I am a Turkish national, who formerly worked in London as a R&D project director and I am almost native in English. Currently I am residing and working in Turkey. However I am currently looking for job opportunities in the UK, as we, with my wife, have decided to move back to the UK soonafter 2 years. My wife isan EU citizen, who is also granted a permanent residence from the UK. Therefore, even though I do not have an effective working permission anymore at the present, it is very easy and only a matter of application for me to get one from the UK.
I graduated from the Civil Engineering Department of Middle East Technical University (METU, Ankara, Turkey) in January 2006, and completed my Master’s degree in Construction Management and Engineering Division of the same department, in February 2009. I have 6 years of working experience, through which I worked on Project management in a variety of fields and sectors.
In the construction sector I worked as; planning and cost control engineer, contracts administrator, and construction manager in Turkey and Libya. The combination of skills I earned through these different tasks of project management, together with the theory of my engineering education, shaped me as a multi-talented project management engineer. I have learned the significance of communication and the value of considering a Project as a whole, where all different functions shall be managed in an ultimate harmony and coordination with maestro accuracy.
In clean technologies sector, I worked as research and development program manager in Turkey and United Kingdom and involved in both technical and commercial aspects and coordination of technology development. In this position I experienced the challenge for managing a highly uncertain progress, which is inherent to R&D projects. I see this experience, during which my ‘problem solving’ and ‘ability to develop original methods’ skills were tested, as of a very particular value for project management especially for planning and cost control management.
Through my professional life, which is diverse through tasks of different competency and talent requirements, I frequently had to adopt and train myself for new responsibilities and changing environments. In every experience I had, I managed to overcome changes, deal with challenges, and I mastered new skills in relatively very short periods. I believe that, my success to adapt to new conditions and ability to easily cover the changing circumstances is due to my innate professional approach, which can be summarized with the following characteristics;
Ø Successful communication,
Ø Quick learner and committed to continuous self-improvement,
Ø Experienced in team work and leadership,
Ø A detailed analyzing skill with successive prediction ability,
Ø Excellent problem solving skills,
Ø Able to develop original methods,
Ø Always working in a systematic, organized, and task oriented way,
Ø Able to create a congenial and efficient working environment.
Career and Personal Highlights
· Design, coding and partial use of own ‘contracts management software’ and ‘contract structures’.
· Planning and cost control engineer for total 1 Billion Dollars’ worth projects.
· Contracts administration experience for 150 Million Dollars’ worth projects.
· Within 5 months completion of a Project in an active war zone, which could had not been completed for the former 2 years.
· Within 10 days completion of the structural construction of a building with a cylindrical concrete roof structure by employing a self-developed formwork system.
· Carrying a clean-tech reactor project, which is entirely composed of mechanic and electronic elements, from an idea to the academic acceptance level.
· Honored as the Turkey winner, for the bio-gas production Project, which introduces use of solar panels in the city Erzurum. This project was the first to claim adaptation of solar systems in the city of Erzurum, where the temperature may fall below -30 degrees during winter. Presently the use of the solar panels in this city is usual.
· Leader and trainer in a variety of groups.
Core Competencies
· Planning and Cost Control Management: Project planning is the correct interpretation and evaluation of the past and the current knowledge in order to foresee future. In other words, planning is the precise management of the correct information for successful completion of a project within the limits of required quality, time, and cost. Management of the knowledge requires a design of a project management understanding, which is, with measurable objectives; predictable, controllable thus realistically reportable on a real time basis. A real time reportable project administration is essential, especially in multi-partner projects, for enabling a continuous awareness and ensuring that the critical top level decisions will be taken on time. Otherwise, rather than the completion date and budget that they are planned and supposed to, the projects will finish whenever they are completed and only on the budget they are completed. With this perception, even though I am a good operator, I have never considered planning as a Primavera operatorship. I am not a Primavera operator, who has memorized the activities of the same type projects and who repeats it again and again. Instead with my talents; quick learning and sound prediction ability, I am a planning engineer, who can completely plan any type of project and can successfully do a real time monitoring, controlling, risk analyzing, and reporting thereafter. As a planning engineer, mostly being road construction projects, I have prepared schedules and budgets for and/or monitored and reported over 1 Billion Dollars’ worth projects, via using tools such as Primavera and MS project.
· Contract Management: In project based sectors the essential operation of the businesses is the trade of the contracts. Companies buy the contracts from the owners and sell them as small contract packages to the sub-contractors. Within this structure, project management is the collective administration of a bunch of parties within a network of contracts, where all parties have varying expectations from the project. Here contracts are the fundamental elements, which regulate the expectations of these parties from the project and also the relations in between them. On the other hand, contracts mostly are perceived as a written declaration of the commercial agreement in between parties. This is a big mistake. Rather than the divergences over the commercial agreement, contractual conflicts mostly occur since the administrative clauses cannot or miss regulate the conflict reasons, which are mainly due to varying expectations of the parties or misunderstanding or misinterpretation of the contract’s clauses. Contract management firstly is designing and composing the correct and clear contracts, where expectations are fairly set, potential conflict causes are foreseen, and their results are regulated. Secondly is the proactive and preventive resolution of the disagreements that may occur during the contract lifecycle, with a win-win manner concerning the technical and business needs and legal rights and limits altogether. Contract administrator is a communication bridge, who understands and harmonizes both; domestically the project team and the legal department and externally the parties to the contract. When contracts management is concerned, I have been at the coalface. I was involved with both technical and legal aspects of a 50 Million Dollars’ worth multi-national project, where the partners were almost at a litigation stage. Following I administered the contracts of a 100 Million Dollars’ worth business. I have worked with and directed the works of a number of lawyers from various locations, cultures and legal background. I have put my contract management experience in to practice with my own contract management software, which I have entirely conceived and mostly accomplished as much as my software skills allowed.
· Project Coordination: Project management means communication. Project managers have to make tens of decisions every day, some of which are critical. In order to make precise decisions, they should base on correct risk analysis and reasonable foundations. While making these decisions, the project teams, who run the main or the support functions of the project, the company departments and the third parties, who are connected with the project, and the functions and the needs of all these groups cannot be interpreted to be independent. Otherwise it will be inevitable to revise the decisions to a cost of time and resources, as they might frequently be precluded, disapproved, or inapplicable. As a result, projects do not fail due to the failure of a single project element but mostly fail due to the lack of coordination between various groups or due to the mismanagement of their linked parallel activities. Therefore a project manager should always be aware of the entire elements of the project and should be a bond between these elements, who holds and runs them with a harmony. In all of the positions that I have to coordinate a project, I have started my task with meeting whole parties to the project from top to bottom. I have always dedicated a portion of my shift for communication with people from different groups in order to understand their abilities and needs. Most importantly I have tried to know personal and professional cultures of these people and groups and also tried to make them know and understand me. As a result, since I was able to think with their minds, along with my own mind, and I was able to consider their needs and evaluate risks for everyone, I managed to make timely and accurate decisions, which were accepted and applied by others as well.