Harry Cross is a Principal Transport Planner based in our Central office, and originally started on the graduate programme in the Southern office in 2014. Here, Harry tells us a bit about his role at the company and what he gets up to on a day to day basis.
What does your job involve?
As Principal Transport Planner, I have a varied role within our Central office. One of the main aspects of my role involves running the day-to-day operations of the Central Transport Planning team through managing available resource and workload through regular team meetings and catch ups to ensure that everyone has enough work throughout the coming weeks and months. This also involves liaising with our other offices to provide support and resource where required.
My role also involves project managing a variety of our exciting projects in locations all across the country, where we are delivering expert Transport Planning advice to our valued client base. On a day to day basis, my usual workload normally involves speaking to our clients on the phone or during project team meetings, checking or approving reports and drawings, and dealing with fee proposal requests... All whilst also making sure that we are meeting all of the relevant client deadlines – of which there can be many at once!
What do you enjoy most about the role?
I really do enjoy the variety of projects that we work on across the business, as we can assist clients on something as simple as a dropped kerb application a stones throw from our office, through to supporting multi-phased residential developments comprising hundreds, if not thousands of units. Being located so centrally within the country is also exciting as we really do cover the full breadth of the UK, and so I am never far away from a project I have worked on over the years. Recently we have been involved in a series of projects in the North East, and so I have found myself travelling on site visits to Newcastle, Sunderland and Leeds and so it has been great to see develop relationships with new highway authorities. We also have a great team set up, not just in our office but across the company, and so it is always fun to work on projects with colleagues within all of our regions.
What achievement are you most proud of since joining Paul Basham Associates?
I have recently celebrated my 10th anniversary at the company, and so I am very proud to have been here since starting as a graduate in our Southern office in 2014 – I really am not sure where the years have gone! I am also very proud to have helped open our Central office in 2016, and it is quite staggering to think we have been open for 8 years as a region. Having helped to grow the team to where it is today with several other people having been here for significant stints shows that we have a solid foundation and a good work ethic within the team, and we try to continually foster a positive working environment for staff.
In terms of projects, I love to get involved in local developments that we can monitor the progress of either during construction, or once they are fully built and occupied. In particular, it is always a pleasure to see the Dorothy Wadham building in Oxford which looks fantastic along Iffley Road or the Penrose Building in Jericho. We have a number of other irons in the fire in Oxford at the moment too, which I will be following with great interest.
What challenges you each day?
Each project can have its technical challenges, assessing whether a safe and suitable access can be achieved, whether appropriate car parking to standard can be provided on site, and whether there is suitable pedestrian infrastructure to support a sustainable development for future site users. Sometimes challenges can be timeframe specific where we need to get started straight in order to meet specific client timescales, but this is part and parcel of development planning and wouldn’t have it any other way. More recently, I have been involved in appeal work which can be extremely challenging and time consuming, and requires appropriate management, but this can also lead to really good experiences in dealing with technical discussion with the local planning and highway authorities, planning inspectors and members of the public. Overcoming these challenges to win an appeal is extremely satisfying.
What do you get up to in your free time?
I try to be as active as possible, so in between playing football and golf I like to try to meet up with friends as much as possible to either go to for a bike ride, cinema trip or more than likely a pub visit! I have recently bought a house with my girlfriend, and it has been amazing to finally have our own place, and there is normally something to build or sort out at home as well. I also try to go abroad as often as I can and try to have as many trips lined up as possible to tick off new countries and experiences. In the last year I have been on an adventure trip to Japan, skiing in Italy, supported England in the Euros in Germany, and have trips to Portugal and Thailand booked for the coming months so it has been a very good year for travel so far!
