Even though I am first and always a mechanical design engineer, I have always had a knack for planning. Figuring out the tasks for a new effort isn’t hard. Yet, we still tend to miss something. Usually, a few things that will throw our project off track.

How can engineers step into a planning role?

If you are doing planning, then you have to estimate cost and schedule. Even if someone else is doing the plan, we will still be asked, “How long is that going to take?” We all struggle with estimating. We are being asked to predict the future, on a technology that has never been done before. By definition, we can never be right.

In my corporate life, I was often asked to understand our companies’ project histories. I had to gather data and interview team members. With this baseline, surely our future predictions would be better!

Setting up these meetings wasn’t easy. No one wanted to talk. Things hadn’t gone well. There were surprises. Eventually, we would sit down with them. Most conversations started with attendees saying, “This project was special.” They would continue on about why it wasn’t their fault, and why this situation was unique. After hearing this on several projects, I learned project surprises were common. I never said it to them, but your project really isn’t that special!

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Woah. Who wants to hear that? No one. But it has proven to be true at several organizations.

Again, as engineers, we hate doing project estimating. We are scientific. We are accurate. These estimates are always wrong. Or are they?

Taking a stab at project estimating

There are two basic approaches for high-level estimates. One is commercially available software. Put in high-level aspects of your design and the software will spit out answers. Development cost. Development schedule. Production cost. It is truly amazing.

The second approach is using company project history. You’ll know what is typical once you pull together the historic data. However, you must use actual results. We know every project is special and had surprises, so we can’t use the original plan data.

People are drawn to commercially available software because it is ready to use. But not so fast. It still needs to be calibrated to your organization. Are you heavily regulated? Are you somewhat informal? Yes, the software will have adjustments for these items, but it still doesn’t consider how you organize overhead versus direct tasks. You need to have your history on hand for this software to be relevant.

But still, it is an estimate. It will be wrong. How do we deal with this? We can look at best case and worst case. Or use different high-level estimating approaches, so you will have several “wrong” answers. They still provide an expected window.

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As an example, your management may have lots of experience running projects like the one you are considering. They believe it could be a year and cost $1.5M. But you’ve done some work digging up company history, and you have detailed actuals from a similar project. They took 11 months and spent $1.3M. Yet, there are some differences that could make your project different. You also run the estimating software and it says 15 months and $1.8M. Remember, you haven’t done any detailed planning. This is simply a high-level, budget-level view of things. I’d personally share all 3 data points as the project expectation.

To continue the example, you then begin detail planning for your project. We have pretty good people. They shouldn’t run into the same problems as before. We’ve worked on this technology before, so that should just plug in. The first “bottoms up” schedule indicates 9 months and $900k. Boy—this is going to be great!

Slow down. For some reason, people are optimistic during detailed planning. As said before, we also tend to miss tasks. If our window was higher than our detailed estimate, why do we want to commit to something less? Personally, I would add buffer to the project. How we manage things is another article, but our plan should not be less than the estimated window.

Getting started

Is this hard to do? No. However, because it is “fluffy,” most engineers hate doing it. I’d argue there are people who can be comfortable with it, so make sure they are involved in your planning sessions. Plan for the surprises by using your company history. It will allow a much more peaceful work life!