• Question: Have you ever worked on any big projects that have succeeded or failed? If so, what were the projects on/about?

    Asked by JJ Bear to Ashwanth, Jeni, Mark, Natalie, Stephen on 14 Jun 2016. This question was also asked by King.E, 364envf27.
    • Photo: Jeni Spragg

      Jeni Spragg answered on 14 Jun 2016:

      When I was working in oil & gas, I worked on developing a computer tool which helped the site to manage the gas composition in an enormous gas pipeline which took gas from facilities all over the North Sea. The gas is always flowing and changing 24 hours a day, so it is complex to model.

      The tool broke – a lot! But I used the breakages as opportunities to identify the fixes we could make, and worked with the software developer to improve it. Gradually, it got better and better until we had a pretty useful tool. It was satisfying to know we now had something innovative which would help people do their job better.

    • Photo: Mark Gowan

      Mark Gowan answered on 14 Jun 2016:

      JJBear
      I have worked on a lot of major projects and they all have been successful, some may have cost more to construct than we were paid to do them and some may have taken longer than anticipated, but all were completed.
      Some large projects I have worked on have been the widening of the M25, a tramway through Nottingham, motorways in Scotland and Wales, I have worked on over 700 projects in my career.

    • Photo: Natalie Wride

      Natalie Wride answered on 15 Jun 2016:

      Hi JJ Bear 🙂

      One of the most successful projects I worked on is part of the underground train system being built in Doha for the 2022 World Cup. The project involved building a station inside an excavation in the ground (it was as deep as 8 double decker buses!!) It’s amazing seeing all the pictures of the work on site knowing you’ve been involved in its’ design. It’s almost a shame it’ll soon be covered over with earth so no one will see it as it’s an underground station like we have in London 🙂

    • Photo: Stephen Richardson

      Stephen Richardson answered on 16 Jun 2016:

      Wow, these engineers have worked on some pretty cool projects! And all success stories so far!
      So I can give you an example of a failure. I was part of a team that was brought together from about 20 different companies to write a report for an organisation called the UK Green Building Council (UKGBC)
      The UKGBC wanted the government to bring in stronger environmental laws for buildings and the report was supposed to show that this would have a positive impact on the economy as well as the environment.
      Over about 6 months we had meetings and discussions and did research and then finally wrote the report – all this on top of each also doing our normal day job.
      The UKGBC even wrote a letter which was signed by the CEOs (the top bosses) of a load of really big companies which said they were all in support of what the report recommended.
      And the result?
      Nothing.
      The government basically completely ignored it. So that was pretty frustrating!

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