Scheduling drafting resources to support design activities

[rockman7892]

I work for a fairly large OEM and we are slowly developing an engineering team to support EPC projects that we take on through our projects business.

I wanted to hear from others how they go about scheduling drafting resources to support their design team. We have recently formed a design team and have internal drafting resources so I am looking for a way to forecast drafting resources to support our design efforts to essentially develop a schedule etc... that shows how much support is needed and for how long, etc...

I'm curious if others have a process that they use for assigning these resources to the design team. Does the design team present a certain number of hours to drafting that is used to guide scheduling and resource loading?

Just want to see what has or hasn't worked for others in the past.

 

[CWB1]

Any decent PM will tell you that the team doing the work needs to define the project plan's details. Allowing arbitrary third parties to do so guarantees the schedule won't be accurate and unnecessarily stresses everyone. Asking an engineer to define the drafty's schedule sounds like a recipe for disaster.

As to estimating resource needs, quoting/budgeting, etc, only time and experience can predict that. Your PM should be keeping record of all projects, tasks, etc and making correlations to help leaders with these tasks, to create an initial project plan, and associated schedules. Note, there is a significant difference between estimates and the actual plan. Leaders handle estimates, the team handles the details.

 

[truckandbus]

you likely have an idea how long it takes to complete the project work - you just need to be able to justify it in a time schedule. A 40 hour job that you can only work on 4 hours a week doesn't look like a 10 week job. 2 FTE won't necessarily make it a 1/2 week (or 5 week) job if only one FTE has the skill set. Usually comes down to do you pad the job hours or do you acknowledge you can't get 40 hours out of a FTE to get the due date to come out right

I've also struggled in the past to differentiate between engineering being "done" and engineering being "done-done". Initial drawing release in my case is usually followed by another round of drawing changes based on manufacturing and supplier feedback so being "done-done" is usually 2 or three weeks after being "done"