How many Engineers do I need!!!?

[WeeNeil]

Hi. I'm a bit new to this and you could say that i'm a little out of my depth in my present position. I have experience in project management, but my company have just taken-on a massive project and i have to build an engineering team to take the product from concept to production in 6 months.

The project is to develop a multi-room audio/video product for high-end residential customers. It will involve mpeg2 encoding/ decoding, trasmission to multiple environments over traditional networking protocols, outputs of component video, DVI, etc, storage on an IDE HDD and interaction through PDA style touchpanels.

I have been asked to work-out a budget and to specify the team that the company will require. Where do i start!!? I've never worked with MPEG or PC-style architechtures - how quick is the design and development process?

Any help would be much appreciated! Right now i don't know if i need a team of 3 engineers or 30!

 

[IRstuff]

How many boards or boxes is going to take and how many people do you have available now?

The first thing you need to do before worrying about how many people is to figure out the scope.

Get the most knowledgeable guy you have to figure out what the darn thing is going to look like, how many boxes, etc. Once that's done, your guy should be able to give you an estimate of time required to design and build each board.

In such a compressed schedule, you essentially need to get finished boards within 4-5 months to allow time for integration/troubleshooting and rework.

TTFN

 

[MadMango]

I agree, define the project first, then identify shortfalls with the resources you have on hand. Try to organize your project into disciplines and see if your resources cover all the disciplines. If you have gaps, I would say that would be a team member you need. In addition to engineers, don’t forget the fabrication guys and craftsmen.

Not knowing the level of experience you have at hand, it’s hard to say how many you will need. It could be as few as one, or as many as ten. Are you going to build boards in-house, or send them to a vendor? You going for the “fully customized” option, or are you going to try to utilize as many COTS components as possible? I think you have a lot to define before you can start looking at required resources.

Ray Reynolds
"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons."
Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949
Have you read faq731-376 to make the best use of Eng-Tips Forums?

 

[RDK]

You might also wantto check out s sister board to this one called

http://www.tek-tips.com

Its a more computer IT forum.

Rick Kitson MBA P.Eng

Construction Project Management
From conception to completion

http://www.kitsonengineering.com

 

[makeup]

Weeneil, some excellent advice given, but you also appear to be in the position of making all the decisions yourself. Stand up and shout louder, this is not your sole job, get a team together and talk about how the job needs to be run. Organisingand running a project (if massive) should never be down to one person.

If you are project head?

1) Break the preoject into large chunks; accounts, purcahsing,electrical,fabrication etc these are Level 1

2) Appoint a head of each section who should be responsible for breaking each level 1 into smaller chunks and identifying resourses

3) level 3 chunks mained up of those on the shop floor, doing the work

The reporting system is then back up the tree to you. Any short-falls in labour should be easy to identify.

 

[WeeNeil]

Thanks for the advice guys! It's been a great help. Once broken down into smaller chunks the actual plan and manpower seems to sort itself out. One of the problems that i was having was in identifying how much work specialist people can do. This is very difficult with the big 'chunks', but with smaller tasks its easier to estimate.

I'm still a little worried about the safety margins that are built into all the estimates - I'm a bit of a 'Theory of Constraints' fan having studied books like 'The Goal' and 'Critical Chain' at university. If you aren't familiar with these, I'd recommend reading either or both - they make seemily complex problems very simple and i've had excellent results in practice.

 

[IRstuff]

Some things:

> Keep detailed records of how your budget was spent, what the original bids were and by whom, what scope changes occurred and their impact to the cost and schedule. These will allow you to "calibrate" bidders, some underbid and some overbid. Also, it'll give an an idea of how schedules and cost get blown and by how much. As you build your database, you'll get sufficient backup to know when you're over-reaching or not. It'll also protect you from management "cutters" since you'll have firm data showing why a certain job cannot be done for less.

> As a corollary, once you know what certain jobs cost, you can start looking at the more critical ones to see if there are alternatives to reducing the cost.

> Have sufficient granularity on all tasks so that no more than two weeks go by without an inchstone event. Accounting hates giving out lots of charge numbers, but it's your neck on the line and the more visibility you have, the better off you are. The larger the budget chunk without inchstones, the harder it will be to figure out that you're in trouble and the harder it will be to recover. If a two-week task tanks, you're only out two weeks. If a two-month task tanks, you're out some serious budget.

> Earned value is the corollary to the above in keeping track of progress and identifying problems.

> Unfortunately, the world conspires to force you to be reactionary, rather than proactionary. Try to plan in slack time for contigencies, but don't get carried away. Too many contingencies dilute both effort and focus.

TTFN

 

[PSE]

And remember one of "Murphy's Laws".

"Adding manpower to a late project makes it later."

Regards,