Interview
David Chen
Chief Program Officer, MetroLink Regional Transit
← Read the full storyOur project managers stopped living in spreadsheets. They started managing exceptions — because the platform handled the routine.
David Chen joined MetroLink after leading a highway megaproject for the state DOT. He brought a conviction that transit riders deserve the same predictability drivers expect from a well-managed road network.
What was the hardest cultural shift?
Getting contractors to enter updates in a shared system instead of emailing PDFs. We solved it by making the shared timeline the only source for change-order approvals. If it was not in the platform, it did not get paid on time. Incentives work.
How did operations teams react?
Skeptically at first. Train controllers have seen a lot of IT projects. We won them over by showing live train data in the same view as construction windows — no separate login, no extra screen. When they could see a track outage before it happened, they became our strongest advocates.
Ready to write your story?
Talk with our team about how Netisen helps infrastructure organizations ship resilient platforms — on time and at scale.