one MEEN Ag said:
SpreadsheetAg said:
one MEEN Ag said:
By the way, I completely agree with all these condemnations of engineers.
Both my wife and my boss gave the same review last year.
- Can't estimate a project completion date to save their life
- Can't stay on budget or hit a deadline
- Always needs more tools to get the job done
- Final product is exemplary and works great
I took all four comments as a badge of honor.
Take whatever you think it will cost and add 50%; then add another 50%
Take whatever time you think it will take and quadruple it; then add another 20%
Take your resource list and add 2 lines for unknown services - 1 will be a field project manager that you didn't think was worth the cost in the beginning; the other will be a scaffolding team or NDT Team
I've heard this one for home projects and it hasn't proven me wrong yet.
Take whatever time you think it would take to complete a job, double it and bump the units up one.
One hour? Two days.
Two days? Four weeks.
This is the time it will truly take you to get a project 100% done, and done well while getting interrupted by kids, wife, work, and Home Depot trips. It's not a measure of man hours to get a job done, just how many hours pass by from start to actually finishing.
on home projects i used to be this way, but i learned a lesson a while back, that if i take the time to truly plan out every detail i can save a ton of time. i've done a couple of home projects where i was well enough planned out that I only made 1 trip to Lowe's and the amount of time savings were incredible. more than made up for the extra planning time.
on the note of engineers being bad financial allocators/planners, while i know its a mixed bag and some truly are bad at it, i'll throw out the other side just for perspective. as a facilities engineer, I am frequently asked to provide annual budgets for our facilities/production equipment work based on drill schedules where 80%+ of the wells don't even have surface locations decided. So i do my best to estimate costs, but if they move the pad from where i assumed it would go that could be a $400k+ price swing just in pipeline costs. then as a specific example, I put together a budget for some facility upgrades where we are bringing in some new wells to old facilities later this year. the schedule i budgeted on was based on being told 4 wells would go to one old facility and 5 would go into another. well while i'm out in the field doing walks to kick off upgrade construction i find out that the have moved the locations and added 2 wells so i now have 11 wells all going to one old facility. this took the upgrade work from a minor upgrade to a major overhaul that doubled the cost estimate for the area. so were the budget estimates i provided in the annual budget process garbage? sure were. but that was because the bean counters and financial planners move things around with no consideration for the fact that those things can have major impacts on the work that has to be done in the field. and don't get me wrong, i love those bean counters because my soul would wither and die if i had to do their job, but sometimes the engineers are bad at money because our assumptions in our budgeting are ruined by corporate "nimbleness".
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