load capacity — to a core structure built long before such requirements were even in local building codes.
But Mr. Charrett is particularly gratified that none of the 12 people on the Read Jones Christoffersen project team left the firm. As Alberta companies continue to aggressively court each other’s employees, engineers often respond by jumping companies. The fact that each member hung in for the duration of the airport project therefore qualifies as a minor miracle.
As Mr. Charrett explains it, he and his fellow principals have devoted time and energy to training and mentoring, while creating the kind of atmosphere that motivates gifted people to stay and grow. Clearly, the approach has paid off.
“We do challenging work and try to foster a family atmosphere,” he says. “I believe those are some of the reasons we’ve enjoyed an outstanding retention rate over the years.”
The Right Grads
Retention starts before a staffer even turns on a company computer for the first time. Read Jones Christoffersen takes the hiring process seriously, hand-picking grads from top schools, then integrating them seamlessly into major projects.
Mr. Charrett has derived enormous pleasure from tracking the development of his younger engineers as the project rolled on.
Case in point. Rob Colwell, P.Eng., joined Read Jones Christoffersen just
a few years after graduating from the U of A. He was immediately assigned to
the Calgary International Airport project.
“Rob started off as one of the junior designers. Being a bright young guy,
he took on more challenge as time passed,” Mr. Charrett recalls.
“He developed so rapidly, he ended up leading one of the teams that designed one component of the expansion,” Mr. Charrett adds. “It’s satisfying to watch young people building up the skills they need to make an important contribution.”
While distributing praise among the entire team, Mr. Charrett also singled out the contributions of Doug Little, P.Eng. This team member had about five years of professional experience under his belt at the dawn of the project. Office manager Ken Laustsen, P.Eng., also made numerous and valuable contributions.
Good People, Big Job
The job needed good people. As part of a large contracted team working on behalf of the Calgary Airport Authority, structural engineers from Read Jones Christoffersen took on an assignment of enormous scope, including expansion of what’s officially known as D Pier. You and I refer to it as the airport’s north end, home of Calgary-based WestJet Airlines and others.
Among other tasks, Read Jones Christoffersen was responsible for designing
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a new centre of operations for WestJet, including baggage processor and check-in
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WestJet’s key operating pier for domestic flights
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new retail, restaurant and food court spaces
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the airport’s only departures-level moving walkway.
Of course, it’s futile to try to summarize an entire seven years of work within a few paragraphs. Suffice to say, the Consulting Engineers of Alberta was impressed enough by the company’s broad-based efforts to single it out for two 2006 awards of merit, for building engineering and project management.
“I don’t think we’ve ever been involved in a single project that came close to this one in duration — a seven-year continuous commission,” muses Mr. Charrett, who first signed on with Read Jones Christoffersen more than 20 years ago.
“We were very fortunate to have the right people in place from the beginning.”