MartinLe
Civil/Environmental
- Oct 12, 2012
- 394
found here, engineering principles to arrive at cost.- aand energy saving designs:
My thoughts: This is all nice and well, but hard to do in any environment I've seen so far. All these suggestions boil down to throwing more engineering time at a problem. Some principles require the end-user to spend significant time to identify costs and benefits, provide data etc. In all likelyhood the end user is busy allready and hired some consultants to do the development work for them.
The Rule to use data and models instead of rules could require more modelling skills than some engineers have and at the end of the day industry codes will mandate adherence to certain rules anyway.
And every company I worked so far had some compartmentalization going where you are activle discouraged from spending time on issues outside your expertise or department, making this cross-disciplinary work harder.
The sad thing is that personally I like most of the ideas behind these rules, and the philosophy of always looking at a complete process. I think a set of written down design rules can be helpful until one has ingrained good practices, and maybe moreso when you ingrained bad practices. Most of these 10xE principles make some sense but are hard to impossible to implement as a sole contributor, they basically need the engineers/designers + their management + the client on board.
And while looking at end-uses and whole processes may be a great way to design an efficient process, to the one paying the engineering bill (or salary) this will have 'scope creep' written all over it.
I wonder if there are types of projects where this kind of engineering is more doable, and if these principles are actually that practicable. And wether defining (any) principles has a relevant impact vs. the choice of engineers to do the work.
Also, the '10xE' sounds like desperate salesmanship.
My thoughts: This is all nice and well, but hard to do in any environment I've seen so far. All these suggestions boil down to throwing more engineering time at a problem. Some principles require the end-user to spend significant time to identify costs and benefits, provide data etc. In all likelyhood the end user is busy allready and hired some consultants to do the development work for them.
The Rule to use data and models instead of rules could require more modelling skills than some engineers have and at the end of the day industry codes will mandate adherence to certain rules anyway.
And every company I worked so far had some compartmentalization going where you are activle discouraged from spending time on issues outside your expertise or department, making this cross-disciplinary work harder.
The sad thing is that personally I like most of the ideas behind these rules, and the philosophy of always looking at a complete process. I think a set of written down design rules can be helpful until one has ingrained good practices, and maybe moreso when you ingrained bad practices. Most of these 10xE principles make some sense but are hard to impossible to implement as a sole contributor, they basically need the engineers/designers + their management + the client on board.
And while looking at end-uses and whole processes may be a great way to design an efficient process, to the one paying the engineering bill (or salary) this will have 'scope creep' written all over it.
I wonder if there are types of projects where this kind of engineering is more doable, and if these principles are actually that practicable. And wether defining (any) principles has a relevant impact vs. the choice of engineers to do the work.
Also, the '10xE' sounds like desperate salesmanship.
