Breaking Down Complex Projects: How Commercial Engineers Simplify the Process
Any complex project, regardless of industry, requires a plan and someone to manage it to successful completion. The better the strategy and oversight, the more efficient the project’s finished work becomes. This theory is particularly true in fields with many moving parts, like commercial engineering.
Commercial engineers are the key personnel in this construction sector to ensure a building’s safety and stability. This article by ZP Architects explains why anyone planning to build a non-residential structure should partner with a commercial architect. Without their knowledge, you risk investing your resources and time into a project that isn’t as safe and sound as it needs to be — meaning less longevity and more risk to those in and around the structure.
How does a commercial engineer take a goal — one building or a multi-structured city block — and dissect it into the details leading to the finished product? They simplify the process by reducing the outcome into smaller pieces via engineering project management, and we’ll explain how that’s accomplished here.
1. Establishing the Parts
Managing projects in engineering requires a unique blend of techniques and regulations that only apply to this particular field. These categories, which include design, safety, building, and maintenance, divide a complex plan into smaller, more manageable parts.
Each micro section must be completed promptly, but more importantly, it needs to meet every safety and regulation requirement. For this to happen, the person or team in charge of the section must thoroughly understand the principles, concepts, and processes. They’ll also need organizational skills to complete the work on time and efficiently.
Rather than focus on the outcome itself, commercial engineers will take the plans and break them into subcategories using planning techniques such as Gantt charts.
These organizing strategies turn a large, complex project into mini tasks designed in order of necessity. When one task is completed, the person responsible can easily look at the chart to see who they must notify so the project can continue into the next phase.
2. Spreading the Work Across Skills
With the jobs necessary to complete a project aligned in an organized manner, the next task is to assign each section to the right person or team. Who receives which part of the project depends on their skills and skills required to do the work.
The commercial engineering industry encompasses various principles and practices that lay the foundation of the entire field. Following these concepts and rules means learning them in your field at the deepest fundamental level and then knowing which related areas apply to those practices. Since every engineer’s background is different, knowing the skills and specialties of the team is essential to assigning individual roles.
Some team members in an engineering project may have a focus on the technical areas. They’ll be the key people involved in connecting the project’s aims and steps to other related fields and bringing in any necessary knowledge that would help the workflow become safer and more efficient.
Other members are those who specialize in project management and planning. They’ll establish the tools to use throughout the scope of the work, decide the approaches necessary, and train those who need help to use these methodologies.
Skills such as leadership, team management, risk management, problem-solving, and communication are vital parts of a successful project. Knowing who to put in charge of sharing information with stakeholders, clients, and team members, who is best behind the scenes juggling budgets and vendors, and who would be the ideal person to handle the technical aspects of the project will turn a complex endeavor into a seamless workflow.
3. Automating the Tasks Where Possible
Before the work begins, the final step is to automate any task possible using engineering project management software. Taking the time to do this piece of the project planning well prior to investing any resources into the work will save the team time and energy and can reduce money spent, ensuring the job stays within the expected budget.
The more efficient and organized a project is, the more likely each milestone will be completed on time and within budget. Communication between the team, stakeholders, and clients runs smoothly, and the progress of the work is accessible to anyone with the proper permissions to view it.
Engineering projects use special tools, so the aspects of the work that can be automated depend on the software. In general, a strong project management software for commercial engineering will integrate with the other systems used by the engineers. It can be customized and scaled as the projects shift in scope and complexity. The software will be mostly intuitive and simple to use, but training is available for added support.
Once the tasks that can be automated are assigned to the software, the work begins. A once-complex project is now broken down into manageable chunks and assigned to the team members who will best handle those pieces of the overall goal.
Conclusion
Commercial engineers must always stay on top of the changes in technology. New innovations emerge that may help simplify complex projects. Still, the foundation of commercial engineering has been the same for centuries: a solid plan, a breakdown of how to reach it, and quality work and materials to take an idea from a blueprint into reality.
