Ranga Passya

Ranga can look at a construction programme and see, quickly, whether it will hold. Close to twenty years in construction across Oman, the United States and New Zealand have taught him how a project timeline should be put together.

He is convinced that projects are won or lost at the outset, in how realistically the programme is set up. The pressures are familiar, materials, labour and the competition for consultants and specialists, and the art is designing a programme that meets its milestones without over-promising. Success, he says, is finding the sweet spot between what the client and the main contractor each expect.

As RCP's national planning manager he has several projects running at once, reviewing construction programmes month by month to test whether they can really be built in the time proposed, analysing risk, tender and contract programmes and extensions of time, and working with contractors to resolve the flaws he finds and land on the best outcome for the project.

He started out as a civil engineer, a childhood ambition born of wanting to build a bridge. The bridges never came, but the projects did, hotels, offices and warehouses, and that construction knowledge is what now underpins the programmes he builds.