Engineering Project Management

Neil G. Siegel

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781119525790
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Project Management in Engineering
• Index: Technology & Engineering

A hands-on guide for creating a winning engineering project

Engineering Project Management is a practical, step-by-step guide to project management for engineers. The author – a successful, long-time practicing engineering project manager – describes the techniques and strategies for creating a successful engineering project. The book introduces engineering projects and their management, and then proceeds stage-by-stage through the engineering life-cycle project, from requirements, implementation, to phase-out. The book offers information for understanding the needs of the end user of a product and other stakeholders associated with a project, and is full of techniques based on real, hands-on management of engineering projects.

The book starts by explaining how we perform the actual engineering on projects; the techniques for project management contained in the rest of the book use those engineering methods to create superior management techniques. Every topic – from developing a work-breakdown structure and an effective project plan, to creating credible predictions for schedules and costs, through monitoring the progress of your engineering project – is infused with actual engineering techniques, thereby vastly increasing the effectivity and credibility of those management techniques.

The book also teaches you how to draw the right conclusions from numeric data and calculations, avoiding the mistakes that often cause managers to make incorrect decisions. The book also provides valuable insight about what the author calls the social aspects of engineering project management: aligning and motivating people, interacting successfully with your stakeholders, and many other important people-oriented topics. The book ends with a section on ethics in engineering.

This important book:

• Offers a hands-on guide for developing and implementing a project management plan
• Includes background information, strategies, and techniques on project management designed for engineers
• Takes an easy-to-understand, step-by-step approach to project management
• Contains ideas for launching a project, managing large amount of software, and tips for ending a project

Structured to support both undergraduate and graduate courses in engineering project management, Engineering Project Management is an essential guide for managing a successful project from the idea phase to the completion of the project.

1
The Role and the Challenge

What is engineering project management? Why do we teach engineering project management? Do engineering projects matter to society? Do engineering projects matter to business? What is a “project?” What is an “engineering project?” What is a “project manager?” In this chapter, we discuss all of these questions, and also provide you basic information about the role of engineering project manager and the opportunity that this role represents for you.

1.1 Introduction

In this book, we study the subject of engineering project management. Let's look carefully at the first two of those three words:

• “Project.” By this word, we mean a deliberately undertaken endeavor to create something that we believe will be of value. This desired result might be a tangible artifact (“product”), or it might be a service. We might plan to use it ourselves, or we might be planning to offer it for sale.
• “Engineering project.” By adding the modifier “engineering,” we now indicate that the methods we will use to create this result involve “engineering.” By this we mean the methods that we will use depend significantly on the application of technology and technological concepts in order to achieve a practical effect. Other disciplines – such as finance, art, and so forth – may also be made use of in order to create our desired product or service, but by identifying this as an “engineering project,” we are indicating that we consider the role played by the application technology and technological concepts to be central to the success of the project.

The judgment about whether the role of technology and technological concepts is central to a project is sometimes fairly obvious (e.g. designing a new computer processor microchip), but in other cases it may be more subtle. For example, painting in oils on canvas involves quite a lot of technology; someone has to know how to create the paints, someone has to figure out what methods of preparing the canvas are likely to create a surface to which the paint will adhere well, and so forth. These are highly technological subjects! But since those technologies have already been worked out, and can today be made available in a form that allows the paint and the canvas to be used in a manner that requires only minimal knowledge of the underlying technology, we probably would no longer consider creating an oil painting an engineering project. This is because, while painters must learn the technique for preparing a canvas, and for applying the paint, they generally no longer have to learn how to do the underlying technological work, such as creating the paint, and no longer have to understand how certain materials in the paint result in certain properties for the paint. There was certainly a time (a few hundred years ago), before these technologies had been worked out, that one could properly have considered painting in oils on canvas an engineering project. But by now, these technologies have matured to a point where a non‐technologist can apply them by learning a technique; the artist need not know the underlying technologies. Given the maturity of these technologies, and their availability in a form that non‐technologists can learn to use, we would probably consider that the creation of technology is no longer central to the success of our oil‐painting project, and therefore, today we would likely not consider painting in oils on canvas an engineering project.

This is akin to the difference between operating a car or a computer and designing a car or a computer. Operating the car or the computer requires technique, but does not require detailed knowledge of the underlying technology.

Now, let's add our third word:

• “Engineering project management.” By adding this third word, we have moved from focusing on the desired end result (that is, the product or service that we intend to create) to focusing on the process and method by which we will create it. By management, herein we mean the notion of planning and organizing the activities that will create the desired end product or service – e.g. things that are done before we start the actual project. It has the additional connotation of providing leadership to that activity while the effort is underway – e.g. things that are done during the conduct of the actual project.

Engineering project management is therefore a discipline that provides the method to get to our desired result: that product or service that we want to use or offer for sale, where the application of technology or technological concepts is central to the eventual success of the project.

1.1.1 Why Do We Care About Engineering Project Management?

I will start this part of the story with two assertions:

1. Engineering projects are vital for society.
2. Engineering projects are “of the essence” to business – they are the only source of revenue for many companies – and the creator of new methods and new products for almost every organization (business, government, non‐profit, etc.).

There is a third assertion, too:

3. Being the manager of an engineering project is a great job!

Let's discuss each of these three assertions.

In your opinion, what is the most important human accomplishment of the last 2000 years? Think about it for a moment, and write down a phrase describing your answer.

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Your answer:

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When I ask this question on the first day of my engineering project management courses, I get lots of really good and interesting answers. Obviously, this is a matter of opinion, and we can all have an opinion. But here is my answer:

The most important human accomplishment of the last 2000 years is the doubling of the average length of human life.

What the archeologists and other scientists who study these matters tell us is that for hundreds of thousands of years, the human lifespan averaged around 35 years … until around 125 years ago, when the average human lifespan started increasing. Recently, the average human lifespan has reached more than 70 years.

To depict this improvement, I created the graph in Figure 1.1 from data made public by the World Health Organization.

Figure 1.1 Human lifespan through the ages.

In fact, in many parts of the world, the typical human lifespan is now more than 80 years.

Obviously, living to 70 rather than to 35 is viewed by most people as a very good thing indeed! But what caused this doubling of human life expectancy? This question has been studied by the US National Academies.¹ Apparently, engineering projects deserve most of the credit, due to the following types of large‐scale societal systems that have been created by such projects:

• Water treatment and delivery
• Sewage treatment and transport
• Motor‐powered tractors
• Motorized transport and delivery
• Large‐scale electricity generation and delivery
• Affordable, mass‐scale refrigeration
• Canning and other mass‐scale food storage/preservation techniques
• … and so forth.

To be a little more precise, the National Academies estimate that 80% of the increase in human life expectancy is due to such engineered systems; most of the rest is due to improved healthcare. And all of these important societal systems were created by engineering projects!

Ergo: If you want to change the world...