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Meet Laurie Corbett

Job: 

Project Manager

Job description: 

Client representative on CIAL construction projects around the wider airport campus and terminal building. Delivering the project scope on time, on budget, and to a happy customer.

Work background: 

I spent seven years on the new airport terminal building project and six years with a residential building company.

Favourite part of job: 

The variety - each new project presents new challenges.

Least favourite part of job: 

Contractors who tell you they will do something and then don’t!

What I am working on now: 
  • Office and Warehouse Project – Dakota Park
  • Retail and Cinema Expansion – terminal building
  • CIAL Office Expansion – on top of the car park building
  • Spitfire Square development – Retail tenancy co-ordination
  • Additional rental car booth – terminal building
A quick story about a job well done: 

To build the new terminal, we had to keep knocking down bits of the old one to make room for the new. This meant we had to move some businesses into temporary locations several times, before they could move into their space in the new building.  The Air New Zealand baggage handling team, the people that make sure our bags go onto the plane with us, had to move premises overnight and everything had to be ready for 20 people to start work at 5am the next morning. We couldn’t start the move until 8pm - that gave us 9hours. We had to have all of their computers, information systems and radio communications up and running, locker rooms and kitchen facilities all ready to be used.

We planned it carefully, making sure did everything we possibly could before we started the move, and then made sure we had enough people to move things along with the people who work on connecting up all the computer systems. There were about 18 people who worked through the night, got it all done and when the baggage handlers came to work in the morning everything was ready for them to start work. It was a great effort by so many people.

A (humorous) story about a job that went badly and what you learned: 

We had just completed construction of a new carpark for airport parking. It is about 10 minutes’ walk from the terminal, so on the road outside it, we built a pedestrian island in the middle of the road for pedestrians to cross safely and walk to the terminal and also a bus stop and shelter for those who wanted a ride.

We realised that when the bus was on the bus stop, there wasn’t very much room for traffic to get between the pedestrian island and the bus stop.  Some of our team members were standing by the bus stop discussing options to improve the area and slow down the cars that were breaking the speed limit, when a man we didn’t know stopped his car and came to talk to us. 

He told us he used that road all the time and didn’t think it was a very good design at all.  When we explained to him a traffic engineer had designed it for us, but we were concerned about it too, he got rather cranky and suggested that “Even though an engineer designed it, it still doesn’t work and has he even got off his bottom and out of the office to look at the area!?”  I explained that “Yes, she has”.

Moral of the story is:

  1. Even though you employ a suitably qualified person to do a job they don’t always get it right and don’t be afraid to question them if you think something isn’t right.
  2. Don’t assume that just because someone is an engineer they are a boy!
Qualifications: 

I don’t have any Project Management qualifications. I came from a background in office, hotel and property management and ‘fell’ into construction when I was managing the office of a building company.

Interests outside work: 

Friends, family, charity work.


Laurie Corbett is a Project Manager for CIAL. Image: CIAL.

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