Can you tell us about your Tekfen Engineering journey?

Starting from my university days, I always had the idea to take a couple of years off from professional life after 10 years. I couldn’t quite do it in 10, but 13 years after working abroad in several countries, I finally came back to Turkey and took that brake. When I started looking for work again, an acquaintance of mine turned out to be well respected by our VP which got me invited for a job interview with him. He shared with me his vision for the company, and his intention to open the Project Controls department. Even though I had no plans at all to work in Turkey, the prospect of setting up and leading this key department in such a large-scale company as Tekfen Engineering was incredibly exciting, and I have been working with the same excitement and enthusiasm since then.

What are the things that you are most proud of and your motivation in doing your job?

Perhaps due to our cultural heritage, we are a bit on the restless side as a society, so we often concentrate most of our efforts on the problems at hand, leaving less energy and time for the problems ahead. While this provides invaluable agility in rapidly changing environments, it comes at a cost: Planning and systematic approaches become a bigger challenge.

As a result, it is almost never enough to just implement well established best practices. We have to tailor our processes to our highly adaptive and flexible way of doing things. This constantly requires coming up with very unique solutions and practices that you would rarely get a chance to experience in other international companies.

Can you define Tekfen Engineering with 3 words?

Joy

Satisfaction

Trust

Where do you see your job in company’s mission?

You can see any engineering design job as a project in itself. Just like in construction projects, you need resources to work on the design, those resources have costs, you have your income, time constraints, milestones, etc., so you need to closely monitor and evaluate those aspects. As the Project Controls department, it is our responsibility to create the tools necessary to monitor our project performances, and administrate the control systems we put in place using those tools. The work that we do shines spotlights on all our projects, and illuminates the roads ahead.