Engineer Resource Planning and Cost Tracking 1

[rockman7892]

I work for a company that is just starting to develop an engineering design team as part of our project team. As we start to develop our design business I'm trying to find efficient ways for managing engineering resources (aprox 20) in related to work forecast and existing backlog. I'm very interested to hear the experiences of others on how they track and manage engineering backlog and plan engineering resources including plans for hiring additional resources based on future work forecast?

I'm also curious how others track engineering costs on large turnkey projects. We have a way of simply tracking hours that are used but I was looking for a more granular method for tracking costs related to estimates and future cost projections for remainder of project. I'm hesitant to re-invent the wheel on this if there are good methods out there (MS project would required dedicated scheduler which we don't currently have) that are useful for providing engineering cost tracking on projects and a pretty granular level that aren't too painful to update. I also really want a way to track various aspects of design (30,60,90,etc...)and document these costs as baselines for future similar projects.

I appreciate any experiences others may be able to offer.

 

[Mahendra Gupta]

Hi,
In my experience as a project manager, I realized the two most essential things while managing engineering projects were controlling budget and meeting deadlines without over-utilizing the resources. It's not easy to keep track of multiple resources at once.

Hence, resorting to a smart and advanced resource management tool is the key to increase efficiency. It will give you all the necessary information on every project attribute with respect to allocated resources, their competencies, their schedule and availability, their utilization levels and most importantly using analytics and business intelligence, you can forecast project costs and required hours for completing tasks. This will help you successfully pipeline projects and improve the productivity of your resources by tracking their progress.

 

[IRstuff]

Microsoft Project supports scheduling and cost tracking/prediction. But, for actual cost accounting, you need to assign specific charge accounts for each item you wish to track; each of our projects typically have dozens of charge accounts.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
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[MikeHalloran]

In my limited experience with MS Project, you need one full time individual solely to run Project; it is very much NOT a part-time task.

Many years before Project existed, a former employer had a full time project tracker/ manager, who spent a lot of his time making and editing PERT charts. His name was Dominic, and I regret all the rude things I said about him, and to him, because I did not respect, or understand, what he was doing.

Now, I have a better misunderstanding.




Mike Halloran
Corinth, NY, USA

 

[IRstuff]

In my limited experience with MS Project, you need one full time individual solely to run Project; it is very much NOT a part-time task.

That's true of any serious project tracking, like Primavera; we've had customers who indeed had full-time schedule trackers. Of course, much depends on the size of the project and the level of detail in the schedule; we've had projects where there were several thousand line items; and other projects that had a hundred, or so, lines.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!

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