FEDERICO PECCOLO, SENIOR PROJECT MANAGER

I have a nine-year-old daughter and tell her… I’m working on a project that means people in southeast Europe can cook food and heat up their homes. I started on the project as the Business Development Manager and took part in the bid. I usually execute projects on the ground and I’d never done business development before, but the commercial manager wanted to try a different model and sell an execution strategy during this phase. It meant the client saw more solid ideas; this was our differentiator. When we got the project, they said, ‘You took it, so now you do it!’

It was the first time we worked in Turkey… so we didn’t have an existing organisation there. We hired from the local market and my team was relatively young, so, for a lot of people, it was their first time working with Petrofac. Despite this, we created a solid team in a short amount of time. So, I’ve ended up delivering a full project team, with 50% of people under the age of 35 – this legacy is something that is very important to me.

I love the adrenaline… you have a lot of responsibility and there is a lot of pressure. The complexity was in the construction and schedule. The site area is very remote and there was no infrastructure. There was also a massive amount of site preparation work – so much so that 30% of construction costs were spent on preparing the site and it took us six months. We then had 18 months to do the entire facility. All of our strategy was driven by this and we had to be fast on the procurement and engineering.

It’s important to always try to put yourself in the other person’s shoes… Look at an issue from the other party’s point of view – why are they asking this, what’s the target they want to achieve? It’s a good everyday life practice and will give you more leverage for where you want to go.

The project has been very successful… everyone across the business wants to understand what we’ve done and capitalise on it. So, we are doing ‘lessons learned’ in a slightly different way – 360-degree sessions involving vendors, partners and subcontractors. Then, we can understand how we can repeat this success.

Meet the people behind this project