Mert ORÇUN

Over the course of my professional life, I have become increasingly involved in project management roles in international projects within on-site organizations of different parties of the construction industry. I have been working not only in top-ranked international EPC contractors but also in the project management team of an investor developed a resort having 600 Mio EUR Capex. I have a solid grasp of both theoretical and practical aspects of initiating, planning, executing, monitoring & controlling, and closing project management processes for phases of construction projects executed by different organization models.
19 years ago, I was given a task at my first job that required to continuously superpose and revise shop drawings at the site office and was provided pens and stencils. I tried to use the AutoCad (14) instead, which was not commonly used out of design offices at that time, for this task and succeeded to provide real-time organized data to the site teams, and consequently improved the progress rate as well as quality of the works, within a couple of months. Later, project management became my main professional field in which digital applications spread into the industry along with designers’ computer-aided drawing tools. The use of software like access, excel, outlook evolved into ERP tools like Cognos, iTWO, and online collaboration tools like Aconex and eventually BIM. Construction projects are one of the most chaotic endeavors due to highly involvement of and dependency on the human factor.
I have been facing and dealing with the challenges of the digital transformation at firsthand and observing similar change-driven career has been going on with my peers. Such an effort to increase efficiency by using new means always includes the risk of failure due to steep learning curve, as your team still must deliver on time with great accuracy in real projects for which time is of the essence. These were the times that the benefits of digitization were not widely bought-in for many sectors, technology was harder to reach, and capacities of processors and internet were extremely limited compared to today. We have been the ones managing this change in wide range of projects within organizations of different scales in which reporting to a mostly analog oriented generation meanwhile managing totally digitalized ones as subordinates has been a major challenge.
As the name indicates, civil engineering is more than building and has always been associated with the development of a country. Digital transformation is inevitable, and the construction industry is currently not a front runner. Most of the data and know-how are considered as project-specific and they are wasted out upon completion of projects. I diverged my efforts in the last couple of years to converge the construction knowledge with data science and information technologies. BIM and citizen development by using low-code programming are at the center of this effort. We co-founded Building Workflows Limited with Ozan INON to develop construction-centric digital applications firsthand. I am extremely excited about this ambitious career shift foreseeing that too much knowledge to be exchanged between the digital technologies industry and construction sector. I believe that, introducing construction professional’s know-how, experience and perspective to digital world will result in many innovative projects that the people will benefit from.
As project management is valid for both sectors, experiencing a more agile approach of the IT sector compared to the conventional waterfall method of construction projects managers will be enlightening as well. Our project management APPS will aim to reflect such a hybrid methodology.
The first launch is bimhouz.com – a cloud platform that offers automated Design & Build tools for any type of home project.