For leveraging project management to bring drinking water to residents in the Indian state of Karnataka

Assistant General Manager at CBRE India ǀ Bengaluru, India

It’s fitting that Commercial Real Estate Project Manager Kaushik Chandra L’s most satisfying project management win to date dealt with natural resources, given that Kaushik eagerly awaits his trekking vacations all year.

These treks aren’t day jaunts on local hiking trails or weekend getaways, but 10-day (or longer) trips backpacking in the mountains—during which Kaushik is forcibly disconnected from digital life. “You have to be in the wilderness for a minimum of eight to 10 days. That's the amount of time that it requires to really spend time in nature,” and lose oneself, Kaushik adds. “It just takes you out of the bustling cities. You’re out of all the noise, out of all the light. So you're there only with people, and in nature.”

But as much as Kaushik enjoys disconnecting, his face lights up when he talks project management and his work at CBRE India. During his undergraduate studies in engineering in his home city of Mysuru, Kaushik decided to work in the managerial side of construction, having seen the sector’s rapid growth and future potential in India. He built on his education by completing postgraduate studies in advanced construction management, and spent a year as an emerging leader at RICS School of Built Environment at Amity University.

Kaushik’s involvement with PMI since 2018 has enriched his work exponentially, he says. “In India, the chapters are growing,” he explains. On completing his Project Management Professional (PMP)^® certification, Kaushik says, “PMP gave us a structured way of seeing projects which are very unique.” Some of his favorite perspectives gained from his PMP training are dealing with team conflicts, solutions-based thinking, a leadership mindset, working as a team, and process-oriented structures.

Yet, when Kaushik speaks of his project management highlights, he doesn’t laud his successes, but rather highlights the thrill of tackling challenges. “We are service-oriented,” he says. “So we need to understand [client] problems. We need to understand their bottlenecks and propose solutions. Clients come with new developments, new issues that are there in their projects.” Kaushik says that strategy and development are what, for him, give his work “that kick.”

Increasingly, internal solutions in Kaushik’s role can be found in tech innovation and experimentation: cloud-based systems, software that updates market lead lists, and annual data showing what markets to expand in and key potential clients within those markets. Apart from the technological tools at his disposal, Kaushik says that there are larger measurements of project success, as well.