Helen Ewing

Associate Director

Sectors

Civic & Cultural

Office & Workplace

Service

Management

Contact

E.hewing@rcp.co.nz

When Helen was three, she kept taking her bike apart. Her father handed her an oil can and told her she was going to be an engineer. He loved building things, and it became a regular part of her weekends, the start of a path that led into civil engineering.

That engineering foundation still sets her apart. Where many project managers come from a commercial or management background, Helen's is design and coordination, and it shows in how she leads. She moved into project management on facilities for the London 2012 Olympics, and from her years in the UK took an appreciation for permanence and whole-of-life thinking, questions she believes get raised far less often here than they should.

The whole-of-life building principle is a lovely concept that doesn't get brought to the surface at the outset of a project as often as it should. What can be repurposed? How would we modify things?

Helen EwingAssociate Director

Her strength is the complex public and institutional projects where success turns on design management, stakeholder alignment and commissioning as much as construction, buildings that have to perform long after the site is handed over. She was lead project manager on Te Rua, the purpose-built national archives facility for the Department of Internal Affairs, a highly specialized asset she guided from stakeholder engagement through commissioning and closeout.

She is also trusted to step into projects when they get difficult, leading the reviews and resets that get delivery, governance and stakeholders back on track. Alongside that, she puts real energy into developing RCP's people, preferring, as she says, to give them fishing rods rather than fish.

Let's do great things together

Careers