As a young engineer, I was looking for drawings from a power plant that came online in 1903. Which, by the way, was a huge mechanical engineering accomplishment. You can read more about it here.
Back to the drawing hunt: I never did find the drawings I was looking for but I did find something called a Functional and Operating Requirements Document for Coal Unloading System, circa the 1950’s. I read this document from cover to cover and discovered how classical engineers controlled their projects and measured their success.
We work with many engineers that are often assigned a project with no clear idea of what the ultimate goals of the project are. They were not involved in either the conceptual development or budgeting processes and lack the fundamental information required to make good decisions about the project.
After we help discover (or rediscover) the project goals, it is critical to set qualitative and quantitative metrics to measure the success of the project against the goals that we defined as a team. It is much easier to throw the dart and hit the target, when the target is painted bright red!/span>
We help our clients stay on schedule. Defining the critical path at the start of the project keeps us all on track.
When a 100 or more parameters affect the project design, documenting them as early as possible minimizes rework and schedule delay.
Controlling fabricator and installer quality requires tight specification before bids are released.