The People Behind the Projects: Meet Pina and Heather

When KGS Group was founded 40 years ago, there were no offices across North America, no sophisticated document management systems and no digital workflows. There were only a handful of people in a small office, a growing stack of projects and a young administration team helping hold everything together.

Two of these earliest administrators were Pina Di Canio and Heather Ironside, who joined KGS within weeks of each other in 1988. Nearly four decades later, they have witnessed this small Winnipeg-based group of four engineers grow into an international engineering consulting firm, serving clients across North America and beyond.

But let’s take a step back.

For Pina, the decision to join KGS came down to a gut feeling. As a recent grad out of South Winnipeg Technical College, Pina was looking for her first corporate job. She remembers Dave MacMillan, Founding Principal, telling her about the company, its size and how passionate everyone was about their work. She immediately felt an energy that stood out to her.

“They really wanted someone new on the team,” recalled Pina. “I submitted my resume, was interviewed, and got the job offer all in the same day.”

Heather’s path was similarly straightforward: fresh out of Red River College, she saw a job posting pinned to the bulletin board and applied immediately. She interviewed soon after and received an offer the very next day. It would become her first, and only, full-time corporate job, turning into a decades-long career.

“I had an interview with a competitor around the same time, but I had a good feeling about KGS Group, and I knew that’s the job I wanted to pursue,” Heather remarked.

Administration at KGS looked very different in the late 1980s than it does today. Reports arrived handwritten, proposals were painstakingly assembled by hand and a single typo meant spending hours fixing the mistake. Soil logs were prepared on typewriters, dot matrix printers loudly handled one page at a time and deadlines still existed, but there was no online folder to throw documents into.

“You just had to get it done,” said Heather. “It was a different way of doing stuff. You just had to do it.”

The work was demanding, but Pina and Heather both remember the way the atmosphere of the office felt: it was special.

Beyond the work, family picnics were annual highlights, employees knew one another’s spouses and children, and it felt like a second home.

“The company was built on a family-oriented culture,” said Pina. “Today, it’s rooted in the same values of care, respect and support for employees.”

That sense of connection extended beyond the office walls. As one of the first voices that clients heard when they called KGS, Pina saw firsthand how relationships helped build the business. Long before customer relationship management systems existed, she knew many callers by name and worked to ensure every interaction felt personal.

As KGS grew, so did the complexity of the work that flowed through the Administration Department. Major projects generated boxes of reports, increasingly complex submissions and new responsibilities. But with the growth also came opportunity.

“The work started coming in across Canada from Kenora and Thunder Bay to the Yukon. We must have been doing something right because we kept getting bigger projects,” Heather said.

Today, both women look around and see an organization that is almost unrecognizable from the one they joined, in the best way possible. The technology has changed, the offices have multiplied and the company has grown into something better.

However, some things still remain the same.

“I feel good,” said Heather, reflecting on KGS’s growth. “The Administration Department has really made a lasting impact on the history of KGS Group.”

“We are proud of the part we played in making this place as great as it is today,” adds Pina.

Forty years later, the projects may be larger and the teams more diverse, but the people behind the scenes remain an important part of what makes KGS a continued success. It is a reminder that every great engineering story is also a story about the people who helped make it happen.