New faces at Cyclops: this time, a mechanical engineer who spent 25 years figuring out where a project manager actually belongs.

Denis Lacroix joined Cyclops as a Project Manager. He’s a civil mechanical engineer by training, has been working in and around the pharmaceutical industry since 2000, and has a very clear idea of what makes a project go well, or go sideways.

We sat down with him to talk careers, cold rooms, and why he spends every July thinking about January.

From metallurgy to pharma: and from drawings to decisions

Denis didn’t start out as a project manager. Almost nobody does.

“I started after my studies as a project engineer, mainly in engineering design offices,” he explains. His first industrial job was in metallurgy. Then, from 2000 onwards, he moved into pharma, and stayed.

The next step took him from design offices to companies delivering solutions to industry. First Siemens, working on cleanroom HVAC control systems. Then Systech, on serialisation for pharmaceutical packaging. “Those are the two companies where I really started officially as a project manager.”

In 2020 came the move that shaped everything after it: Denis was hired to manage CAPEX projects for the R&D department of a global organization across Europe.

“That’s where I gained experience in project management from the client’s side. The owner’s side. Which what we do here at Cyclops.”

Why Cyclops? Because of where the project manager sits

Here’s the part we didn’t expect him to say out loud.

Having worked from all three vantage points – the design office, the supplier, and the client – Denis reached a conclusion: the best seat for a project manager is next to the client.

“During my interview process, the management of Cyclops explained how Cyclops positions itself. And I found it perfectly in line with what I was looking for to develop my career.”

The second draw was methodology. “What I did in the past was probably less formal. A bit more by feel. Here I see a real intention to approach projects in a consistent, coherent way, with project managers of a good level who apply methodologies that have proven themselves.”

The project he’s proudest of? He didn’t know it yet

Ask most people about their proudest project and you get a rehearsed answer. Denis got his by accident, two weeks ago, on a client site visit.

At the end of the tour, the group reached a galvanising line, and Denis recognised something.

“In my very first job, I designed the big accumulator towers. You know, the ones with the carriage that goes up and down. My first job was calculating those two towers, one at the entry, one at the exit.”

He’d last seen them as steel being assembled. Decades later, he watched them run.

“Looking back, that did bring me a certain pride.”

Outside the office: ski season is a state of mind

Denis skis. Properly.

“When people ask me in July, ‘where are you going on holiday?’, I say: in July, I’m waiting for January.”

He aims for two and a half to three weeks on the slopes a year, always with friends. Never alone. And yes, there’s a professional principle hiding in there.

“In certain places, you never ski alone. You have to be accompanied. That’s also part of risk mitigation.”

There’s also the less technical justification: “the après-ski counts too.”

The rest of the calendar fills up with squash, indoor football, and roughly ten concerts a year, rock and pop, mostly. “There are periods where I think, right, I’ve been to  enough concerts. And then I look at what’s coming up and think: I’d go to that one. And that one. And that one. And it ends up being ten a year.”

Why this matters to us

Denis’s story says something we care about at Cyclops.

Engineers with 25 years behind them don’t move for the sake of moving. Denis moved because he’d worked out, from experience, exactly where he wanted to stand on a project: beside the client and with a proper methodology in hand. And Cyclops was the place that let him do it.

He also joined because of a conversation, not a brochure. Three interviews with three people who could explain what this company actually does and why. That’s the part we’d like to keep true as we grow.

Welcome to the team, Denis.