Tanya Ross

We had to be quick. Tanya Ross is off to the dentist. After that she has to do a radio slot with GLR. And then she has to pen her regular column in Building magazine. In between all this she has to squeeze in her role as Buro Happold's chief plate spinner on the Millennium Dome.

"My aim in life," she says laughing, "is to be in a celebrity docu-soap."

She already is. Even before it opens, the Millennium Dome has reached cult status, if not for its colossal feat of structural engineering then for its equally colossal budget – £750 million plus change. Not a taxpayer's penny in there mind (unless one counts the National Lottery), just oodles of commercial sponsorship to remind us that anything today can be a consumer product, even a Christian anniversary.

Quite rightly, Tanya Ross won't be drawn on the political arguments. "Once you have decided to spend money marking the Millennium, the Dome is a pretty remarkable way of doing it," she judges.

"Building something like this is a tremendous achievement. It still gives me a kick to see so many people working together to achieve something so big." Being the building services engineer/project manager/resident media star means that Tanya Ross has a pivotal role on the Dome. As Buro Happold's main point of contact with the client, New Millennium Experience Company (NMEC), it is Tanya's role to check every piece of correspondence to and from the design team. She is also the main point of contact with the Environment Agency, the Highways Agency and building control, plus acts as the liaison officer on CDM issues.

"What I like about this job is being a cog, not just any small cog, but the cog in the middle," she says. "And helping other people realise their objectives. I have to be good at listening to people and in clarifying what they want in terms another professional will understand and accept."

"A typical example is the architect saying 'this is what I want it to look like', the structural engineer saying 'I'll have a torsion problem with that' and the services engineer thinking 'he won't let me put a hole through it'.

"What I have to do is make those three people understand what the other wants so they can solve their problems without getting into arguments. I've found I'm quite good at that," she says with a chuckle.

An MEng graduate in architectural engineering from Leeds University, Tanya Ross joined Buro Happold immediately after graduation. The tedium of sizing pipework took its toll, and Tanya was seriously considering a new career in catering when Buro Happold offered her a position in the quantity surveying department.

"I had a thoroughly good time on tender documentation, variations and the sharp end of contract negotiation," Tanya recalled enthusiastically. "I realised that I quite like dealing with people, finding solutions and settling the final account."

Once appointed as Buro Happold's project manager on the Millennium Dome, Tanya found herself based permanently on-site, chasing people up, spending her time solving problems and generally making sure that the closely corralled band of creative talents realise their ideas in the short space of time available.

It still gives me a kick to see so many people working together to achieve something so big

"Some of those creative talents are very difficult to deal with," she confided. "They see visions of waterfalls, and you have to say 'OK, where's the water coming from, where's the pump going to be and where is the trench?' That," she said, slapping the table with feeling, "is a huge challenge."

So what has been the biggest hand grenade Tanya has had to defuse?

"Well, there were a couple of minor crises to do with things not being where they thought they would be," she says diplomatically. "In the early days we hadn't a clue what was going inside the Dome, and the poor engineers where saying 'look, how big do I make this pipe', or 'how wide do I make this trench?' In the end someone had to say, 'just make it 6 m wide', and they went with that.

"Right now we have a debate on the impermeability of the site. The Environment Agency expect it to be impermeable, so I've had to go back and say 1, are you serious, 2, what do you mean by impermeable, and 3, which bit of the site?

"My job is to try and understand the environmental issues, so that when we are proposing solutions we do not compromise the Agency's primary concerns."

Working in such a male dominated profession, where does Tanya find the threshold between egality and chauvinism?

"To be honest I don't notice anymore that I am a woman in a man's world because I've been doing it for ten years," she says, "and I haven't been exposed to anything sexist, either than people on the phone thinking I'm a secretary, and that's when you start grinding your teeth."

It's one thing to be a woman in a male dominated industry, I said, but being a project manager as well makes Tanya Ross an extremely rare breed of building services engineer. Does Tanya see herself in the vanguard of change?

Tanya reflected on this for a moment, gazing out of the window to the giant white orb filling the horizon.

"Mark Whitby once said that engineers are the session musicians to the architectural pop stars," she said finally, "but I think its time for them to step out of the limelight and take credit where credit is due. I can see Mark's point, but it can be quite galling when you know that 95% of a structure is in the engineering, but the architect gets the credit for it."