By Naldo Vinti

Almost every infrastructure project manager has heard some version of the same line from a client: “This can’t go down.” In hospitals, pharmaceutical plants, and diagnostic centers, that line stops being a preference and becomes an absolute technical constraint. An MRI scanner that’s out of service means canceled exams. A bioreactor that’s offline can mean entire production batches lost.

The most expensive mistake on this kind of project isn’t technical — it’s sequencing. — Tami Rocha

“Teams calculate how long it will take to install the equipment, but they forget to calculate the time for all the supporting infrastructure: power, cooling, shielding. When that happens, the equipment has already arrived and the construction work still isn’t finished. That’s when the delays blow up,” says Rocha, a project manager with experience in critical facility installations in the United States and Brazil.

The MRI That Couldn’t Wait

That was exactly the risk Rocha faced when she led the development of a new diagnostic center for Fleury in São Paulo’s South Zone, in Brazil. The facility’s MRI scanner required complex electrical infrastructure and specialized shielding, and any delay in construction would have meant an extremely high-value piece of equipment sitting idle, racking up costs every single day.

The solution was to reorganize the project sequence: the team planned and completed the entire power supply infrastructure before the equipment arrived, eliminating the most common bottleneck in this type of installation.

0 days of downtime between the equipment’s arrival and its entry into service at the Fleury facility

“That’s only possible when you treat the supporting infrastructure as part of the equipment, not as a separate item on the punch list,” Rocha says.

The Same Problem, at Industrial Scale

On projects for AstraZeneca in Gaithersburg, Maryland, the same logic plays out on a different scale: installing bioprocessing equipment — Hamilton STAR systems, bioreactors, and centrifuges — as part of renovations to facilities that are already up and running. There, the risk isn’t just to the schedule; it’s regulatory.

“In these environments, identifying a risk before it happens is worth more than solving a problem well after it has already happened,” says Rocha, who designed the risk identification processes and mitigation strategies used to minimize disruptions on the pharmaceutical company’s renovation and installation projects.

About the Expert

Tami Rocha, MBA, is a senior project manager with more than 17 years of experience delivering construction and installation projects of the highest technical complexity, from pharmaceutical bioprocessing to sensitive hospital infrastructure. Her career spans two countries and multiple regulated industries, always centered on the same kind of challenge: keeping critical operations running while the engineering happens around them.

With a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration and an MBA in Project Management and Financial Management from Washington University of Virginia, Rocha has built a career that combines technical rigor with business acumen — a rare pairing in an industry usually split between people who understand construction and people who understand the numbers. That dual expertise explains why she is called on both to lead the physical construction of an industrial plant and to overhaul processes that save clients millions.

One of the defining moments of her career came when she led the construction of a complete industrial complex for Procter & Gamble in Brazil: a distribution center, a manufacturing plant, an administrative building, and a freight elevator serving cargo trains, all built simultaneously on top of 1.1 million cubic meters (about 1.4 million cubic yards) of earthwork. On that project, Rocha led a value-engineering effort that scaled back the retaining walls and saved the client R$7 million (about US$2 million), while also implementing a LEED certification program for sustainable construction practices.

Before stepping into frontline project management, Rocha served as a Lead Auditor at Bureau Veritas, where she was recognized as one of the top performers in her department, auditing civil engineering projects across Brazil. She was selected to conduct ISO certification audits, wrote an internal best-practices manual that the company adopted more broadly, and saw her audit reports become the company’s standard template — a rare testament to the fact that her technical standards are as respected as her ability to deliver.

Today, leading projects for AstraZeneca in the United States, Rocha brings that same discipline to installing bioprocessing equipment in pharma-regulated environments, where the risk is no longer just about the schedule but also regulatory. Colleagues describe her as a servant leader who builds collaborative, inclusive environments and forges long-term relationships with stakeholders — the same skill that allows her to negotiate high-value contracts without losing sight of the client relationship.

Multilingual and with experience on operations in several countries, Rocha represents an increasingly rare profile in the market: someone who can move with equal authority between the job site, the audit room, and the negotiating table.