Technical Careers - Employee Profiles

- What is your current role at Shell?

- What do you like best about your role?

- Tell us about your background and experience

- What makes you stay at Shell?

I am the Project Portfolio Manager for Downstream responsible for managing the delivery of Shell's capital investment portfolio in the Refining and Chemicals businesses. I work closely with all Refineries and Chemicals Manufacturing Locations and the Downstream Business Organisation.

My role entails creating an environment in which procedures for delivering capital projects are easy to follow and are being followed. Our target is to reach first quintile in capital project performance as externally benchmarked. I'm also a member of the Downstream Manufacturing Investment Committee who makes decisions on capital investments.

I enjoy the two-fold nature of the job - managing a small team of project assurance staff and meeting with customers where I get to apply my experience in project management. I especially like working with the refinery and chemical plant project teams and drive overall performance forward towards our goal of reaching first quintile.

I get to interact with senior executives to determine changes that will have a positive and substantial impact on their businesses.

I enjoy the pace and the dynamic nature of SGSI and the current capital project environment.

I graduated in Mechanical Engineering from Delft University in The Netherlands in 1984, specialising in Thermal Power Engineering. I initially worked for a nuclear power company and then for an engineering contracting company for a total of four years.

I joined Shell because they offered me the opportunity to gain practical experience working in a construction team, rather than simply working from an office, applying my technical skills but never seeing the actual hardware.

For the first five months I followed a number of basic training courses in The Hague and was then off to Woodside, a Shell joint-venture in Australia. It was there that I had five jobs in three years in mechanical and production engineering, supporting both the on and off-shore teams.

In 1991, I moved back to The Hague and worked as a Cost/Planning Engineer, and then to Moerdijk as Head of Projects and Services where I was responsible for 17 multi-disciplinary staff and all capital projects. I then moved to a different role in Moerdijk where I was Maintenance Manager responsible for all production facilities, with a staff of around 125 people. Here I participated as a member of the Moerdijk Management Team, before moving to Shell Global Solutions in 2000. I than took up responsibility for the specialist Mechanical and Heat Transfer business groups giving technical advice to worldwide refining, chemicals and gas operating units. Specialisations included mechanical design & stress analysis, static equipment, piping systems, flare and relief systems, noise, plant layout, codes and standards, engineering databases, and reactive hazard assessment as well as Fired and non-fired heat transfer equipment. I worked with a team of about 100 engineers in seven locations worldwide.

Shell provides endless opportunities to follow a long and varied career. It also provides a working environment where you are able to take risks, improve things and really make a difference to yours and your customer's business.