Do This One Thing to Ensure Successful Engineering Projects

When we look at most engineering projects that go off the rails, we know we can do this one thing to ensure successful engineering projects.

Yet, this one thing is something that most people overlook in their eagerness to get a project of the ground. The problem is that it often causes change orders almost off the bat that ultimately cause the project to run over budget and beyond the deadline.  

As part of our ROI Systems Method for ensuring successful engineering projects, we call this Project Assessment. It’s the first step in our method to ensure you get what you want and need from your projects.  

The Project Assessment phase of the project is the first step and it’s where we take a close look at the conceptual design. Most companies overlook this step and often think it’s unnecessary and adds to the timeline. 

The reality is that neither is true. It’s an essential step and it will actually help ensure your project stays on its timeline.  

The Project Assessment phase evaluates the overall project needs, staffing requirements for the project, initiates a discussion around scope of work creation, outlines budget concerns around the project scope, establishes the time frame for when the project needs to be completed, and also checks for feasibility, from the highest level, to ensure there is a high probability of success.

In short, the Project Assessment sets up your project for success from the very beginning.  

For one client, Comcast/NBC Universal we were involved in engineering a complex, first of its kind application.  

By ensuring we did the Project Assessment phase, the design enabled a more simplistic approach thus creating a simpler system design and a less complex solution for operation and maintenance. 

Project engineering timeline was reduced by months. It minimized the number of change orders. And we saved the client $500k in technical engineering documentation and $5 million in hardware.  

Needless to say, skipping the Project Assessment would have been very costly.  

Overlooking this step, whether intentionally or unintentionally, puts project success at risk. This beginning step is one of the most critical for project success. Starting with an auditing process that works toward vendor selection, budget controls, communication, and technology expectations, starts projects on the path to success.     

Again, this is just the first phase in how we approach every project, using our proprietary ROI Success Method. If you want to know more about the entire method, let us know and we will be happy to send you more information.  

So, is this something you do with your projects?  

Let us know, we’d like to hear more. Leave us a comment below or send us an email at hello@valerity.com.

[This article was originally published on the Valerity Blog]