That’s a Good Question: What does a Project Manager do?

There’s plenty that goes into getting work done on our electricity network – much of it before our crews even get to site.

For this special Te Wiki o te Reo Māori edition of That’s a Good Question, we caught up with Project Manager Manga Poa to answer a few pātai about his mahi and some of the work that happens behind the scenes on our network.

Tēnā koutou katoa. Nau mai, haere mai ki Te Wiki o te Reo Māori.

Ko Manga Poa tōku ingoa. Ko Maniapoto rāua ko Ngāpuhi ōku iwi. Nō Ōtorohanga ahau. Ko taku mahi he kaiwhakahaere kaupapa. Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa.

Why do you need a Project Manager just to move a few poles?

It takes the same amount of organising to change one pole as it does to change 20 poles in the same location. There’s still planning and coordination that needs to happen to get the job done.

Why are you replacing that pole or cable when it looks perfectly fine?

To the untrained eye, it probably would look perfectly fine. But we have a specialist team that goes out and looks closely at the condition of the conductor on the poles, the poles themselves and the wooden crossarms. That gives us a close-up view of the condition of those assets on our network.

How do you decide which network work gets done first?

I look at it as FPC. The first one, F, is faults. Obviously, if a fault has occurred and people are without power, we have to deal with that first. We have a specialist fault team that looks after that area. The next one, P, is prioritised jobs. We look at those from P one through to P five. Then C is customer-initiated work. By the time we get those folders, the customer has already paid for their job to be done, so obviously they want their work done as quickly as possible.

Got a good pātai?

There’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes to plan, prioritise and deliver work on our electricity network – and plenty of it isn’t obvious from the side of the road.

That’s a Good Question is our chance to answer some of the things people ask us about our network and the work our teams do.