Manager of Design, Port Authority of NY and NJ

Alright, my name is Kessann Grant. And I currently work for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. My current position is the Manager of Design, and that entails me managing engineering projects within design division. So we're actually doing engineering design for construction projects. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey owns a variety of transportation infrastructure. So we have airports, ports, tunnels, bridges, the path train. And I work at the World Trade Center, which is also part of the Port Authority. So the engineering department is tasked with doing design work to maintain these infrastructures. So whether that's asset replacement or repair, keep it in operation. So design is tasked with actually preparing engineering drawings with an engineering solution to a problem, whether that be we need to do a replacement, we need to do an upgrade, we need to do a repair. So I am tasked with managing the project as it goes through design phase to completion. Because I'm not actually doing the technical design work, my role entails a lot of coordination between disciplines. So it takes a team of roughly eight to 10 people to get a typical project done. You'll have a variety of different disciplines. So you'll have your electrical, your mechanical, your architectural, civil. But then you'll also have your construction manager, your estimator, your contracts person. And we're all tasked with doing a portion of the project so that we could put together one final package that will go out to a contractor. So my job is to coordinate all that, to make sure that everybody's meeting the objectives, we collectively are meeting our milestones, problem solving, and that could be technical problem solving or people problem solving, 'cause people are just not getting along. And communication with the client.