I wasn't too sure what to expect before going on my site visit as my experience with construction sites before my visit has been very much limited to walking past them as a pedestrian, so it was a bit of a change of pace for me being away from the office. I think the thing that differed the most from what I expected was how fast paced the operation was, the efficiency and level of execution was really eye opening with how many people were working across the site to keep everything moving and ensure trackers and deadlines were met.

During the site visit there was a presentation from Rachael Davies who works at Balfour Beatty as a social impact manager, hearing from her and the passion she has for the ongoing work in Bradford and the positive impact they've been able to have on the community and getting the general public involved and invested was really inspiring to see and hear. Knowing that the work taking place that SCAPE, Balfour Beatty and countless other companies were collaborating on was positively affecting so many people was wonderful to see

Being able to see how people within the business operate with their IT equipment on site visits and what IT infrastructure was available on site to help. This gave me a good picture of how we can help support people attending site visits, from having local versions of documents in order to ensure if the internet speeds are limited waiting times for documents to load aren't excessive and ensuring that laptops have good battery life and are running fast is crucial to ensuring things operate and run smoothly. Remote support can be tough at sites as the signal is often poor, having this insight and seeing it first-hand will be really helpful when we’re looking at updating different systems and seeing what we can do to ensure the smoothest possible operations.

I can't recommend doing a site visit enough, it was a wonderful experience and really eye opening to see the work that SCAPE is doing in the real world. I think as somebody in central services it can be easy to not really grasp the scope and reach SCAPE are having, but seeing this project come to life and the positive impact it's already having on the people that live in the city is inspiring to see. It was an eye-opening day that really gave me a first-hand look at what were all working towards by working at SCAPE.