Looking for Advice and Opinions on Managing and Sealing

[PowerEng65]

A few questions on the back of my mind.

For the sake of conversation, presume Massachusetts is the state in question and the engineering discipline is electrical building systems.

1) In your experience, how many designers / "engineers" (non-PE) should a single manager be able to support? I am finding that 12+ direct reports for a single engineering department manager to carry complete responsibility for (resourcing / scheduling, personnel issues, reviews of their projects and sealing of all office discipline work, etc.) is not an ideal ratio for a single manager. I feel my quality as a manager is suffering and my own experience and research says six to seven is a more sustainable number. Am I ineffective or is 12+ too many?

2) Signing and sealing drawings as pursuant to 250 CMR 5.02(c) indicates that the application of my seal and signature certifies the drawings compliance with 250 CMR. That includes adhering to "generally accepted Engineering Standards" and to "hold paramount the health, property and welfare of the public". Am I correct that it would be both a liability for the engineer of record and the organization to release signed and sealed drawings that were not reviewed by the engineer prior to their release, in addition to the legal non-compliance in doing so. Also, reviewing them after release (Permit and/or Construction sets but before actual construction starts) may head off issues but would not be compliant with general engineering practice (ie. most engineering firms do not operate this way)?

3) Many states, Massachusetts included, have provisions indicating that a professional engineer must maintain control over their seal and signature at all times. Others are not permitted to affix an engineer's stamp or signature for them for physical copies and encrypted signatures must be used for digital copies. Are these requirements (where applicable to your state) observed in your experience and have you seen cases brought against individuals for not following them?

Thank you.

 

[phamENG]

Can't speak to electrical or Mass specifically - I'm a structural in VA (and several other mid-Atlantic states). But I do have electrical O&M management experience from a previous career, and have my own engineering business now. So take this for what it's worth.

1) A lot of that ratio will be dependent on size of projects, frequency of projects, and experience level of the engineers reporting to you. If you have a lot of small projects and a fairly junior department, 4-5 may be a better range as you'll spend a lot of time scheduling and a lot of time dealing with HR not to mention needing to do more in depth reviews. 12 may be doable if they are more experienced and grouped in teams on large projects. Scheduling won't be as onerous and the work product, while fairly large, will be more manageable for you as a reviewer. The six to seven range is probably a reasonable target if you're somewhere in between. Be sure to leverage teaching and training opportunities within the group, internal peer reviews, etc. to make sure the product reaching your desk is essentially ready to ship.

2&3) These go together, and I think you put them out of order. Unfortunately, this is a bit of a mixed bag. I worked at a firm where all of the engineers (except me) had their stamps and signatures on the network for the draftsman to pull down and put on drawings. I can't remember how many times I'd be in my boss' office and he'd get a phone call about a job he never saw with his seal, apologize, and then curse whoever sent it out when he hung up the phone. In the world of Bluebeam's batch sign and seal, an EOR who doesn't make time to review drawings and stamp them him/herself is being negligent and is not acting in accordance with the law (at least in VA and, apparently, in Mass). So no, they shouldn't be released (for any purpose) without a thorough review from the EOR and seals/signatures applied by the EOR. The encrypted signatures...we don't have the really strict requirements here but they do in NC. They aren't usually followed as strictly. On multi-discipline projects, it makes merging the final drawing set a nightmare. It was required for a NAVFAC contract I worked on at my old firm, and all the RDPs had to meet at the architect's office the day before the submittal was due to the client so everyone could digitally sign their sheets in the master file. Even adding Bluebeam security has caused problems for me with municipalities since they couldn't add their "Approved for Permit" e-stamp to my drawings.

Edit: A caveat to the "negligent" comment. There are still some engineers out there who cut their teeth on a slide rule and learned to draw by hand...I work with one regularly...he never really took the time to learn a lot of the electronic submittal requirements and isn't set up with the software to do it. So he has someone else do the electronic seals. I don't like it, but making accommodations for reasonable issues like that make sense.

 

[PowerEng65]

PhamENG,

Thank you for your thoughts and perspectives. They give me some hope that I’m not in left field here.

As you might have guessed, I need to have some discussions and hearing other’s experiences helps, even if I can’t point to them in that conversation.

I’d greatly appreciate anyone else’s thoughts too if they can share.

 

[IRstuff]

A PE must have "responsible charge" of the work they stamp; that is what limits the size of your team, theoretically. One thing that might help is to get a drawing checker to catch all the low fruit, so that you can concentrate on the actual engineering.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
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[Craig_H]

1) I also do some work in another industry that involves emergency response. In the Incident Command System, 1:5 is the guideline for a reasonable "span of control". I'd like to think that engineering offices can be a bit more calm than an emergency response scenario, but 1:12 is definitely excessive. Most of the teams that I was on prior to becoming a sole practitioner were in the range of 5-7 technologists and junior engineers to one team lead. The manager then only had the team leads as their direct reports.

2) Can't comment from up here in the great white north.

3) Pretty typical requirement between jurisdictions. See here for an APEGA discipline example:

https://www.apega.ca/docs/default-s...s/discipline/18-006-rdo.pdf?sfvrsn=72ee3fb2_2

 

[phamENG]

Craig - that APEGA discipline example could have been written about the firm where I used to work....that seems to be the standard MO around here, though our regulations are much the same.

 

[PowerEng65]

Thanks for the comments. The link to the disciplinary report was also great, even if it’s from Canada.

I plan on obtaining advice from a lawyer as it only seems practical given the stakes. If anything earth shaking results I’ll update.