Is It Not Time to Improve the Delivery of Design Projects? – Part 1 of 3

Similar to the challenges that will face a contractor when it comes to managing a construction project, the engineering consultant is no better when it comes to manage the design stages of a project. Not only the engineering consultant have obligations to deliver the design deliverables within the agreed milestones, but also need to ensure that his cost for delivering this scope is within the approved contract budget. The engineering consultant is also responsible to ensure that contractual obligations for delivering the project's design deliverables are fulfilled.

Unlike contractors who are required to deliver the project scope based on pre-agreed drawings and specifications, the engineering consultant need to capture owner requirements to come with the needed deliverables. In other words, the risks of scope creep, delays and going over budget are much higher during the project design stages. Therefore, the engineering consultant must adopt the project management best practices to reduce the likelihood of encountering those risks.

The availability of project management information system (PMIS) like PMWeb enables engineering consultants to better adopt the best practices of project management to increase the likelihood of delivering projects on schedule and within budget. The PMIS technology will help in reducing the massive knowledge wasted by those engineering offices by failing to capture the data generated from the different project management processes that takes place on their project every hour and every day during the projects delivery life cycle stages.

Defining the Project Scope

Similar to any project, the work breakdown structure (WBS) for the design stages need to be well defined and agreed on. The WBS would usually have the design stages as level 2 while the project will be level 1. The WBS can be further detailed to improve the level of control on the design stages.

It is also recommended to use the WBS dictionary to detail the scope of work included at each WBS level and in particular what is excluded. Actually, having the list of exclusions is very important and it must be shared and approved by the project owner.

Developing the Project Schedule

The WBS will help the engineering consultant to have a complete and better integrated project schedule. The schedule needs to project deliverables oriented, that is to say the schedule needs to ensure that all deliverables are listed and properly sequenced. For example, the design schedule would list the different drawings, specification sections and other deliverables as task. The tasks of creating the deliverable, reviewing and approving the deliverable will be part of the activity duration. The actual review and approval process details will be captured in the deliverable submittal review and approval process to be detailed at another part of this article.

The schedule needs to be resource loaded with the different design resources such as the project manager, architects, discipline engineering, BIM modelers, Draftsmen, etc. The schedule can also be uploaded with the equipment resources like CAD Station among others.

Regardless which planning and scheduling software is used in creating the schedule, the schedule tasks need to be imported into the PMIS, in this case PMWeb, to ensure that all future records and documents are linked to the schedule when needed.

Creating the Project Budget

The project budget represents the amount the funds that the engineering consultant must not exceed to ensure that the project is not in loss. The budget is usually based on the detailed cost estimate done by the consultant for delivering the project scope of work. It should include all direct and indirect cost as well as the contingency reserve for all accepted project risks. It is highly recommended that the budget line items are aligned with the project WBS levels. For some, the budget can be detailed to the project’s deliverables level for the ultimate cost control.

For each budget line item, we need to distribute the planned spending of those funds depending on the project schedule. If the budget was detailed to the deliverables level, then this will be associated with the relevant deliverable schedule task.

Developing the Deliverables Register

The engineering consultant needs to have a detailed log of all deliverables needed to execute the project. Those could include the drawings, specification sections, contract agreements among many others. Each deliverable needs to be associated with the relevant WBS and schedule activity it relates to.

The workflow steps for submitting, reviewing and approving each deliverable will be created using the PMWeb workflow engine. The workflow steps could vary much vary from one deliverable to another depending on the submittal type, stage and other user defined attributes.

Enforcing Governance in Project Delivery

The project stage gates will be used to enforce governance in project delivery. For each project stage as defined at level 2 of the WBS, the relevant schedule activity will be linked to provide the planned dates for completing the stage. In addition, all deliverables identified in the deliverables register will be mapped into their relevant project stage.

This will ensure that each project stage will have the formal review process to approve it before the next stage can formally commence. A scoring system will be added for each stage to list all items that must be verified before the project is blessed to proceed. Using PMWeb, the organization can have unlimited variety of all possible items to be checked with a predefined score to select form with the weight for each score.

To be continued