Evaluations, Investigations, Problem solving

[Numberseven]

When engaged by a client to evaluate a special structural condition and provide explanations or repair methods, time can be spent in aquiring knowledge and information not yet possessed by the Engineer. The Engineer's expertise goes to being diligent and economical in obtaining such added knowledge for the benefit of the client. However, his base of knowledge also increases, which will be helpfull in future work. Often it is necessary to buy new materials such as computer programs and literature (these items, depending how specialized, should be probably be considered part of the cost of doing business). Since charges for evaluatiion work can exceed the client's expectations and become hard to explain, I wonder what are the colleague's opinions on the subject, with the idea of collecting adequately and keeping a happy client.

 

[civilperson]

If you are going to school on the clients dime, you were probably not qualified prior to reseaching the situation. Estimate what an expert with multiple experiences in the same subject would take to do a similar assessment and limit your fee to that amount.

 

[hokie66]

I think Civilperson is on the right track. You just need to be fair to your client. But it really depends on how "special" the problem is. Maybe there is no one, at least in your area, more qualified than you to deal with the issue, and extensive literature study or other investigation would be required regardless of who is engaged by your client. You should be frank with your client, explain to him that you do not know the answer to his problem, but feel confident you can solve it.

 

[pba]

Wow!

What a really good question. I don't have any particular answer but this is how we deal with some of the issues.

We employ people with all sorts of levels of experience. Often, we find that the inexperienced graduates need longer to do their design than more senior engineers. Here we allow the graduates to 'learn' on the client's time. That is partially why they are cheaper. Now so of them get it wrong and have to re-do their designs several times or we have to take the work away from them. This usually costs us money as we would find it hard to justify to the clients. This extra cost is part of our overhead and is covered by our fees is a less transparent way.

Expert witnesses get hourly rates which are many times greater that we do. These rates cover the costs of the various engineers working behind the scenes who produce the work.

So it's all a matter of degree. If you are a commercial organisation the client has to pay one way or another...

 

[DarthSoilsGuy]

if you can explain your charges, fix the problem (eventually), and have a happy client afterward, then you are an expert. Evaluation/repair is engineering in its purest form in my view. you're question is too vague for anyone to answer objectively so i'll tell you a story.

my mentor engineer would pickup the worst jobs with leaking and moldy buildings to work on. The symptoms were the same, but the cause(s) were always different. we went back to square one so many times that the jobs were a joke in the office. All of them worked out though, which is very important. Each one of these jobs had tough client management aspects. In evaluation and remediation projects, the client will not be comfortable until the problem is understood, and not satisfied until fixed. i know this about clients on this type of work: you can't let yourself magnify your self-doubts (inherent engineer defense mechanism) by your perception of client's satisfaction until you're out of the water. Or the client will think you're selling snake oil.

All the jobs we did, we went over budget. But, we had taken the work to establish relationships for big & easy new construction projects.

 

[msquared48]

Never, but never go to school at the expense of the client. We all have to update ourselves every three to seven years on the codes, and that is on our time for the benefit of the client, but usually gradual - more tolerable financially. If it has to be done at once, you have to access whether or not your finances can tolerate it. As a side benefit, you could open up another market for yourself, but what is school for?

Mike McCann
McCann Engineering

 

[UcfSE]

My company breaks down whether we bill for these things. It's based on if the labor helps the client, would the labor have been incurred if we didn't have this particular project, and does the contract allow us to bill to it. They made a flow chart to go along and there are other branches that I didn't list. Basically if it doesn't benefit the client, don't bill. If we would have incurred the labor anyway if we didn't have the project, don't bill it. If the contract doesn't allow you to bill it even if the others items above are met, don't bill it. There's a whole break down. It's interesting to see how they've thought of this ahead of time for us so that there shouldn't be as much confusion down the road.