Job Description of Project Engineer – My Real Experience (Part 1)

When I was working in this company, I worked as project engineer for precommissioning activity. In the end I realized that the term precomissioning department was not suitable for us, but mechanical completion.

I want to share you some experience and what I actually did as project engineer in that project. For your information, the project was Senoro Gas Development Project. It is owned by Joint Operating Body of Pertamina & Medco EP. It is located at Senoro, Central Sulawesi.

The History Begin With…

One day I went to convenient store and met my senior when I studied in Taiwan. He works for PT Rekayasa Industri. He asked me whether I want to resign from my current company. I of course said yes.

Not long after the meeting, he asked me to send my curriculum vitae to his friend who works for PT Tripatra. Then I sent my CV.

A week later, I got an invitation for interview at PT Tripatra. It was the shortest interview I have ever experienced. However, although I applied as process engineer, but my work is project engineer. I said I accepted the job regardless the difference between process engineer and project engineer. User who interviewed me explained that the job of project engineer is to do precommissioning activity. This is what I imagined when he said that:

• I will do motor solo run test and mechanical running test
• I will do hydrotest and so on

I am really familiar with that activities. So, I am not really afraid to migrate from process engineer to project engineer.

But, when I really get into works, being project engineer is totally different from my imagination.

First Three Months

In my first day, I was very surprised because I worked with a quite large team. However, the project engineer itself is divided into two groups: construction project engineer and precommissioning project engineer. Precom project engineer consisted of three person. I was the oldest.

In the first month I was dealing with line list and test package. Basically the work is to input test package number in Excel from test package. In the beginning I was quite happy with the job because it was really easy. I was paid quite a lot but I did easy job. I did it for the first three months and felt boring in the end. I also had discussion with our parent company about utilization of our own mechanical completion sofware.

Because my job was really simple, I started to think about resignation. This job did not improve my skill AT ALL. However, I survived. Beside did line listing, I also prepared precommissioning procedures. Maybe, the last one was really made my day.

In conclusion, basically my job in the first three months were:

• Prepare line listing based on test package
• Prepare precommissioning procedures (hydrotest, flushing & blowing, cleaning, reinstatement, catalyst filling)
• Learn how to use mechanical completion software

Went to Senoro

My activity in Senoro can be divided into two large activities: mechanical completion of early start up facility and mechanical completion of central processing plant.

Mechanical completion basically for me is to ensure that all required precommissioning activities has been done. For example, for piping, you need to ensure it is installed, hydrotested, flushed, blowned, reinstated, and the last… nitrogen purged. All of those activities must be proved by a single sign (which in fact it is really hard to get the sign).

Rifka, did you do that all by yourself?

No, I didn’t. Actually the one who did that were vendors or subcontractors under my company’s construction department and witnessed by our quality control engineers.

So, in which part did you involved?

I involved in preparation of mechanical completion dossier. It is basically a compilation of evidence that my company really did our works and the client accepted it.

Hmm, basically you did nothing, didn’t you?

Of course I did something… but really administrative (which really drove me crazy!). We compiled all prerequisite for gas in, then we proposed to our client that we were ready for gas in.

I thought this post will be quite long, so I will divide into two post. Please wait for my second post. 😉