Jul 13, 2026 · 54 min · 13 segments
Tanmaya "TK" Kala spent 13 years at DPR Construction rising to Project Executive on billion-dollar healthcare projects — including OSHPD hospital builds where clients demanded actual-cost…
Tanmaya KalaGuest
Rishi SrivastavaHost
Who knows? The next section, Tanuma, here is on the finance versus operations gap.
One theme of this podcast is the disconnect between the job site and the finance department.
From your experience running large projects, where does that disconnect usually show up?
Yeah, I mean, we started this podcast about you asking me what attracted me or what makes me stay in the construction industry.
If you ask a student who's studying civil engineering, he's not going like, you know what I'm excited about? Doing invoices.
I always used to say, like, what makes a good project manager a good project manager is who knows where actual cost is at compared to the budget.
Like if there is one thing that makes a project manager strong is knowing that.
But having said that, there is something in us, and it's probably true for all human beings, if there are things we don't like or we're not interested in, there is a tendency to procrastinate.
And in construction, it's very easy to do that because every project in some ways is managed chaos.
Project manager every day is dealing with multitude of problems and it's all about prioritization.
What am I going to do now versus what I'm going to, what's going to take a backseat to solve this problem? And there will always be a psychological leaning towards solving a problem that's out in the field because that's what you know, we as construction managers and civil engineers feel like is the real thing and that what we are paid for.
And that could lead to deprioritizing if an accountant and saying, hey, you didn't review the billing, you didn't quote the invoices, you know, I need all the coding, I need all these invoices matched to the cost code and you have to read the invoice.
Those things would start taking a backseat and that just That's the nature of the beast.
Who knows? The next section, Tanuma, here is on the finance versus operations gap.
One theme of this podcast is the disconnect between the job site and the finance department.
From your experience running large projects, where does that disconnect usually show up?
Yeah, I mean, we started this podcast about you asking me what attracted me or what makes me stay in the construction industry.
If you ask a student who's studying civil engineering, he's not going like, you know what I'm excited about? Doing invoices.
I always used to say, like, what makes a good project manager a good project manager is who knows where actual cost is at compared to the budget.
Like if there is one thing that makes a project manager strong is knowing that.
But having said that, there is something in us, and it's probably true for all human beings, if there are things we don't like or we're not interested in, there is a tendency to procrastinate.
And in construction, it's very easy to do that because every project in some ways is managed chaos.
Project manager every day is dealing with multitude of problems and it's all about prioritization.
What am I going to do now versus what I'm going to, what's going to take a backseat to solve this problem? And there will always be a psychological leaning towards solving a problem that's out in the field because that's what you know, we as construction managers and civil engineers feel like is the real thing and that what we are paid for.
And that could lead to deprioritizing if an accountant and saying, hey, you didn't review the billing, you didn't quote the invoices, you know, I need all the coding, I need all these invoices matched to the cost code and you have to read the invoice.
Those things would start taking a backseat and that just That's the nature of the beast.
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