There is a film called Seven Years in Tibet. A man arrives in a remote, unfamiliar place — cut off from the world he knows — and is changed by the experience in ways he could not have anticipated. I am not comparing myself to Heinrich Harrer, and Yardimli is not Lhasa. But when people ask me how I became a claims consultant and contract manager, I think of those seven years in the Azerbaijani mountains, and I understand the analogy better than I probably should.
Kabul to the Caucasus
I joined Ludwig Pfeiffer in September 2011 as a hydraulic engineer, assigned to a water supply project in Kabul. Afghanistan. I was a designer — that was my world. Three months later, the firm secured a new contract in Azerbaijan: a World Bank-financed water supply, wastewater and treatment plant project in a small mountain town called Yardimli, near the Iranian border. I was appointed Design Manager and lead hydraulic designer.
It was the first time I had led a team. It was also the first time I had encountered an international contract form — ENAA conditions, Employer's Requirements, the full design-and-build structure where the contractor assumes the design risk entirely. I did not fully understand what that meant yet. I would learn.
What I could not have known in December 2011 was that I would not leave that project until 2018. Or that it would change, completely, how I think about construction.
A town of eight thousand, and one German engineer
Yardimli sits in the Talysh Mountains in southern Azerbaijan, close enough to the Iranian border that the cultural mix is unlike anywhere else in the country. Soviet-era architecture alongside traditional Caucasian village life. A town of around eight thousand people at the time — self-contained, unhurried, with its own rhythms that had nothing to do with the project schedule we had brought with us.
When a construction project arrives in a place like that, it creates a kind of disruption that is also, in a strange way, an event. There is activity, noise, unfamiliar faces. The town notices. For us, it became home — or something close to it. The site office was in Baku, a four-and-a-half-hour drive away, and we moved between the two worlds regularly. But Yardimli was where the work actually happened.
It was also where I met A.
A. was the Contractor's Representative — our CR, the most senior person on the project from the contractor's side. He was German, old school in the best possible sense, and he was around seventy years old when I arrived. He had been doing this work for decades, across countries and contract forms I had barely heard of. He had a way of reading a situation — contractual, commercial, interpersonal — that I had never encountered before. His letters were precise, measured, always one step ahead of where the conversation appeared to be. He saw angles I could not see.
I was fascinated by him from the beginning. Not just by what he knew, but by how he thought. I asked questions constantly. He answered them — all of them. That curiosity, and his willingness to mentor, changed the trajectory of everything that followed.
Thirty thousand dollars and a glass of wine
The turning point came over something that felt, at the time, like a disaster.
We had missed something in the Employer's Requirements — a detail in the contract that, overlooked, had cost us USD 30,000. It was not negligence exactly, more the kind of gap that opens up when you are learning a new contract form under pressure. I was furious with myself. I spent the entire day in a state of barely contained frustration, going over it again and again.
That evening, A. invited me for a glass of wine at the hotel in Baku where we both stayed. We sat down. He looked at me for a moment, and then he said something I have never forgotten:
"If you are not prepared to lose USD 30,000 on a project of this size today, and recover USD 100,000 next month, then this is not the right profession for you."
It was not dismissive. It was not unsympathetic. It was simply true — and it reframed everything. Contract management, I began to understand, is not about avoiding all losses. It is about understanding the full picture, maintaining perspective across the lifecycle of a project, and making strategic decisions in conditions of uncertainty and imperfect information. The 30,000 was not the story. The project was the story.
That conversation, more than any course or qualification I have since completed, is where my thinking about this work began to change.
From deputy to Contractor's Representative
A. left the project at the end of 2014. By then, I had been his deputy for three years — involved in every significant contractual decision, every letter to the Engineer, every negotiation. When he left, I stepped into the CR role.
What followed was among the most demanding periods of my professional life — and also among the most formative. The project was running behind schedule. The original contract value was around USD 30M. The gap between what had been anticipated and what the project actually required, in terms of scope, time and cost, was significant.
I submitted three major variations over the following years, with a combined value of approximately USD 12M. Each one required a thorough understanding of the contract, a clear entitlement argument, and the kind of documentation that makes a claim difficult to reject — contemporary records, programme analysis, cause-and-effect linkage between events and impacts.
I had learned from A. that a claim is not something you build at the end of a project. It is something you build from day one. Every notice, every letter, every record is a brick. By the time you submit, the structure should already be standing.
What you cannot control
The hardest thing about Yardimli was not the contract, or the claims, or the negotiations. It was learning to make peace with the things that were beyond my control.
The project moved at its own pace. Delays accumulated for reasons that had nothing to do with the quality of our planning. Cultural dynamics, local conditions, the way decisions were made and unmade at the Employer's level — all of it created a reality that the programme did not account for. You could work yourself into exhaustion trying to force the project to conform to the schedule. Or you could adapt.
I chose to adapt — not by lowering standards, but by developing a different kind of resilience. I became more flexible without becoming less rigorous. I developed social skills, negotiating skills, the ability to read between the lines of what was being said and understand what was actually meant. I learned to manage relationships across cultural lines where the rules of engagement were different from anything I had encountered in Serbia or on European projects.
What does not destroy you, the saying goes, makes you stronger. In Yardimli, I tested that idea repeatedly. I can confirm it is true.
Building the case from the first notice
With each variation submission, I also submitted an interim claim for Extension of Time and prolongation costs — these are separate entitlements, distinct from the variation itself, and treating them as such from the outset matters. During the negotiations over variations, one sentence was always left deliberately open: a door that could be reopened at the end of the project for a consolidated final claim. At the end of the project, we did exactly that. The Consultant rejected it. We ended up in arbitration.
By the time the case reached the tribunal, something remarkable had happened: I was the only person still available who had been present throughout the project. The original teams — on the Employer's side, the Consultant's side, the contractor's side — had all moved on. Nobody else had the full picture.
I did. Because I had been building it since the beginning.
Every notice I had sent was linked to the programme. Every delay event had a corresponding record. The cause-and-effect chain was not something I had to reconstruct after the fact — it was already there, documented, consistent, coherent. I presented as a key witness for the contractor. My testimony — and the record-keeping behind it — was, I was told, a significant factor in the outcome. We won.
By that point I was also midway through my LLM in Construction Law and Arbitration at Robert Gordon University. The combination of live arbitration experience and formal legal study gave me a perspective on that hearing that I could not have had ten years earlier. I understood, from both sides of the argument, what the tribunal was looking for. I knew how to present facts in a way that a legal decision-maker could use.
"A claim is not something you build at the end of a project. You build it from the first notice — one brick at a time."
What I brought home
I left Yardimli — or rather, the project finally ended — in 2018. Seven years. A WWTP, 72 km of water supply network, 45 km of sewerage, USD 42M in final contract value, three major variations, and one arbitration. A town I came to know well, a language I picked up fragments of, a culture that took time to understand and longer to appreciate.
And one German engineer who, over a glass of wine in a Baku hotel, told me something I needed to hear.
A.’s lesson was not really about money. It was about perspective — about having a long enough view of the work to make good decisions under pressure. About understanding that the project is a system, and that your job is to manage the system, not just react to its individual moments.
That lesson shaped everything I have done since. It is in the way I approach a contract review, the way I structure a claims strategy, the way I advise clients who are frustrated and angry about something that went wrong last week. I think about USD 30,000 and USD 100,000. I think about the whole project, not just today.
And I think about what it means to build a case from day one — before there is a dispute, before there is even a claim, before anyone knows that the record you are keeping will one day matter more than anything else on the project.
In Yardimli, I learned that it always does.