People and projects from around the PETROFAC world

PEOPLE

DINA LOTFY, SENIOR ENGINEER, PLANNING
Dina has been with Petrofac for nearly 11 years, and also worked on Phase 1 of the Ghazeer project. As a Planning Engineer, she is responsible for compiling, analysing and presenting progress data and submitting it to key stakeholders.


With the Controls team shifting early to site, I was the only member of the project team left in Sharjah… From the home office perspective, I was focally coordinating all reporting for the project. My job was to make sure everything was on track, by taking data from the onsite team and comparing our progress against the baseline plan. With a fast-track project like this, it’s vital to have a clear vision and a precise plan, and to monitor progress completely and accurately.

Digitalisation has been an important theme… I deal with project data, so digitalisation is particularly important, and bp has promoted the digital agenda. I work with applications like Power BI (a data visualisation service) to create dashboards that clearly show the rate of progress and provide an early warning of any potential hold-ups. Also, bp has been taking our raw data for use in their own reporting and planning systems.

As a woman, Petrofac is a great place to work… I joined as a fresh graduate, and the company has always helped and encouraged me to build my career. I had originally intended to be a Design Engineer, but became more interested in Planning, and Petrofac made it easy for me to make the transition. Also, as a mother of two, I know how hard it can be to manage your work-life balance, but the company has always been flexible and supportive.

My advice to anyone starting out on their career would be to focus on the technicalities… Petrofac is an engineering focused company, so it helps to have a thorough grounding in the technicalities. You need to know how a project functions and the way it is sequenced. Irrespective of what path you eventually want your career to take, it’s useful to know all the underlying disciplines.

The project has been a springboard… I’ve learnt so much on this project, and it has enabled me to move forward to the next phase of my career. I’m now a Project Controls Engineer on the HKZ Offshore Grid project in the North Sea. So, I’ve moved from onshore to offshore and from oil and gas to renewables. It’s quite a change and quite a challenge, but one I’m really enjoying.

“Irrespective of what path you eventually want your career to take, it’s useful to know all the underlying disciplines.”

WORDS PETER HALLIDAY

PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 2020

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