Been a lurker on this forum, but this thread caught my attention as I experienced and witnessed similar job functions. I started out in consulting firm doing design and drafting for oil and gas projects before moving over to a major that did both in-house and contracted work.
When I first got hired on, the engineering structure was basically a facility engineer responsible for an area. The facility engineer would be responsible for everything in the area, such maintenance, regulatory compliance, emergencies, identifying any future work etc. In addition, the other duty was project engineering, management, and technical/field support.
Detailed design engineering was either done in-house or contracted out depending on the complexity of the scope of work
In house work was basically initiated by the facilities engineer by creating a design criteria document. This is where design parameters of the project specified and internal/external departments would give their input. Once all the design criteria was finished, it would be handed it off to the design department, where a pipe designer would be assigned. The designer does all the design work design document specifications create the drawing.
When projects were contracted, then the facilities engineer would be the owners engineer. Basically you would be baby sitting the contracted project engineer.
You're probably thinking, well you have an in-house design department... why is work still contracted? Workload, time and cost is the best answer. We had an in-house design department that had first rights (union agreement) to any project. If they couldn't meet proposed deadline, then the engineering design, drafting and management would be contracted out. Also in-house design was a time consuming and bureaucratic process. It took time to get all the input from relevant departments to create your design guidelines document. After you finally get the relevant information for the design parameters, you have to give it to the design department and wait for the design package. IMHO this was the biggest bottleneck in the project execution processes. I never understood why it would take forever to get a simple drawing out of the design department.
If the engineering plans aren't completed in the calender year, then there was a high risk of losing the funding for the following year. If that happens, then the project sits in limbo until it becomes a big emergency that can't wait. Then the facility engineer is forced to take care of it immediately by bypassing the bureaucratic in-house process and getting whatever fixed or doing something to delay the inevitable ASAP. In the mix between all that is scoping other work, 3rd party municipal or regulatory info requests, answering questions from the designer, doing process improvement items, review red-line drawings, field engineering support, endless meetings, and dealing with other emergencies ( 3rd party dig-ins, leaks etc). I could ramble on and on, but the point is that project engineering was not the primary role as there were a lot of other responsibilities to attend to with work scope, leaks and digs-ins being the top of my hit list. When things get too busy, items tend to fall through the cracks. This happened far too often and was always a discussion point for process improvement meetings and maintenance operation folks.
This work structure existed for the longest time. At some point in time, there was a company reorganization with the direction of better project execution and near zero contract work. In managements view to accomplish this task, they decided to split the role of the facility engineer. The facility engineer would just be in charge of emergency maintenance, scoping and identifying work in his/her assigned area. Therefore, the project execution role was given to a project engineer. I had enjoyed the project execution role more than the other roles of a facilities engineer, so I requested a transfer into this new department. The in-house design was unchanged, which was create the high level parameters and give it to the design department. However, the only difference was that I could take a more active role in the design process instead of being bombarded with other responsibilities.
For the other projects that still needed to be contracted out, I initially thought it was a complete waste time to be the owners engineer for a consultant/EPC. Most if not all the consultants used to work for my company and they had complete access to our company standards library. There was one company initiative that changed my thinking on this.
Awhile back, upper management wanted to create a whole new department for asset replacement projects. There was a deadline to replace X number of vintage components classified as high risk per year and they knew it could never be done purely in-house and on time, so they contracted out the work to an engineering consultant. The consultant literally had a blank check and no engineering/design oversight to run this department. When another reorganization came with new upper management, they took a hard look at this special department. The consultant was creating incredible results,but management felt we could do better if it was brought inhouse. Management didn't just want to bring the work in-house, but they also wanted to copy the exact processes/procedures that the consultant used. This is where the trouble began. Adapting new processes and procedures at a blink of eye into a big company that's been doing it another way for the longest time is asking for trouble.
The consultant had the project engineer do all the detailed design work on paper, and a drafter created the formal engineering drawing based on the sketch. Well as I wrote before, our in-house engineering and design department worked differently. In-house project engineers do design, but not in that kind of fine detail. Upper management wanted us to copy exactly what the consultant did, so we had to adapt to being a design engineer and drafter, which had good/bad results. The bad was that I got pulled into this department mainly because I had previous design and drafting experience. Therefore my primary role was to review the design packages before it was handed to the design department. It nice to do drafting for a change; however many of the in-house project engineers, who had just been managing the engineering for the longest time could not do detailed design. The ones that adapted quickly were previously employed at a consultant or had worked in our design department before moving on. Another bad thing was that the project engineer was doing detailed design, which is a union shop responsibility. Therefore, there were a few designers that thought their job was being taken away and and this lead to a few union grievances.
Engineering drawing standard was another issue as the consultant had created drawings using their own proprietary standard. We reached an agreement to use the exact drawing template which caused heated arguments with the design and project engineering department. One argument that I recall and agreed with was that the contractors drawings were essentially telling the crews how to install pipe, instead of just showing the final product or intent. Therefore, you could say it's a hybrid design/assembly/instruction manual drawing. They were essentially trying to cram every detail and assembly process into a single drawing that lead to a convoluted product and messy redline from the field.
In the end, this only lasted for 2-1/2 years before management abandoned trying to convert the engineering and design department to function exactly like the contractor had done. I think that was mostly because management discovered that our in-house cost was far too high compared to the historical averages. Therefore, we looked for ways to adapt certain aspects and not a complete conversion of the contractors process. The point here is that you may feel that you have to baby sit the contractor, but there is a reason that you have to.
I was fortunate the major that I joined did in-house work, or I would have been bored just like the OP is experiencing. Also I consider myself lucky that I did design and drafting before switching jobs. I've met engineers hired straight out of college, who are routinely thrown into the project engineering role without relevant experience. Without the experience, you are essentially managing the technical side of engineering, but not understanding if the in-house designer or contracted engineer did the design correctly or makes sense.
