Breaking New Ground—Stories from Defence Construction Breaking_new_ground | Page 117

DCC’s unexploded explosive ordnance
(UXO) service offering supported DND’s
launch of the UXO and Legacy Sites
program in 2005. From the outset, DCC’s
role was to marry DND’s extensive property
inventory knowledge with best practices for
identifying and mitigating threats from
unexploded munitions—an approach that
continues to inform projects across the
country. Before new infrastructure can be
built on any legacy site, UXO must be
safely identified and unearthed.
Perhaps the most striking example is that of the business
managers that are now found within most DCC business
units. John Graham has seen this change firsthand in
his career with DCC. He’s worked in Kingston, Head
Office, up in the Arctic on the DEW Line, in Trenton and
on the East and West coasts.
The biggest change that I’ve seen is that when I came
into the company 20 years ago, people were expected
to move on a regular basis. Within the first 10 years, I’d
moved five times and held eight different positions. We
still have that variety of opportunities, but there are
more opportunities to relocate locally (without moving)
and still do different things—we’re providing a greater
variety of services, and so there are opportunities to
move within the different service lines at the site if you
have the appropriate qualifications.
At the same time, the responsibilities within the roles have
grown. Previously, for example, training in media relations
would have been needed for very few DCC personnel.
Today, however, DCC’s Manager of Communications
Stephanie Ryan explains that high-profile projects are
engendering much interest from local—and even
national—media.
BREAKING NEW GROUND
DEFENCE CONSTRUCTION CANADA
In the past year, DCC has experienced more media
activity than I think it has in the past ten years. The
projects that we handle for the Department have a
higher profile, and there is an increasing demand for
transparency by the Canadian public. Our people,
whether they be on a construction site, deployed
abroad or in Head Office, are given guidance on how to
handle different media situations as the need arises.
Building relationships
The relationship between DCC and its primary client
remained an essential focus for the Corporation through
the early 2000s. To help measure this in a constructive
and quantitative way, DCC surveyed DND annually
on client satisfaction—receiving ratings consistently
exceeding 95 per cent—and used the feedback to help
guide ongoing service quality initiatives.
The two organizations have found good success in
creating new, cooperative ways of managing projects—
including instituting joint program management
support offices wherever the scale of a project indicated
that this would be beneficial, such as the DEW Line
Cleanup project and the unexploded explosive ordnance
(UXO) program.
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