Management of Engineering Projects

Engineering operations are becoming increasingly complex as a consequence of improving technology. This very often leads to a project approach, when a new product or process is being developed and introduced, in order to ensure that appropriate skills are available at all stages of the project. Project work requires not just a technical input, but also the correct attention to planning and teamwork.

For successful completion of any project, both the timing and costs have to be carefully planned, monitored and controlled. These two parameters are obviously interdependent, but none the less they are often treated separately. It is clearly fallacious to say that a project is on time simply because the expenditure matches the budget; this is most likely to be a warning of an over-spend and over-run. Equally, to monitor the progress solely by performance is also misleading since a project may be kept up to schedule by using overtime working and other costly resources.

This chapter begins with an explanation of the alternative forms of organisation, and their appropriateness for the management of different kinds of project. This is followed by looking at some of the problems arising in project management. The next part of this section examines the skills and attributes required in project managers. The final section looks at aspects of the project management process—that is, achieving the project objectives of cost, time and budget through other people. The Bibliography contains details of further reading that covers project management in more detail. The functions of the project manager and project leader were defined in Chapter 1, section 1.1, this chapter assumes that both these roles will be taken by a single project manager; indeed for a small project these and other roles will be taken by the project engineer. A further definition that is needed for this chapter is the Line Manager: the person who is responsible for a particular function within a company. The line manager usually has no project responsibilities, and a project manager will request functions to be performed by the line manager’s department or section. Functional Manager or Departmental Manager are synonymous with Line Manager.

Almost inevitably projects will call upon resources beyond those of the organisation that instigates a project. Indeed a company is not likely to remain competitive if it can cater for every eventuality from its own resources. Consequently, most projects will make use of contractors to undertake part or all of a project, according to terms that have been agreed in a contract.

The requirements for safety are ever increasing, yet the difficulties in ensuring adequate safety in any operation are also increasing for a variety of reasons.

This chapter treats the planning of a new facility in its widest sense. Most projects will be of a much smaller scale, or be part of a major new operation. However, an overview is always useful, and the principles developed here can also be applied in a reduced form to smaller projects.

The treatment of a computer system as a project is very little different from the treatment of any other type of project such as building a house, a bridge or a motor car. Only the detailed parts will be different, but like all projects the success depends upon the quality of the project management applied to the project. However, the newness of the technology in computer projects makes the project approach both more important and more difficult; the problems are not of themselves new.

This chapter is concerned with the selection, justification and implementation of a Computer Aided Design/Computer Aided Manufacture (CAD/CAM) system.

This chapter uses one medium-sized project carried out within an engineering company as a case study. The company is not mentioned by name but it manufactures machines used in producing a food product. The underlying theme is quality, in that the aim of completing the project was to improve the quality of the machines. The intention here is to pick out the key stages, or prerequisites for success, and to draw these key points together at the end of the chapter, to allow their use as guidelines for the planning and/or implementation of other projects.