He aha te mea nui o te ao. He tāngata, he tāngata, he tāngata

What is the most important thing in the world? It is people, it is people, it is people.

Clockmakers take pride in assembling the many moving pieces of their creations in such a way that things run like, well, clockwork. 

A major building development, much like clockwork, requires many moving pieces acting in harmony to keep the project ticking. 

The new Mitre 10 Mega on Prestons Road is one such development that Lumen have been heavily involved with recently.

Mitre 10 Mega Structural Design

Lumen, as the structural engineer to the development, have been working in concert with the developer, the building owner, architects, civil designers, HVAC engineers, builders, geotechnical and fire engineers, customers and residential neighbours, as well as meeting the requirements of the Building Code and local and regional councils through Building and Resource Consent. 

All of these cogs in the machine are fickle. Owners change their mind. A mechanical engineer needs more room for a duct. A structural engineer needs a bigger foundation. Working together as a collaborative team is like building a clock with cogs that change shape as you fit them into place.

There is one major difference between a ticking timepiece and a project such as this; we are dealing with people, not machinery.

A very tricky tick-tock indeed. 

At Lumen, our values and culture help us to meet these challenges with a confidence and enthusiasm that makes me feel part of a dynamic team, and not just a cog in a machine.

I’ve been working at Lumen for over ten years, and have come to greatly appreciate the levels of effort put in by the management team into developing a values-based culture. We literally spent years formulating our values and distilling them down into five key words: Entrepreneurship, Adaptability, Relationships, Transparency and Happiness, all tied up with the simple acronym EARTH. 

At Lumen, we are immersed in our values. It took us a lot of work, with input invited from every level in the company to formulate what means the most to us. We take ownership of them, and they shape our culture.

These values have helped us to specialise in delivering effective forward-thinking engineering solutions that tend to have a lasting effect on people, and this project is a prime example.

Mitre 10 Mega is a building with a floor area of approximately 8300m2, plus outdoor garden centre, parking, stormwater swales, canopies and delivery yard. This development presents all the designers involved with various complex issues that require innovative solutions and strong relationship management skills.

The main challenge on this project, from my point of view, has been accommodating changes, and communicating the effects of these changes on other people’s work.

Seemingly small adjustments, or changes to solve problems can often have disproportionate knock-on effects. These effects often circle back around to the origin in the form of a completely new problem.

For example, after we had completed our initial structural design and about half of our drafting, a problem arose from the Resource Consent aspect of the development. This problem was solved by mirroring the whole building; the garden centre moved from the west side to the east, and vice versa for the trade drive-through. It seemed like a simple solution. But then structure had to be added to satisfy a change in the fire design, the civil engineers had to tweak pipe locations to work with contours, which affected where electrical equipment could be located, which in turn caused issues with site access and parking. Et cetera, et cetera.

From my point of view, clear and honest communication is the key to helping all the parts of this project fit together. 

During this project, I have spent many hours talking to the architect, the civil engineer, the project coordinator, the site manager and many others. We had serious discussions. We complained about the weather. I voiced worries that I had about this detail, and listened to complaints about that detail. I pleaded with my colleagues in the office for help at times, and we celebrated the wins when they came.

All the people involved in the Mitre 10 Mega development helped to make gears of the project turn. I can’t take credit for steering the coordinated effort to a successful conclusion myself, but I like to believe the people around me at Lumen helped me to influence the direction we were going.

These people are the springs that set wheels in motion. 

This is what makes us tick. 

Teamwork makes the dreamwork