Faculty of Engineering and Technology

Department of Electrical Engineering: Electronic

Engineering

Engineering skills 1A
INSTRUCTIONAL OFFERING:
CODE: EEESK1A
INSTRUCTIONAL PROGRAMMES: Diploma in Electrical Engineering

DOCUMENT REVISION: January 2024

ADVISORY BOARD APPROVAL: July 2019

STUDY MATERIAL

TOPICS:

a) Engineering skills at glance: Discussion of the background to soft skills in engineering.

Overview of different engineering skills by identifying stem skills and discussing the soft skills
relevant in various engineering fields.

b) Theories on engineering and engineering professions: Presentation of types of theories on

engineering. Concise discussion on the kinds of engineering fields: Mechanical, electrical, civil,
chemical, computer etc. Elaboration what an engineering team; artisans, technicians, technologists
and engineers are about.

c) Engineering and the environment: This is about social responsibility, environmental impact,
natural resources, sustainability of the engineering activity. Legal and safety considerations.

d) Engineering teamwork: This unit looks at teamwork versus group-work, basic principles of
engineering project management (plan, organise, lead and control), project costing, budgeting and
resource management. It concludes with know-how to develop a business plan

e) Ethics in Engineering: A presentation on professional ethics, responsibility, engineering norms,

ECSA and their function.

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 Learning unit one

1. Engineering skills at glance

What will this learning unit tell us?

• As you know, this is not an engineering module, but a module for students to acquire broad-based
insights to relate engineering and other disciplines as well as situations across social settings.
• This is a compilation of theories about engineering. Some insights on certain theories of engineering
shared for broader understanding of what engineering is about, along what engineering students will
learn what it is.
• As a point of departure, the learning unit shares a general view of what engineering skills are, as
relevant in the field of engineering.
• Additionally, this learning unit sheds lights through conceptions informing theories about
engineering. Some influential engineering theorists are presented.
• Some insights about engineering gathered across humanities and social sciences are also shared to
add value to global understanding of what is said engineering to be and not in across board.
• Engineering skills are primarily about one’s ability to easily relate things and themselves across
various perspectives. Thus, with more knowledge about constructions of engineering would lend
value towards your self-development and growth as an engineer, beyond your school engagement.

1.1. Introduction

Engineering has become one of the most dynamic and exiting endeavours over the past to present.
Throughout its breakthroughs creative processes have been witnessed from the engineer of the past to
the present. In the past engineers mainly focused on the form, fit and function of their design. While
that focus remains central in the current daily workflows, the dynamic increase of technological
capabilities has only made engineering more complex. For instance, the emergence of Computer Aided
Design (CAD) simplified the design process, however its increase into more markets influenced that the
modern day engineer has to solve a lot of problems that had not been witnessed before. Nevertheless,
none of the designs, components, subsystems, systems and inventions take place in vacuum; nor do
engineers, hence engineers engage with one another to help address societal issues. Co-existence of
diverse engineers bear some challenges and advantages, of which revolve around critical soft skills that
they ought to have in order to cope well within their engagement. The constant change in our world over
thousands of years into the developed global communities demonstrate that the world has become
healthier, safer, more productive, with high speed of communication, mobility due to existence of
engineers and their contribution. This is one of the attributes that engineers can be applauded for.

Engineering career is an endeavour that occurs within societies for societal issues. Thus, being an
engineer doesn’t mean that one would be flouting as if engineering exists in vacuum. As important as
one’s field of engineering is, so are the people the practice is meant for. The fact that engineering is for
people, by people, it presupposes a profound element of creativity throughout various processes.
Creativeness of the processes can be observed through designs under control for improvement of a
quality of life. The reference to “under control” implies the impact of technical, economic, business,
political, social and ethical factors that are considered in the process. Along this, human beings’
unlimited wants or even needs, engineering is increasingly one of the fastest and dynamically growing
and most sought after fields today more than ever. One of the exciting things about engineering is that,
graduates obtain significant earning potential, job stability and financial security. However, the aspect on
personal satisfaction remains debatable cognisant of the fact that, some crucial skills within the fields of
engineering have been overlooked for core engineering skills. These are the soft skills that enhance
one’s qualification and personal management, as well as interpersonal relations at the workplace.

As much as there are many different career options in engineering, not any engineer can practice as an
expert in any field. Expertise in engineering is crafted and sharpened beyond the foundational training.
Thus, not every engineer can be an engineer-in-practice at any engineering field, however, as the

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demands in terms of skills and knowledge are intense. Moreover, if one needs to be an expert in
engineering, they should consider furthering their studies beyond bachelor’s degree, more probably a
master’s degree, from an engineering faculty. On top of the proper educational background and relevant
technical experience, one will still need to demonstrate many other skills, often referred to as “soft”
skills in order to penetrate and retain a good job.

Engineering career also happens to be one of the most stable that offers significant earning potential for
its varied professionals. Various fields of engineering, some common foundational technical and soft
skills training enhance them with generic, yet core competencies along specific areas of specialty. Not
any engineer can be specialist in any field, due to the demands in terms of skills and knowledge are
required. However, adequate educational background and relevant technical experience, complemented
with core “soft skills” will equip one to become an effective and successful engineer.

Soft skills refer to skills such as interpersonal, leadership, communication and organisational. The soft
skills go along the “hard” skills, such as computer modelling or a working knowledge of chemistry, which
are specific to your branch of engineering and are technical in nature.

1.2. Background
1.2.1. Why do engineers fight against learning soft skills?

Many engineers and technical specialists lack with and even refuse learning soft skills. Bernd Schulz
(2008) in the Journal of Language and Communication article entitled “The Importance of Soft Skills,”
reveals that engineering board proposals as far back as the 1960s that called for at least 20 percent of
collegiate engineering curricula composed of soft skills related courses. The very lack of development
and offering of soft skills-oriented courses by universities within engineering or other technical-degree
curricula also has an influence on engineers’ attitude. As early as 1999, when the German author
Dietrich Schwanitz, compared the levels of soft skills of hypothetical graduates of Mechanical
Engineering programmes with that of a History of Arts, the rating revealed the mechanical engineer at
the level of a caveman. Against this, still today, many graduates from engineering programmes with lack
of exposure to soft skills tend to feel that soft skills are not important in career success.

Another contributing factor is based on the difficulty in comprehending soft skills for logical personalities.
In engineering most knowledge and skills learned and in other technical areas have rigidity with regards,
right or wrong, left or right, black or white answers. However, soft skills often varied answers giving it a
label of “shades of gray.” Soft skills deal with subjective and almost impossible to quantify elements
such as personality and emotions. These are difficult concepts to grasp for many people at school or in
the workplace. This highlights that the corporate setting also needs to train departments
to customise soft skills education in a manner that engineers and technical employees can easily
understand. Accordingly, the Faculty of Engineering and Technology at Vaal University of Technology
(VUT), has crafted integration of soft skills in such a manner that, teaching and learning focuses mostly
on the learner’s introspection, prior knowledge and reflection, as well as more practical exercises than
theory on nature of any of the soft skills. The outcomes are comprehensive to such an extent that
students acquire various soft skills required in engineering.

1.2.2. Are soft skills important to engineers?

As exciting and lucrative engineering profession is for many young people to choose, it is also crucial
that one fully understand how also highly demanding in terms of gaining the skills and knowledge
required to get a foothold in the industry. The entry requirements of companies in the industry vary.
While mostly maths and science form basis of the engineering career, with some companies being more
rigid in terms of entry path, some firms require potential applicants to not only possess relevant
qualifications but also to display evidence that they possess other skills, which can be more difficult to
quantify. All “top” engineers all have different strengths and weaknesses that they bring to their teams
and projects. Moreover, they also possess some common and necessary skills in order for them to work
on some the biggest engineering projects all over the world. Soft skills promote career success.
Therefore, yes, soft skills are very important to engineers, especially if they are to be effective in the
industry.
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Craig Watson’s research on successful professionals in the McKinsey Quarterly (1983) provides support
to this example. He argues that those who successfully utilise soft skills generally outperform those who
rely solely on technical knowledge. In support of this Daniel Goleman’s books Emotional
Intelligence and Social Intelligence, as well as Daniel Pink’s book, A Whole New Mind, have stretched on
this notion with abundant examples of the importance of relationship building, communication and
teamwork toward both individual and corporate performance. Specific to engineering, the University of
Washington’s Professor David Socha’s article “Teaching Reflective Skills in an Engineering Course” cites
the lack of soft skills as a contributing factor in the majority of engineering project failures.

Each one of us knows a person or two who is/are extremely intelligent yet lack/s the ability to work and
communicate effectively, engage in team projects, or copes well with others who have different cultural
backgrounds, or maintain professionalism. Typically, this results in a lack of effectiveness, personal
satisfaction, limits growth opportunities and success, as well as, affect others around those persons. Any
ambitious person who seeks to penetrate modern day’s marketplace, should know better that soft skills
play an important role in differentiating potential candidates for employment or advancement.
Richard Serby, in Direction Magazine’s article, founder of the Geosciences, a recruiting firm, GeoSearch,
indicates that the development of soft skills is crucial in view of the “intense competition for many
available positions.” Obviously, the day-to-day work of engineers and technical specialists requires soft
skills as critical components of success.

A case study:

For example, when designing a bridge for specific community, especially in the residential area (those
metal power lines running along highways, even people to use the bridge); it takes more than one
particular engineer to complete the project. It requires a team of engineers and other professionals;
community leaders, drafters, project managers and administrative and PR/marketing staff, working
together and potentially interfacing with clients, regulatory agencies, subcontractors and even public
advocacy groups.

Answer the following questions:

1. What would be the likelihood of success if team members could not communicate together?
2. What if they could not share responsibilities and accountability in working as a team? What if there
was no leadership present in the project?
3. What would be probability of blaming engineering company if community members have not been
consulted and made to take ownership, be part of a project?

Simply, soft skills are those which involve interpersonal matters, such as leadership and communication.
Developing these skills can be the gateway to various career opportunities beyond engineering. On the
other hand, “hard” skills complement “soft” skills. Hard skills can include such as computer modelling or
a working knowledge of chemistry, physics which are precisely to your field of engineering (applied) and
are technical in nature.

1.3. Theories about engineering

Each engineer knows iconic figures in their own field that have established and or modified its (field’s)
steps, contributing to what it is at a particular stage. That spans from knowledge of a particular theory
and accepting it or not accepting it, as well as having ideas to modify it. Ironically, less is known about
engineering theorists. They are the architectures of theories of engineering. All disciplines have
theories, of which actually “provide structure and order for guiding and improving professional practice,
teaching ... and research” (Sitzman and Lisa Wright Eichelberger). Theorists are people who seek to
thoughtfully describe the interplay of factors in engineering practice. Through these theories/frameworks
the designs can be studied, evaluated and evolved to make better sense of new situations or outcomes.

Theories are divided into several categories and some of these are discussed below.

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1.3.1 Theories on the nature of engineering

These are at the highest level as philosophies of engineering that analyse the nature and imperatives of
engineering discipline.

1.3.1.1 The nature of engineering

Gordon Rogers proposed an overarching theory that analyses beyond what engineering is, but also
about creativity in engineering. Furthermore, it is the general evolution of technology and the ethical
issues it (technology) has brought. As a result, his analysis has been considered across broader context
of human knowledge.

The theory describes science, engineering and technology through essential differences among them;
with science being about scientific answers of the ‘why?’ question and technology the ‘how?’ He argues
that, science developed when theories and verifiable experiments began to be carried out on natural
phenomena (ibid). On the other hand, technology evolved as craft and technics when coherent theories
were developed for what had been logical reasoning and rules of thumb (ibid). This distinction does not
reveal the appreciation of the different but also compliments the roles of science and technology. Rogers
stresses that science aims to establish better theories while engineering’s goals are to improve the
efficiency of our products and constructions.

Primarily, the theory analyses the source of creativity in engineering through the process of engineering
design. It also moves beyond to indicate the ethical problems raised by technology and how decisions
are made in the technological sphere as well as, suggests the way society can exercise broad control.

Finally, Rogers foresees the role of the engineers in the future and concludes that technology can
enhance the lives of the poorer countries not only the favoured few (ibid). He also highlights that
engineering and technology can enhance individual lives by creating the time needed for people to
engage in other activities to understand the physical world through scientific endeavour, explore their
feelings about human world though arts, music and poetry, reflect on the mysteries of life though
philosophy and religion, and attempt to wrestle with human relationships through literature and
psychology (ibid).

1.3.1.1 The Imperatives and Goals of Engineering

Howard Rase investigates the imperatives (challenges) confronted by engineers while performing their
work and suggests what would constitute a creative and satisfying professional life. He points engineers
at striving to perform in new original and creative work and not be content with the memorisation and
uninspired work which, while necessary, should be done efficiently and effectively as possible. Secondly,
he highlights the need for engineers to engage in wider tasks and pursue to work across all spheres of a
project rather than allowing themselves to be committed to be the helps of those who lead only by virtue
of being the master of their fields and or projects.

It is crucial for any engineer to read, listen and learn about other engineers’ experience, as well as turn
attention to their own experience to develop intuitive insights and impression to a problem in order to
craft relevant solutions to deliver products effectively and efficiently. Time and budget are principal
factors when it comes to the delivery of produced goods. Thus, Rase argues that, exposure and
creativity applied accordingly would meet requirements in a timely manner. He identifies the following
factors as ingredients that would lead to the acquisition of engineering skills:
• Facts
• Laws
• Theories
• Techniques
• Tools

Rase puts emphasis at techniques by indicating that they are the expert method in executing the
technical detail of accomplishing a desired outcome. Additionally, he considers the analysis and
synthesis, as vital and then, concludes on how to develop concepts which are effective in turning
uncertain situations into manageable processes.
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The core of Rase’s notion of engineering is on how engineers make decisions. Then he identifies a five
step decision making process. Looking at how engineers reason in working toward a solution and how
experiment and hypotheses can be used to guide work to a solution. To him, beyond the mechanics of
decision making, the considerations which inform an engineer’s mind carry experience, know-how and
the use of design standards as a way of passing on knowledge. Rase also indicates how the knowledge
of values is gathered by analysing the metaphysical (actual existence) and philosophical (general and
basic) aspects of engineering. This raises an inquisitive question as to: What are the ingredients from
which value judgements are made?

• Tapping into a comprehensive approach, he studies biological, economic, aesthetic, moral and
spiritual values from the perspective of how these would benefit a practicing engineer.

Rase proceeds by viewing the source for meaning in engineering. However, he reveals that that such a
quest is often postponed due to series of important short-term and well-defined goals that fill in our
lives. He pinpoints the disappointment that can flow from investing all in our one professional specialty
because specialties can rise and fall (wax and wane). Along with this, he poses a question: Where does
the dignity of labour lie? The answer is:

• In knowing oneself and searching out an appreciation of life to the very limits of what is knowable.
Having perceived these limits, we can return to our profession in a clear and confident way and use
engineering as a tool to implement our perception of mankind's highest values.

These are the theories on the significant themes in engineering practice, also considered to be major
theories.

1.3.1.2 Theory of Systematic Engineering Design

A theory of systematic engineering design and practice was developed by Gerhard Pahl and Wolfgang
Beitz in Pahl and Beitz, they identified the need for a systematic approach of complex designs. Then,
indicated that a complicated or a family of products is usually beyond the intuitive skills alone of a
designer or design team (ibid). Thus, Pahl and Beitz crafted a strategy for the development of solutions
which aims to increase the probability of technical and economic success of product design. This is done
by creating a dependable approach which requires cautious planning and systematic performance so that
the whole design task narrows to a logical and comprehensible exercise and allows recovery from
inevitable errors. It also allocates a time schedule for the design stages which in turn leads to a
predictable project timetable. As much as this systematic design is general enough to be applied in any
branch of engineering Pahl and Beitz have not recommended that this method be automatically applied
to all designs nor all aspects of a design. Their argument for this is that, work should never be
performed just for the sake of being systematic or for pedantic reasons. It is the tasks and problems are
unique from product to product and so designers need to have various backgrounds, experience, skills
and preferences. Therefore, a designer should assess the situation they are faced with and choose their
own appropriate method for any particular design step. The authors also do not discount the role of
creativity and intuition in developing solutions. Complex tasks are solved one step at a time and in each
such step a designer must find a balance between the systematic and the intuitive. Intuitive
inventiveness is one way technical or economic advantage can be introduced into products.

1.3.1.2.1 The steps which make up systematic design

Pahl and Beitz divided their method into a few broad phases, each with a set of basic steps as follows:

A. Start off with product planning and a clarification of the task

Clarify the task and build out the specification and requirements

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The designer needs to understand the clear aims which the solution should address. He or she also
ensure that there will be the requisite commercial motivation and intellectual stimulation to carry the
design through to completion. The specification as presented to the designer may not be comprehensive
and often will require clarification and additional information. At the end of this phase the specification
will be fully developed and requirements and constraints compiled.

B. Conceptual design phase

Prior the conceptual design step a decision is needed as to whether a conceptual elaboration is required
or whether known solutions allow the designer to proceed directly to the embodiment and detail design
phase.

Abstract the task to identify the essential problem

When a problem is broadly explained it becomes clear what the overall function should be. Narrow view
of the task, or a quick prejudged one may lead the designer down a path to a non-optimum solution;
one which would ultimately detract from the technical and economic success of the product.

C. Establish the functional structures

This refers to both an articulation of the boundaries of the solution (what is in and out of the design) and
the functional way in which energy, material and signals (information) flow (are processed or converted)
from input to output to meet the specification. It involves breaking down the overall function into sub-
functions until the sub-function task becomes clear and simple. The development of functional structures
aims to support in discovering solutions.

D. Search for solution principles

There are various workable solutions for a sub-function to be achieved and the designer in need of
optimum technical and economic solution needs to explore a wider range of potential solutions to be able
to assess the comparative merits of each possibility. Pahl and Beitz claim that a successful solution is
more likely to spiral from the choice of the most appropriate principle than an inflated concentration on
the finer points.

E. Combine the solution principles into concept variants

This development of solution options is the strength of the systematic approach, whereby, smaller
solutions proving the sub-functions help to build the larger product. As a result, there is likely to be a
number of product concepts or variants which can be derived in this way.

F. Evaluation of concept variants using technical and economic criteria

First, the designer needs to a set of evaluation criteria and then assess the relative merits of a solution
using a bottom up approach starting from the sub-functions which make up each concept different. In
this way a comparative technical and economic evaluation can be built up for each concept variant and
allows a decision to be made as to which particular solution should be manufactured.
Additionally, the purpose of such an evaluation is to select one or two back-up solution which, while not
as cost-effective, could nevertheless be deployed in place of the first choice should this turn out to be
necessary.

G. Embodiment design

Pahl and Beitz stress that in the embodiment design stage there are many details which will need to be
clarified, confirmed or optimised and when this is completed it become obvious whether the right
solution concept has been chosen. They also claim that no embodiment design can hope to correct a
poor solution concept. The final general observation is that the end of the embodiment design is the very

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latest to which assessment of financial viability of the project can be left. Some of the details to consider
are as follows:

a. Develop a definitive layout and check that the requirements are met

This means that for each concept solution variant, the designer will need to determine the layout which
will end up being the technical product or system and check that function, strength and spatial
compatibility requirements are met.

b. Carry out a detail design

i. Detail design

The principle of systematic design should be applied to make the choice of suitable components,
materials, forms and finishes. Thus, exploration of options does not end with a conceptual solution but
extends to the physical realisation of the products.

ii. Documentation

At this stage, a designer can record that they have covered all of the factors which potentially could
significantly impact on the design, ending up with one or more potentially manufacturable designs. The
designer here, documents in detail including the production of final design drawings which can be used
to manufacture the product. This enhances each possible product concept solution into a potentially
manufacturable design.

Would all of this take too much time?

Pahl and Beitz indicate that it’s important to be systematic about the plan whether some aspects of the
design have been properly covered or not. Meaning that, the designer should first examine as they
prepare a design.

Later edition

Later, they published the third English language edition updates and expand the material covered,
adding some new content into this plan on:
• Mechanical inter-connections,
• Mechatronics (integration of mechanics, electronics and information technology to create new and
improved products and new ways to produce and assemble these),
• Adaptronics (adaptive structures with electronics so the structures continually fulfil their task by
actively adapting to disturbances and to changes in loading or required functionality),
• Designing for quality, and
• Designing for minimum cost.

Against this, Wallace and Blessing [2] lend some perspective to systematic design by highlighting two
contrasting ways in which design can be approached.
1. The systematic generation of solutions set out by Pahl and Beitz is a problem-orientated approach
and this is favoured in central Europe. In contrast, in the
2. UK and the USA, a more product-oriented approach is evident in which an initial product idea is
continually elaborated during the design process.

1.3.1.3 Theory of Scientific Management

The theory of scientific management was developed by Frederick Winslow Taylor (1911) through
principles of scientific management as a way of replacing older, craft-based, manufacturing methods. In
doing so, he modified industrial production and his philosophy widespread into various areas of industrial
and business life which could be divided up into individual processes. Before the advent of scientific
management, the dominant approach was to leave the solution of how to perform a task mostly in the
hands of each individual worker using his own preferred or prevailing methods. The shortcoming of this

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was that for each large scale manufacturing site the processes and tools to be used were not
standardised with the consequence that it was very difficult, if not near impossible, to increase the
efficiency of production or reduce costs.

Taylor came up with standardisation of tools for each task and standardisation of steps workers need to
perform to measure the in a uniform way. This was refinement of processes for efficient use of materials
and labour. This changed practice of management by dividing the responsibility of task completion into,
(1) the responsibility of management to plan the task, (2) the worker to execute it.

Taylor also helped with the setting up schedules, to determine expectations as to what could be
achieved. He had foreseen this as means of winning the trust of the workers. Scientific management was
about proper planning, measurements and workers taught how to use the system for efficient production
and increasing benefits, to bother workers and company, as well as consumer benefit, through fair price.
However, a limitation whereby companies tried to increase profit without increasing workers’ wages then
human nature would ensure that the gains would be unsustainable. Moreover, Taylor realised and
testified that scientific management would never be able to be applied to areas of work such as planning
departments which did the management’s side of the preparation because scientific management was
not inherently suited for application to work which could not be atomised and re-assembled into more
efficient wholes.

According to Robert Kanigel (…) in his biography of Taylor reveals that in 1874 Taylor began his
apprenticeship, engine powered factories and mass manufacturing labour were then a new idea. For
forty (40) years the Ford assembly line and by the standards of the average earner, goods of middle
class life were affordable. The traditional way of learning engineering was on the job by way of an
apprenticeship and on the coaching. Only few schools in the early days offered degree programmes in
mechanical engineering and these had few graduates. Taylor's apprenticeship in pattern making (for
pouring castings) lasted for four years, then he took on a second apprenticeship as a machinist in 1876.
During this time, he began his twenty six year (26 years) effort to search for the laws which ruled the
more efficient cutting of metal and which also ultimately morphed into the philosophy of scientific
management.

1.3.1.3.1 What is scientific management in practice?

Taylor (1911) revealed that the foundation of the best management is a true science resting on clearly
defined laws and principles which were applicable to all types of human activity. Then, he summarised
the elements of scientific management as:
• Time study of tasks
• Use of numerous functional or specialised supervisors
• Standardisation of all tools and elimination of unnecessary actions by workers
• Planning department
• Use of the 'exception' principle in management
• Use of a slide rule for the quick and accurate calculation of settings
• Written instructions for the workers
• Division of work into measurable sub-tasks
• Bonus pay or differential rate when targets were met
• System for classifying manufactured products
• Routing system
• Cost tracking system

So, in scientific management, Taylor noted, management takes on themselves a number of duties such
as the:
• Development of a science
• Scientifically selecting and training workers
• Co-operating with the men

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• Accepting responsibility for their part of what would be an equal division of work compared to the
case beforehand where the workman bore the entire responsibility, both for the general plan as well
as the detail of the work.

We could observe that Taylor's theory of scientific management as:

• Simple in conception
• Effectively reduced a complex situation to a set of simpler goals
• Relies on self-evident motivation
• Scales well
• More difficult to implement when done well (and has been often done badly because to do it well
requires time and motion studies to atomise the work so proper pre-planning and re-arrangement of
the elements of the work can be done), and
• Requiring a setting of an equitable quid pro quo for the other parties to this bargain (a form of social
contract)

1.3.1.4 Theories on specific practices and concepts

Theory of the Interrelationship of Success and Failure in Mechanical and Structural

Engineering Design

Henry Petroski is a prolific author and major contributor to engineering design philosophy and in setting
out the nature of mechanical and structural engineering. In his first book [Petroski, 1985], he indicates
that engineering is a human endeavour and as such is subject to the same errors. His theory looks at
why structural problems occur, when designing a structure that has not existed before.

He claims that engineering is consisted of hypotheses that engineers strive to design so that there is no
failure. To avoid failure and design structures beyond previous work engineers should follow sound
conventions and standards. He insists that failures need not be catastrophic because designs can ensure
that early signs of failure are caught. The theory stresses that there is an ebb (retreat) and flow in
design innovativeness. And engineer should all means avoid failure because when failure happens,
standards and conventions are re-examined to incorporate the lessons so that the event will be
prevented from happening again and modifying designs to become more conservative. Over time, as
more structures are designed using a new feature or technique, a greater confidence arises again.

The theory highlights that instead of having a list of what could fail, an engineer musy focus on what
needs to be completed to prevent structural failures i.e.:
• Communications and
• Organisation,
• Inspection,
• Good quality design,
• Structural drawings,
• Selection of good designers,
• Timely dissemination of technical data.

Henry Petroski concludes that experience is the greatest tool, with the statement that, “The well
prepared engineer can and does build beyond experience without hubris as surely as a well-trained pole
vaulter goes after a new record.”

1.3.1.5 Theory of Inventive Problem Solving

Genrich Altshuller's theory of inventive problem solving (TSIP or TRIZ) is set out as a method of
systematically approaching the task of inventiveness. He aimed this work at the engineer but noted that
the principles can be transposed to the organisation of creative thinking in any sphere of human activity.
He claims that people have been inventive for a long time but that the technique which has been
employed was that of selecting alternatives (... what if we do this ...). This way of approaching problem
solving is relied on various accidental factors which are difficult to understand or control.

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Then, he developed problem solving techniques and proposes a method which is founded on a step-by-
step analysis of a problem which breaks it down into simple essential parts and identifying the technical
contradictions. Then, identifiable contradictions are fixed by testing forty (40) basic methods to change
variations and ten (10) classes of solutions of more complex problems. An example of a basic method by
Altshuller is the “Go Between” Principle which presents an intermediate object to transmit an action. For
example, for a class of solutions is by introducing an additive you expose a difficult to see the object. As
a personal motivation, Altshuller observes “[w]hat can be more alluring than the discovery of the nature
of talented thought and converting this talented thinking from occasional and fleeting flashes into a
powerful and controllable fire of knowledge".

1.3.1.6 Alternate theories about engineering

Alternative theoretical insights may not fit neatly into the design plan but still make insightful
statements about engineering hence shared here for your knowledge.
• Aesthetics and the professional identity of a modern engineer
• Strengths and benefits of professional identity

Insights of consideration

• Gendered perspectives of engineering

• Link between philosophy and engineering
• A social history of engineering

After looking at the perspectives of earlier engineers, it’d be interesting to realise if Howard Rase's view
of engineering still relevant today? An inquisitive mind is, does his philosophical basis for engineering
still resonate with us as human beings. Of course, in a technical sense though, computerisation has
allowed calculation to become exceptionally precise in all but the most complex problem areas. However,
judgement and experience are always needed, firstly to know how to start and carry out a task.
Secondly, even if individual problems are able to be modelled accurately and calculations made
precisely, when a large range of interacting processes form a system or network then it may not be
possible to calculate what may happen with a desired degree of precision because the inter-related
behaviour is too complex. So, when engineers are asked to design ever more complex or complicated
systems, precise solution are likely to always trail and engineering experience and judgement will not go
out of vogue.

1.4 LIST OF ENGINEERING SKILLS (soft skills) required

1.4.1 Teamwork

In any field of engineering, it’s impossible for engineer to work alone. One works with a wide range
of other employees; some might be engineers and people and/or even employees outside
their departments, or organisation, sought to bring organisational projects to achievement. So, one
needs to be able to work as part of a team. Working in collaboration with different people in terms of
their levels, cultural backgrounds, gender and sexual orientation and uniqueness as individuals
requires applying skills as varied as intercultural communication with cognisance of appropriate body
language and verbal communication to group dynamics, analytical and critical thinking skills, as well
as prioritising problems to solve. In a diverse field of engineering one needs the character and integrity
that will persuade others to trust them as they all work in cooperation. For instance:

Mechanical engineering involves lots of teamwork in order for the projects to be completed.
Engineers regularly work in groups to design technologies and solve problems. Sometimes they
might even work with other people who are not mechanical engineers, such as computer
scientists or architects. Therefore, in addition to a need to be able to work with a diverse team of
people to solve problems, they also need other soft skills in order to be effective in their career.

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Even if one has leadership skills, which is one of the requirements in engineering; it’s unlikely that only
one engineer will be chosen to head up the whole thing. Even having leadership skills means that one
still needs to have the ability to work as part of a team [to lead). At university level, a student’s
participation in course projects helps to equip engineers become familiar with working in teams. Then,
throughout life, in one’s community, church or work that experience is then built life.

In some instances, while you’re at the workplace; an engineering company, you might fall seriously ill to
an extent that you need to consult a doctor. Some companies have their own health facilities. Thus,
you’d be urged to go to the corporate doctor. In order for you to get to the doctor, you’d be driven by
the corporate driver (in one of the company’s cars). Moreover, the food you eat in the company’s
premises is prepared and cooked by its chef and you’re served by catering staff. Therefore, it is crucial
that you prove to your employer that you can thrive in a team environment and cope well with your
colleagues. Engineers should understand their team just as well as they understand their projects. If
you’re a self-centred individual who does not work effectively in a group, who doesn’t want to help
others achieve the company’s goal; you most unlikely to make it in the industry. There are many other
soft skills engineers should have, such as intercultural, and interpersonal for collaborative skills,
including flexibility and creativity. The bottom line is on realising that; a single engineer cannot design
an engineering marvel. It takes a team to do so, because one way or the other, one’s invention still
needs to be evaluated and approved by others in the field. The ability to work effectively with other
people is a special skill that requires patience to learn more. All other soft skills are part of this
overriding one.

1.4.2 Analytical skills

The profession of engineering revolves around problem solving. Hence is exist to help address societal
issues. Therefore, almost every task needs to be approached with a strong analytical mind. Engineers
often have the responsibility to craft relevant solutions to ensure minimum risk in the implementation
process as possible as they can. Thus, is crucial that engineers are capable of visualising,
articulating, conceptualising for solving complex problems in an unambiguous decision making and
sensible manner given the information about the problems.

Analytical skills also imply elements of logical thinking, which enables an engineer to break down
elements of the problem into pieces of puzzle that can be integrated together into solving the problem.
The process of problem solving might involve pilot study and it might be through experimentation and
testing before execution actually begins to prevent wasting the budget on failed attempts. According
to Richards J. Heuer Jr., (1999), "Thinking analytically is a skill like carpentry or driving a car. It can be
taught, it can be learned, and it can improve with practice. But like many other skills, such as riding a
bike, it is not learned by sitting in a classroom and being told how to do it. Analysts learn by doing."

How can one’s analytical skills be tested?

Of course, analytical skills can easily be tested, By being given a task to look for inconsistencies in
product, text, artefact, linking that to some events or other items, orderly, or critically explaining it.
Sometimes companies conduct interviews to test one’s analytical skills and in some
cases standardised tests are conducted. A candidate would be required to use their logic to pick apart a
problem and come up with a solution.

While analytical skills are essential, other skills are also equally required. So, it’s on one’s disadvantage
to conclude that, they only require analytical skills in order to be effective engineers.

Why employers value analytical skills?

Engineering profession is a very competitive industry that requires high level of accuracy and dedication.
Along this, employers search for employees with the capability to scrutinise a problem and find a
solution in an efficient and effective manner. With analytical skills considered to be one’s ability to collect

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and analyse information, problem-solve and make decisions; that makes it one of the most important
skills in the industry at large.

Five most important analytical skills

There are five most important analytical skills complemented by sub-lists of more additional skills sought
by employers. One can use these skills as keywords to include in either resume/CV or job application
letter.

Top five analytical skills

1.4.2.1 Communication

Communication is the most crucial tool of your life at work and in your own living environment. It is
fallacy foreseeing yourself as that potential engineer who will just sit at a desk and do design work all of
the time, without interactions with others. In the real work life, you’ll find yourself spending considerable
amount of time discussing with clients and making informed decisions about the end product. Obviously,
you must have interpersonal communication skills in order to build and maintain effective relationships
with both clients and colleagues.

As much as your success in your profession depends on the understanding of its sub-language; having
effective communication skills helps you convey your ideas, opinions clearly and simply, even to non-
engineers. It is not everyone you’ll be interacting with understands your technical language. It is your
responsibility to make them understand your work unambiguously and making them feel valued. An
effective communicator can translate complex technical lingo into plain and simple language and also
communicate verbally with clients and other engineers working together on a project.

In many instances you’ll find yourself having to write reports of your work. This is one of the reasons
that recruiters tend to ask for the sample/example your writing. Written communication is also essential
for maintaining professional interpersonal relationships. From time to time you’ll be receiving emails to
respond to and so, your writing skills should always showcase your capacity in the industry. A skill of
giving feedback to colleagues or clients is essential as it helps to keep the flow of work running and this
presupposes that, you also need to have some skills of receiving feedback to your own messages in the
most professional manner. You’ll be dealing with diverse groups of people and should be aware of
potential dynamics and how best to respond or send messages without losing yourself. As one software
boot camp instructor puts it, “Providing honest, kind, and actionable feedback when working in teams is
only possible if you have empathy. And the skill of giving and receiving feedback is more often than not
the key difference between successful and unsuccessful projects.”

1.4.2.2 Creativity – the ability to solve problems requires creativity. In engineering several
innovations have been witnessed and this is part of creativity. The mindset that is eager to take
risks- challenging the old ways and coming up with the ones is creativity along, of course,
reasoning.

1.4.2.3 Critical Thinking – objective review and evaluation of issues, informed by not only your
instincts but, broad based knowledge gathered from varied perspectives

1.4.2.4 Research – everything that an engineer is doing must be informed by research; a

systematic study into whatever they do.

1.4.2.5 Data Analysis

Thus, possession of strong analytical aptitude would demonstrate a combination of the above-mentioned
skills through which a great engineer is continually examining things and thinking of ways to help things
work better. Good analytical skills equip the engineer to deliver a clear communication that creatively

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(relevantly) outlines instructions build out of scientific research skills and data analysis orientated with
critical thinking skills for effective solutions and problems to both the clients and the team members.
Without analytical skills, the possibility of failing a project is very high.

1.4.3 Attention to Detail

Engineering projects are extremely complex. There are millions of details that have to be thought
through during the planning and construction processes. Engineers need to possess a high level of
attention to detail to ensure nothing important gets forgotten that could potentially derail the company.
If the success or failure of a project falls upon you, attention to detail is one of the most important
attributes you need to utilise.

The skill is a great tool for accuracy and precision to avoid mistakes. According to Leonardo Helicopters
Division, explained: ‘Mistakes can be costly so attention to detail is very important. When working with a
R1m test specimen, you don’t want to get it wrong and have to spend another R1m.’ You might have
heard about several failures of some projects, such as collapse of bridges, structures and so. Some of
those are due to failure of fine details during the design of the structure. Undeniably, failure to pay
attention to the finer details can have serious unintended consequences; such as losing your company a
lot of money or putting lives at risk, if not losing them.

Engineers often deal with complex projects and so must consider various details, starting from the
concept and the problem-solving phases to the modelling and the testing phases. They need to focus
and pay close attention to detail to ensure nothing critical gets lost in the process. Actually, the success
or failure of any project often hinges on serious attention to detail.

All in all, paying meticulous attention to detail protects an engineer from making the slightest error
which can cause an entire structure to fail, hence every detail must be reviewed thoroughly during the
course of completing a project.

1.4.4 Desire to learn to acquire general knowledge

Any diligent professional who is passionate about what they do makes an effort to keep abreast of
industry changes and developments. Moreover, they go beyond knowledge of engineering to acquire
general knowledge. They take it upon themselves to learn new techniques and new technologically
advanced pieces of equipment in order to perform their job to the best of their abilities. Additionally,
they also search how other fields and disciplines might have utilised the tools relevant in their own field.
They also learn about other societal troubles and acquire knowledge as to what other solutions have
been applied. Hence you’d find collaborations between engineers and other non-engineering
professionals. A knowledgeable engineer demonstrates that his knowledge of the current state of the
engineering industry along other things in a society and can work effectively within the existing context.
Keeping abreast with current issues helps one proceed in anticipation of dynamic occurrences that might
influence his career, in order to pro-actively relevant towards where things might go in the future.
A great engineer is continuously inquisitive.

1.4.5 Leadership and Management Skills

You might be wondering why you’d need leadership and management skills when engineering is typically
about technical abilities. But, always bear in your mind that engineering is a profession of working in
teams. Within your team you might resume the responsibility of a team leader in order for your project
to be successful. Even if you may not have been designated as the leader of that particular team, for
your own sake, it’s crucial that you have leadership skills, just in case in the midst of the project,
something goes wrong and a substitute is required. Moreover, as a team-player, it’s important to have
necessary skills that will help enhance the capabilities of your team leader.

So, leadership and management skills are just as important. Part of leadership and management skills if
the ability to delegate tasks, organise different teams of people and coordinate many complex
processes. As your engineering career progresses, you will be given more responsibility, perhaps
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eventually leading to becoming the manager of a sub-team or even the entire team. To be effective and
successful in this venture you need to possess leadership and management skills. These might include
the knowledge about when to step in or back off; how to best utilize a team member’s strengths; how
and when to discipline someone and so on. You don’t become a top engineer without leading at some
point, so possessing and developing these skills is vital. As your career progresses, you will likely
become responsible for managing and motivating other engineers as well.

1.4.6 Time management and Organisational skills

Time management and organisational skills are critical to the effective pursuit of goals and objectives for
productivity. If you want to stay on track, you should do the right thing at the right time and in the right
manner. However, prior to doing this, you must be able to make your key decisions informed by
accurate information. Simply, if you don’t know everything that you have agreed to do with others to do,
how would you possibly determine your highest priority? You’d be struggling with the project unless
among other skills, you prioritise time management and organisational skills to avoid failure with the
process. Often, the time management solutions will not work if you have not first realised the
main organisational skills. The main organisational skills form the core of your time management and so
do the time management skills. Both enhance your ability for pursuing coherent options towards end of
the project. They are some of the most important and transferable skills one needs to demonstrate in
the industry. They are made up of many sets of skills that help a person to plan, prioritise, and achieve
his or her goals. The ability to keep work organised makes it possible for one to focus on different
projects without getting disoriented or lost, thereby increasing productivity and efficiency in the
workplace. An effective engineer should not only keep their work and desk organised, but can also
adjust quickly to the organised structure of a company.

Mastering key time management and organisational skills equips engineers with the tools they need to
succeed independently so they can contribute to the success of the business. In the engineering
industry, a company cannot succeed when deadlines or appointments are missed. Not to mention when
time is wasted while projects remain unfinished. Core time management and organisational skills allow
you to equip you have all the information that you need to make effective decisions. Not only that; they
also ensure that you have all the relevant information at the time when you actually need it. You will
never be able to do everything that you would like to do but when you have core organisational skills
you will be able to continuously complete your most important tasks.

The following five, core organisational skills should form the backbone of any effective productivity
system. When you have these skills and you use them effectively, you will see dramatic improvements in
your time management and productivity. According to David Allen, these are:

1.4.6.1 Capturing

You’ll often be asked to perform tasks; of which you’ll agree to do. Additionally, you may have a thought
about something you need to do. Along this, one tends to think they have captured the tasks at hand.
They assume that all are in their heads and so they would be able to remember things easily. Especially
if one has always met the deadlines in the past, they tend to assume that they can easily mark off the
date on a calendar of include it on a smartphone. However, capturing tasks is beyond marking a date as
it includes strategically planning for the needs of the project. It is crucial to record and allocate enough
time and resources for each and every stage of the project. The planning might require collaboration as
some companies seldom have enough in-house engineers and other required expertise to handle all the
tasks necessary for success of all projects. Some of the deliverables may be sub-contracted or given to
consultants that be may hired to handle day-to-day tasks. It is necessary for an effective engineer
to recognise the need for assistance for others and advise a manager if need be, to find and hire the
necessary experts and then to follow-up on outsourced tasks to make sure they are handled in an
efficient manner. Accordingly, meeting deadlines requires setting incremental goals that move a project
forward project and demand accountability when an interim deadline is not met. Schedules are set,
supplies ordered and tasks assigned. An organised timeline will account for all of these factors while also
providing a cushion for the unknowns. Prioritise the most important tasks and delegate certain
supervisory tasks to subordinates. Ensure that workers at all levels understand what is required to
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complete the project and necessary contributions. This allows employees to organize a
personal workflow to meet individual goals.

Capturing, eventually will be beneficial during the project process, implementation and reporting. If
you’re involved in project A is facing of more other production deadlines in May, clearly organised time
and resources are needed to be identified and captured to complete the projects. Working in
collaboration with engineer B, however, may need to work out coordinated scheduling before the start of
a project. Scheduling requires engineers to assess the potential needs of a project and to prioritise the
use of resources to meet the needs. The same skill set must also be applied by other individual engineer
when determining how to move forward with production or managing a section of project in the
company.

The assumption that one can keep everything in the head is partially true. It can be in their head and
they will remember it at some point. What if they are unavailable and there’s a need for the project to
proceed without them? That presupposes that time will be wasted as new organisational system would
need to be constructed and time allocated. However, if one wants to be effective and productive, they
need to deliver on the task at a time when they are in a position to complete it, but when they are not
there, through already captured and documented/recorded information, the task can be carried on.
Thus, while the human brain is very good at storing and retrieving information, it generally does not
retrieve that information at a time when it is useful to do so. In addition, one’s brain attempts to
remember the tasks in their short-term memory, as they are short-term tasks. As short-term memory is
not designed to store large chunks of information, this starts to steal your energy and cause stress.

NOTE: capturing a commitment does not mean that you have to decide what to do about it there and
then. It can be as simple as placing a note in your in-tray. However, proper capturing requires
developing a designated service level agreement with terms and conditions, even within your
department. This is part of organisational skills.

1.4.6.2 Processing

Once you have captured your commitments, you must regularly process them to determine what you
should do with them. Many people write every commitment down on a list and call it a task list. The
problem with this approach is that you end up with a lot of stuff on your task list which should never
appear on a task list; e.g.,

• Something which does not require action

• Work which somebody else should be doing
• Work which should only be done at a later date
• Things which could be done in a very short period of time i.e. 2 minutes
• Projects (only tasks should appear on task lists).

So, as much as capturing various aspects of the project is necessary, this stage is primarily for
processing the nitty gritty stuff relevant to the goals and objectives of the project.

1.4.6.3 Organising

Organisation is what you get as a result of the decision you make about each item you have captured
and processed. As a result of organising, each item should end up in one of a very limited number of
places e.g.;

• in your calendar if it is time or date specific, with other actors documented

• filed appropriately if it is only for reference
• on someday/maybe list if it will be reviewed at an unspecified time in the future
• in a tickler file or digital reminder if it needs to be reviewed on a specific date
• on a project list if it is a project. The nest task to be completed would be added to the appropriate
list

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• on an appropriate task list if it a task to be completed in a near future

The examples above, illustrate that you would be quickly able to find the item at the appropriate time.

1.4.6.4 Reviewing

Review is the ability to review your options and determine the most important task that you can or have
to complete with the time and resources available to you. The better you have organised the items, the
easier it is to review. This is why each person must be organised in a manner that suits the way that
they work and live. This skill requires knowledge of the plan, resources, timelines and other actors and
lines of communication in order to make suggestions when you review and realise there’s a need for
modifications. This is an important skills geared the project towards implementation.

1.4.6.5 Execution / Doing

You can’t stay organised if you never actually do anything. Core organisational skills acknowledge that it
is not enough to keep adding stuff to your lists; you must also be knocking off of your lists by
completing it. Otherwise, you would just have a depressing list of stuff you have never done. The key to
getting stuff done is to be able to trust that you are doing the right thing at that time. There are a
million things that you could be doing but when you possess and implement the
core organisational skills, you have greater confidence in your choices. The lack of doubt allows you
focus solely on the task at hand and complete it quicker and to a higher standard.

If you want to be more productive with better time management, you must start at the start. Like
building a building a house, the foundations must be in place. In productivity terms, this means having
the core organisational skills and implementing them consistently. The core organisational skills allow
you to capture every commitment that you make. Determine the best course of action, and choose the
right task to person at the right time. There are many time management tips which can help you to
improve your performance but unless you have the core organisation skills in place, you are limited how
productive you can be.

1.4.6.6 Why Time Management and Organisational Skills Are Important?

Staying organised in the workplace can save a company time and money. Time management
and organisational skills are essential for multitasking and keeping a business running efficiently and
successfully. Employers aim to recruit applicants who can work to achieve results consistently, even
when unforeseen delays or problems arise. Workers with strong time management
and organisation skills are able to structure their schedule, boost productivity, and prioritise tasks that
must be completed immediately versus those that can be postponed, delegated to another person, or
eliminated altogether

Organisational skills encompass more than simply keeping a clutter-free desk area. While maintaining a
clear space to work in is important, organizational skills are more than just keeping neat. Employees
with good organisational skills are able to keep themselves calm and prepared with systematic planning
and scheduling. Work projects are typically centred around a rigid timeline, and organising a job into
smaller projects and goals can be an effective way to complete them. Furthermore, employers look for
works who can schedule and delegate these smaller tasks to themselves and other employees in order
to stay on track with deadlines while sustaining a healthy work-life balance.

Maintaining strong organisational skills can reduce the chance of developing poor work habits such as
procrastination, clutter, miscommunication, and inefficiency.

Do you keep on misplacing your things, like books, pen or keys?

Do you constantly miss school deadlines?

17
Are you often running late for lectures and appointments?

If your schedules, to do lists, and labels keep you from accomplishing your target, you might need to
brush up on your time management and organisational skills.

When faced with tasks, it is not enough that you can do the job.

It matters more when you can do it well.

Remember, the end goal of an organisation is increased productivity and efficiency. This is the very
reason why you need to practice and try to master prioritising, scheduling and planning skills.

While having to do lists, storage drawers, labelling system and/or schedule of deadlines on a calendar
may help you organise your work flow and space, your organisational skills should not be limited by
that.

It is not enough to show off a clutter-free desk to illustrate organisational skills, highlight calendar as
much as it’s said clean-equals-organised.

According to Lona Glenn, “Being organized means that you are able to find your documents quickly,
manage your responsibilities well, and accomplish tasks right on time.”

So, how else can you organise your life aside from your lists, labels and journals?

If your dream if to be successful and effective engineer or business owner:

Always keep in mind that time management and organisation of work is what successful and effective
engineers have in common and so do the successful business owners.

Without the ability to organise your time for your work and your resources, you could be twisting in the
wind in no time. You may have been able to muddle along back in the day, but in today’s competitive
environment, you need to work any advantage to your favour.

Read on twelve (12) ways to improve your time management and organisational skills, at home, at
work, and in varsity.

1.4.6.6.1 Here are 12 Ways to Improve Your Organisation Skills

Tip #1: Review your current organisational system.

Be proactive. Most people take their work one day at a time, coming in ready to take on whatever
happens. However, that means you are reacting to a situation rather than preparing for it in advance.
The best way to make the most of your day is to prepare for it in advance. Know what you need to do
for the next day and make preparations for them before you leave for the day.

Before starting on any project, you need to tap into S.P.E.A.K formula by Karl Albrecht: situation
analysis, presence, empathy, authenticity and knowledge are critical aspects of social intelligence to
practice in order to position yourself effectively in your organisation. This content is associated with
social intelligence. Look into factors such as: What system was employed to organise things the way
they are currently? Identify what needs to be improved, if the system in place needs to be revamped.
Find other techniques and tools that can work for you and organise things better.

This not only takes the guesswork out of your workday, it might even give you some insights or ideas of
how to do the work better.

Tip #2: Make a list

Part of being proactive is making a list of all the things you need to do for each day. The benefits of this
is of course for you to prevent forgetting anything. An added bonus to making a list is crossing it out. It
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gives you not only a concrete way to keep track of the tasks you need to do, but it motivates you to
keep doing it because it gives you such a sense of satisfaction and accomplishing crossing each item on
your list. Metaphorically speaking, this is putting all your ducks in a row, and you shoot them down one
by one.

After making a list of things that should be covered each day, you should align that to specific schedule.
Each task should have a prescribed time to do it.

Prioritise. Once you have a list for your day’s activities, the next step is for you to organise this list in
order of priority. Once your list is organised, it becomes a map to guide you from morning to evening in
the most effective way to help you increase productivity. This time management guide tells you what
you have to do and what is more or less important. You will soon develop the habit of using your list as
a blueprint for the day and improve your organisational skills along the way.

Increase productivity. Effective engineers work from a daily list. It is the most powerful time
management technique ever discovered to increase productivity and improve one’s organisational skills.
Ineffective engineers those who tend to be overwhelmed with too many things to do and too little time,
either do not use a list or do not refer to a list if they have one in the first place. They often resist the
idea of writing everything down. As a result, they find themselves continually distracted by ringing
phones, interruptions, unexpected emergencies, and e-mail requests.

Sometimes a task or demand on your time will seem urgent when it comes up. But something that
might distract you from your other work regains its true importance when you write it down. An item
that is written down on the list next to all your other tasks and responsibilities often doesn’t seem so
important after all. Your daily list is perhaps the single most important planning tool you can have. Some
people call it a ‘‘to-do list.’’ It’s said to increase daily productivity with 25%. You can bring order out of
chaos faster with a scheduled list than with any other time management tool.

Once you have written up your daily lists and begun work, new tasks and responsibilities will come up.
Telephone calls will have to be returned. Correspondence will have to be dealt with. In every case, write
it down on the list before you do it. When you create your daily list, you begin by writing down every
single task that you intend to complete over the course of the day.

The second part of the time-planning system is a calendar that enables you to improve
your organisational skills by planning several months ahead. With the right system, you will be able to
transfer individual items from your master list to the exact day when you intend to complete them. This
also helps to inform your colleagues and other team mates about your availability in order for you to
draw synergy with their own schedules. If you stick with this practise, you can ensure you meet all your
deadlines and nothing is left on the wayside.

Tip #3: Make time management and organisation a team effort.

Whether it’s at home or in the office, do make an effort to include others in your action plans for
scheduling and organising. This is crucial as your need the trust of your teammates and also you need to
trust them about he projects you’ll be working in together. This would benefit everyone if everything
around you is adequately scheduled and organized. This is a practice to be applied beyond just your
personal space.

Talk to your colleagues about your plan and determine if you can put up a common filing system for
documents that you share with each other. This can be a digital centralised platform which all of you can
access it. At home, implement a system where each one would be responsible for a task for a scheduled
period. If you’re sharing an apartment, you can set up schedule for cleaning the place, or cooking and
etc. Look at the bigger picture, organisation with everyone involved means increased productivity and
efficiency for everyone.

Tip #4: Declutter and properly arrange before adding more workload

Organising life-hacks would always suggest putting your stuff in labelled boxes. In your attempt to
duplicate your Pinned photos from Pinterest in your home, you excitedly buy a number of storage bins.
The problem is, the shopping part comes first, and as a result, adds to the clutter you have at home. Be
wary of this decluttering trap. It is advisable to do the decluttering first, so you will have a
better gauge of how many boxes and containers, and what specific types you will actually be using.
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Improve your time management and organisations skills by establishing a filing system. Nowadays
people rely more on digital filing. Even if you also do so, you still need order for you to know where
everything you need is stored. You need to make sure all your files are easily labelled and properly
placed in order. You should also have a master document of all your files and the location of those files.

Developing a time management system takes a few minutes to set up. It then assures that you
constantly improve your organisational skills and never miss or forget to access your files or folders in
order to follow up on incomplete tasks, or make a distant call, or appointment. Remove one out when
you bring another one in. One of the reasons for clutter is an excess of things. For instance, having three
or four files of the when you can only use one or two. Even ending up with a collection of same files in
different names. Before saving a file, think whether it has a duplicate since this adds to the volume of
your space in the computer you’re using. The rule should be, for every updated or new stuff you save,
throw out one or two of the same kind.

Tip #6: Find a simple solution.

Piles and piles of clutter at home can make you feel overwhelmed. But don’t let that get to you. Pause
for a while, and determine whether your clutter problem can be addressed by a simple solution.

While you’re a student

Tip #7: Take advantage of your biological prime time.

Our bodies have a natural peak time when we have the most energy; hence, a greater potential of being
productive. This is what Sam Carpenter calls as biological prime time or BPT. It varies per person; some
may find that their BPT is during early morning, while others feel theirs is during evenings. Since is the
time you feel you can work your best, you can configure your schedule so that you can tackle your
priority tasks during your BPT.

Tip #8: Manage your attention, not your time.

Instead of arranging a schedule of your daily activities based on how long it will take you to fulfil each
task, work on a schedule that allows you to accomplish your tasks depending on the energy and focus
you will expend in doing so. For example, allot time for managing and replying to e-mails during lean
times of your day. That way, you won’t be wasting your focus and attention on menial tasks. You can
also opt to have somebody else do the small tasks for you, so you can give more of your attention on
bigger tasks.

Tip #9: Categorise items in your work space.

One hindrance to achieving maximum productivity at work is the time we spend searching through files
for a single document. If we know where exactly we can find each of our stuff, we will be saving time,
energy, and focus for the tasks that truly matter. Make it easier for you to find what you are looking for
by categorising the things on your desk. Create at least five categories to group similar items. For
example, supplies category can include your pens, papers, binder clips, and the like; resources for
reference materials you use at work; and projects for documents relevant to projects you work on.

Tip #10: Assign a storage space for each category.

Once you have narrowed down items on your workspace into a few categories, the next step would be
locating a storage space for those. You have to consider three points when looking for storage space:
convenience of the location; frequency of use; and quantity or volume. For instance, if you think you’ll
be making calls every now and then, place your phone where you easily reach for it. For files and reports
that you won’t be using needing that much, you can stow them farther from your desk.

Tip #11: Practice a regularly scheduled clean-up.

Consistent effort in organising can help you be more efficient. If it means allotting ten minutes a week
to declutter your desk when the work is over, then do so. You won’t have to dread going to work on
Monday with piles of uncategorised documents and tasks on your desk. This practice can turn into a

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good habit that you can benefit from in the long run. It can also leave a good impression on you as an
employee as you will give the impression of being reliable and can be trusted with keeping important
stuff.

Tip #12: Make the most of your prime time

Be an early bird. You are more likely to get more things completed and in time, if you start early. Of
course, this should reflect on the work schedule you make, but getting started early also means there
are other things you can do to keep you on your toes, such as daily exercise and a good breakfast.
Starting early also means you avoid stress by having plenty of time to get to work and do anything else
you need to do. Everybody has a certain time of the day when they are most productive. Some work
better early in the morning, while others work best in the evening. You should schedule all your most
demanding or challenging work during this time. Of course, if your business involves meeting with other
people, you need to coordinate your prime time with theirs.

Minimise interruptions. You may think it is obvious, but you waste a lot of time dealing with interruptions
to your work. This is why it is important to make a schedule. Follow the schedule and avoid distractions
as much as possible. Turn off your mobile phone, close the door to your office and avoid useless
engagements such as parties, uninvited guests, meetings or outings. If you travel frequently, you should
travel in as comfortable surroundings as you can so that you can do work.

1.4.7 Multi-cultural skills

Why do you need multicultural, or even intercultural skills? It is because culturally diverse groups
continue to experience disparities in access, quality and outcomes. You will be working in culturally
diverse areas and in some instance, even with engineers from across the globe. Multi-cultural orientation
equips you to become aware of your own worldview, such as by learning about your own culture
and recognising the limits of your competence along others.

1.4.7.1 What is culture?

According to Geert Hofstede, “Culture is the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the
members of one group from another”. Every community has its own values, norms, mores, customs,
cultures and cherishes the same. And any member of others’ culture interferes or intervenes and insults
then there will be cultural conflict. The rapid growing technology and media has made the globe smaller
and people are learning to respect various cultures across the world. Culture is a broad term to define
and it can be defined precisely as the love for one’s own values, norms, mores, values, customs,
language in which one is born. To be born in a particular culture is not a choice but destiny. However, if
there is an aptitude and attitude to learn others’ culture it is always possible to have cultural fluency,
cultural competence and cultural tolerance and adjustment.

As a multi-culturally skilled engineer you should be able to create a culturally sensitive beneficial
relationship, such as by affirming colleagues’ or clients' uniqueness and diversity. Additionally, you
should understand the other's worldviews, such as through learning about the historical context of their
cultures. Moreover, keep checking on how society's structures, values and social messages, like
stereotypes and generalisations, impact clients. Besides the rampant differences in self-perceptions,
whether negative or positive, disparities in social classes also contribute to the complexity of a modern
workplace. Not to mentioned advancement of technology. Therefore, more than ever, if you contemplate
being effective in your industry, you need to have multicultural skills.

The ability to work with others from different cultures is a key skill for engineers, yet, it is a kind of
competence that is rarely well defined. Neither is the path to attaining it. However, while the path
to intercultural competence is not always clearly marked, in the end, intercultural competence remains
the major part of an engineer’s success. Along this, some of the very crucial engineering skills that you
need to have are intertwined to multi-cultural skills. Six of them are:

1. time management,
2. respect for authority,
3. teamwork and responsibility,
4. interpretations of transparency and ethics,
5. communication styles, and

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6. acceptance and reluctance in giving and receiving feedback.

1.4.7.2 Time management in relation to cultures

In some cultures, being prompt is a rarity and being late is the “normal.” Ensuring that every team
member is on the same page regarding timeframes and deadlines would require an extra effort. Start
with developing a strong understanding of the company culture’s prompt and deadline-oriented culture.
Make it a habit among team members with lesser-important deadlines. Over time, team members would
be more accustomed to being prompt and on time.

1.4.7.3 Respect for authority

Every culture teaches people to be respectful to the authority. However, the degree of respect and how
people respond to authority differs from culture to culture. Also, the higher the education level, the more
likely the individual to scrutinize the quality of the authority. Thus, a manager should be aware of these
differences and expect to receive different responses. For this, you would need to be ready to respond
accordingly.

1.4.7.4 Teamwork and responsibility across cultures

Teamwork has a lot to do with being responsible. A good team comprises of team members who are
responsible for their tasks and each other. They are also aware of whom the accountable person is and
ensuring the tasks are completed satisfactorily. Different backgrounds affect how a team operates since
the levels of esteem and skills differ from person to person. Thus, it is a manager’s role to ensure that
every team member works according to their skills and encourage them to work confidently despite their
differences.

1.4.7.5 Interpretations of transparency and ethics across cultures

How transparent should it be? How ethical? Every individual perceives transparency and ethics
differently. However, when standards are used, cultivate the understanding that transparency and
ethical activities must be adhered to at all times. Keep the team members on the same page by
reiterating the importance of maintaining transparency and being ethical in performance.

1.4.7.6 Communication styles across cultures

Some cultures and personality types are quieter and perceived as “introverted,” while others are more
talkative and “extroverted.” These differences are both valuable as they can cater to different needs in a
team. Some positions require more inner thinking, while others need more talking. Place the right people
with the right communication style in the right position. However, when working in a team, a manager
should be aware of those quiet ones and give them equal opportunity to speak up in meetings.

1.4.7.7 Acceptance and reluctance in giving and receiving feedback.

Some individuals are not used to giving and receiving feedback. They tend to stay within the confine of
their comfort zone. It is the manager’s job to ensure that every team member accepts the necessary
feedback and follow through with it. Start by opening yourself to receiving feedback from such
individuals, ask them what they need you to know about. This way, mutual understanding can grow.
Managers in modern multicultural workplaces should be aware of the various background and habitual
differences. It can be quite challenging to manoeuvre, but once you have mastered the skills of
managing a multicultural workplace, the rewards can be tremendous. Thus, having determined how to
be effective in the above-mentioned skills, should easily trickle down onto multicultural management
skills. Being an adept communicator is important in any job, but it is particularly great is you’re able to
communicate effectively with diverse people.

Effectively picking up on nonverbal cues is also an important part of getting to know how other cultures
convey subtle messages. Gestures may mean completely different things in different countries, and
blunders by the uninitiated may lead to much embarrassment all around. In some Asian cultures, a
kissing sound is preferable to whistling to get a friend's attention. But Westerners are sometimes
offended by the kissing sound, mistaking it for over-the-top flirting.
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1.4.7.8 Importance of multicultural skills

It is essential to manage and minimise the cultural differences at all the levels. It helps people
understand better and enhance peace and tranquillity in the society. At the corporate level also it
promotes healthy relations among the work force. It enhances productivity and performance. TCS trains
its executives in foreign languages. All the companies are realizing the significance and importance
attached to multicultural skills. Some companies recruit the talent from different cultural backgrounds so
as to maintain cultural competency. A few business schools and engineering institutions are encouraging
the students across the globe to join and study together. It helps as a training ground getn encultured
and enlightened with other with other cultures. It helps in people getting out of the mindset of ‘frog in
the well’ and broadens their mental faculties.

1.4.7.9 Tools for minimising cultural differences

• Learn to respect others’ cultures. ‘Love your mother but do not hate others’ mother’. Every individual
has right to love his mother, but he has no right to hate others’ mother as for somebody she is the
mother. Similarly, you can love your community and culture and it is absurd to hate others’
community and culture. There is a strong need to empathise with others’ culture.
• An optimist looks at the things from positive perspective where as a pessimist looks from a negative
perspective. Learn to look at the commonalities among various cultures rather than at the
differences. It will help promote cultural synthesis and synergy.
• Develop tolerance towards others’ cultures. And if possible, try to read books that promote cultural
literacy, cultural competency and cultural fluency.
• When you enter into a new cultural zone, closely and keenly observe the situation and people,
analyse and then adopt. Speaking less and observing more is essential.
• Project yourself as a low-key person in a new cultural ambience.
• Don’t criticise and don’t compare others’ culture with that of yours as every culture is unique.
• Develop patience towards others and do not rush in your actions and activities.
• Lot of research and home work needs to be done when entering into a new cultural environment as it
will help glide and guide the process of negotiations smoothly.

Cultural literacy, cultural competency and cultural fluency are essential for personal and professional
growth. Learning others’ cultures and languages activates grey cells. It helps in knowing and
understanding others better and results in cultural adjustment and cultural adaptability, cultural
tolerance and prosperity. It is high we cultivated right attitude and aptitude towards all cultures across
the world.

1.4.7.10 Trustworthiness

This is one of the personality traits that are built overtime with the members of
the organisation including your boss and team members. If the organisation is built by trust then
projects will most likely have a positive outcome because the team members are working better
together. Lack of trust one of the most common causes of disputes in a team, which leads to people
leaving or even betraying each other. As an engineer, you should be honest even if the situation will
not favour you, even if it is painful to deal and even if it contradicts the needs, desires, beliefs, and
intentions of the organisation. This is one of the key personality traits and the most basic job of a good
engineer. Projects tend to fail with dishonesty as the problems that arise may not be addressed
properly. Along with trust, is ethical and morality behaviour, which is very essential in engineering
professions.

1.4.7.11 Problem solving

Not every challenge an engineer faces requires the use of all the aforementioned tools. In fact, maybe
the most valuable tool in the engineering toolbox is one we have not yet discussed—the one that helps
engineers choose the right tools for each job. It is the engineering design process. A big part of an
engineer’s job is solving problems using mathematical or science measures. STEM skills are core of
problem solving in engineering. Engineers need to be strong, not only as analytical thinkers, but also

23
mathematical and/or scientific thinkers who are capable of solving problems brought to them by clients
or employers.

We all solve problems on a daily basis, in academic situations, at work and in our day-to-day lives. Some
of the problems that are typically faced by students include:

• Putting together an argument for an essay

• Debugging a computer programme
• Dealing with an awkward customer when working part-time in a shop or restaurant
• Thinking about how you are going to manage your budget to keep you going until the end of term
• Working out why your printer won’t respond
• Developing a strategy to reach the next level of a computer game.

Any job comes with its own problems to be faced. It is important to show to a manager that you have
the right skills to resolve these problems, and the personal balance to handle the challenges and
pressure they may bring.

First you need to look at problems as a means for opportunities; because they allow you to see things
differently and to do things differently as well, perhaps to showcase your skills.

Before you can attempt to solve any problem, you need to be able to:

• Evaluate information or situations

• Break them down into their key components
• Categorise it
• Consider various ways of approaching and resolving them
• Decide on the most appropriate of solutions from your options
• Develop a process of execution
• Execute with your analytical, creative, time management and organisational skills applied

However, particular skills are needed will vary, depending on the problem and your role in
the organisation, but the following skills are key to problem-solving:

• Analytical Ability (remember it has five elements)

• Lateral Thinking
• Initiative
• Logical Reasoning
• Persistence

Analytical and critical thinking skills help you to evaluate the problem and to make decisions. A logical
and methodical approach is best in some circumstances: for example, you will need to be able to draw
on your academic or subject knowledge to identify solutions of a practical or technical nature.

In other situations, using creativity or lateral thinking skills will be necessary to come up with ideas for
resolving the problem and find fresh approaches. Not everyone has these sets of skills in equal measure,
for this reason, teamwork skills is often a key component in problem-solving. Further skills, such
as communication, and multiculturalism are important in finding solutions to problems involving people.

Whatever issue you are faced with, some steps remain fundamental:

• Identify the problem

• Define the problem
• Examine the options
• Act on a plan
• Look at the consequences

This is the IDEAL model of problem-solving.

The final stage is to put the solution you have decided on into practice and check the results.

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1.4.7.12 Developing your analytical and problem-solving skills

Most problem-solving skills are developed through everyday life and experience. However, the following
interests and activities may be useful in demonstrating a high level of these skills - this may be
particularly important when applying to employers in areas such as engineering, IT, operational research
and some areas of finance.

• ‘Mind games’ such as cryptic crosswords, Sudoku, chess, bridge, etc;

• Computer games – the best of these can involve strategic planning, critical and statistical analysis
and assessing the pros and cons of different courses of action;
• ‘Practical’ interests such as programming, computer repairs, car maintenance, or DIY;
• Working with sound or lighting equipment for a band, event or show;
• Academic study: evaluating different sources of information for essays, designing and constructing
a ‘microshelter’ for an architecture project; setting up a lab experiment.

There are several stages to solving a problem. Each of the five stages are below:

A) Evaluating the problem

• Clarifying the nature of a problem

• Formulating questions
• Gathering information systematically
• Collating and organising data
• Condensing and summarising information
• Defining the desired objective

B) Managing the problem

• Using the information gathered effectively

• Breaking down a problem into smaller, more manageable, parts
• Using techniques such as brainstorming and lateral thinking to consider options
• Analysing these options in greater depth
• Identifying steps that can be taken to achieve the objective

C) Decision-making

• Deciding between the possible options for what action to take

• Deciding on further information to be gathered before taking action
• Deciding on resources (time, funding, staff etc) to be allocated to this problem

D) Resolving the problem

• Implementing action
• Providing information to other stakeholders; delegating tasks
• Reviewing progress

E) Examining the results

• Monitoring the outcome of the action taken

• Reviewing the problem and problem-solving process to avoid similar situations in future

Problem-solving skills and graduate jobs: what do recruiters want?

Analytical ability, problem solving skills and using initiative are among the top ten skills for recruiters of
graduates. They want people who will take the personal responsibility to make sure targets are met;
who can see that there might be a better way of doing something and who are prepared to research and
implement change; people who don’t panic or give up when things go wrong but who will seek a way
around the problem.

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These problems may be similar to academic problems (e.g. in scientific research) or may be more
“practical” problems such as those involved in people management. These skills can be asked for in a
variety of ways. Many job ads will simply ask for candidates who “can take the initiative" or "have the
ability to resolve problems"; others, however, may not make it so clear. You have to learn to interpret
phrases like:

• “Someone keen to take responsibility and with the confidence to challenge established practices and
come up with new ways of working…”
• “An enquiring mind and the ability to understand and solve complex challenges are necessary…”
• “We are looking for innovative minds and creative spirits ...”
• “We need ambitious graduates who will respond with enthusiasm to every issue they face…”

These quotes from employers’ job adverts on graduate websites are all asking for essentially the same
two things:

• The ability to use your own initiative, to think for yourself, to be creative and pro-active.
• The ability to resolve problems, to think logically and/or laterally, to use ingenuity to overcome
difficulties and to research and implement solutions.

These qualities help graduates to make a difference to their employer, whether that employer provides a
service or manufactures a product.

How will recruiters or potential employers assess these skills?

On application forms

If analytical or problem-solving skills are a key part of the job, there is likely to be a question on
the application form which asks you to give evidence of your competency in these areas, such as:

• Describe a situation in which you analysed data and solved a complex problem;
• Describe a complex problem you have faced and the steps that you took to solve it;
• Describe a setback in your life and say what you did to overcome it. What lessons did you learn from
this?
• Describe a time when you demonstrated creativity in solving a difficult problem;
• Describe a time when you provided a new or different solution to a problem;
• Give me a specific example of a time when you used good judgment and logic in solving a problem;
• Describe a difficult problem that you have solved. State how you decided which were the critical
issues, say what you did and what your solution was. What other approaches could you have taken?
• Give an example of a problem you have solved that required analysis. What methods did you use
and what conclusions did you reach?

When answering these questions, cover the process you used to solve the problem rather than just
outlining the problem itself. Give examples of how you used initiative/creativity, or made effective use of
resources, in solving the problem. It is also useful to say what you learned from this process, especially
if the problem was not resolved to your complete satisfaction.

Evidence you could give to an employer to convince them that you have problem-solving skills

Examples could come from your course, extra-curricular activities such as student societies, school, work
or work experience, year-in-industry placements, travel or other sources.

EXAMPLES:

• Analysing data from a project or experiment

• Working as a “troubleshooter” on a computer helpdesk
• Advising a client at the Kent Law Clinic
• Implementing a new filing system in an office job
• Acting as a student rep
• Dealing with staff problems or unexpected staff shortages in a part-time job
• Coping with living on a limited student budget
26
Putting the evidence onto an application form: A scenario below:

During the interview

Give an example of a time when you have successfully resolved a complex problem:

1: Describe a situation from the last five years when you demonstrated effective use the skill you have
chosen?:

In the second year of my studies, I took part with two friends in a “Robot Challenge” competition. The
brief was on designing and building a robot that could perform a dance routine synchronised with a
music soundtrack.

2: What action did you have to take?

My responsibility was to control the movement of the robot through the sensors and actuators. This was
a complex task because of the number of movements that the robot was required to execute and the
different stimuli to which it had to respond. In addition, the robot proved particularly sensitive to
changes in light levels and I needed to experiment with a number of adaptations to discover the
optimum balance between responsiveness and reliability.

3: What was the result of your action?

Our team achieved second place in the local competition and progressed to the regional final, where we
came fifth out of 25 teams.

Through psychometric tests

The most common of these tests involves verbal and numerical reasoning: you may also
encounter diagrammatic reasoning and critical thinking tests. They may be administered online at an
early stage of the selection process, or at first interview or assessment centres. There is a great deal of
information about these tests at www.kent.ac.uk/careers/psychotests.htm ... Several organisations even
here in SA give such tests for various reasons. It is good to familiarise yourself with them for exposure.

Further questioning on the answers given on your application form

If your application form has included competency-based questions such as the ones above, you can
expect the employer to ask for more detail about the problem or the situation and the way that you
went about finding a solution. Be prepared to be asked about alternative ways in which you might have
gone about tackling this problem and what you would have done if things hadn’t worked out.

Hypothetical questions

Competency-based questions ask you about actions that you have taken in the past: hypothetical
questions ask you about the course of action you might take in the event of some fictional situation,
often work-related.

• "How would you deal with a staff member who persistently arrives late and takes
regular, unauthorised, breaks from work for a cigarette?”
• "You are working on the till in a retail store when a customer’s credit card is refused.
The cardholder is a regular customer who is trying to buy a present for their mother’s birthday the
following day. How would you deal with this situation?"
• "Your manager regularly leaves you in charge of a small office in his absence. The other staff
regularly complain to you about the way he runs things, and how irritated they are by his
interference in their day-to-day work - what do you do?"
27
• "You work in a company that manufactures meat pies and pasties. Sales have been falling for several
years and you are asked to come up with ideas to revive the company”

There is usually no right or wrong answer to these questions: the interviewers are seeking to assess
your logical thinking and common sense. You may need to ask questions to clarify the situation and
gather more information. You can expect your answers to be challenged, the interviewers asking
questions such as:

• “Yes, but what if …?”

• “Have you thought about ….?”
• “Why would you do that …?”

This doesn’t mean that there is anything wrong with the answer you have given – just that the
interviewers are trying to find out how you have arrived at your solution to the problem. They may also
be testing you out to see how you cope with pressure and how well you can argue a point. Although the
situation is hypothetical, if you have been faced with any similar situation in real life you can use this,
and the way that you handled it then, to support your answer.
For further information on handling hypothetical questions,
see www.kent.ac.uk/careers/intervw.htm#Hypothetical

Technical questions

These are most commonly asked at interviews for science, engineering and IT posts. They may relate to
your previous relevant work experience or to a student project, or may relate to hypothetical situations
as in the examples below:

• “The scenario was that we were in charge of lighting a theatre. We were given different conditions
as to what type of problem could be caused by various faults in the lighting plan and who this
problem would affect e.g. lighting technician, stage manager or director. There was only ever one
problem with the lighting plan.
It got harder as different conditions were added to the original ones and you had to take more and
more information into consideration, such as: certain lights need to always be turned on first; some
lights need to be warmed up in the breaks; different lights create different effects”
• “I was asked to suggest a route to synthesise ethylene glycol – one of the company’s products”
(Chemistry graduate interviewed by petrochemicals company)
• “If I were organising a national cancer screening campaign, what standards/ precautions/ feasibility/
practicality checks would I do before implementing the scheme?” (Medical physicist)
• “They asked technical questions mainly to work out my thought process on problem solving, there
was no correct answer as long as they were logical and eventually you had to come to a point where
you gave up and admitted defeat!”
(Graduate interviewed for IT support post with NHS trust)

Ethical questions

You should be aware of the legal and regulatory framework behind these questions. You will be expected
to put both sides of the argument before giving your opinion and can expect to be challenged and asked
to justify your opinion.

Engineering’s ethical questions may be drawn from technical (incompetence), discrimination

(favouritism, bribery, harassment), health, safety, welfare of the general public, climate change to
environment, as well as commercial. The most prevalent ethical issue in SA is corruption; taking bribes,
misuse of resources and poor quality of work. You should always be cautious of unethical conduct.

Alternatively, you may be asked questions related to the issues facing real-life clients:

• A manufacturer of water boring machines, based in the rural area of Eastern Cape, wants to expand
into further mainland rural areas in South Africa. What issues should they consider? What risks
might they face?
• A bridge is needed between a rural area and a city. What issues need to be thought about?

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Through group tasks and discussions at assessment centres

Almost all assessment centres will involve a strong element of group work. These tasks may involve the
group sitting around a table discussing a problem or may (as in the final two examples) be more active
and practical:

• “We were asked to come up with a business proposal for building a computer network between
an imaginary group of islands, to be presented to the islands government”
• Candidates for a place at medical school were given background information on ten patients and
asked to select five of them who would receive a kidney transplant
• “We were provided with information on four sites that were possible locations for the construction
of a nuclear power station. This information included material on the environment, the local
economy, transport links and the estimated costs of construction. We had to select one and
recommend it to the Secretary of State for Energy, giving the reasons for our decision.”
• “We were given a task involving Lego bricks - we had to work out how many bricks we wanted to
use to build the tallest tower possible at the lowest cost”
• “A large part of the Army Officer selection process takes place outdoors – the teams of candidates
have to negotiate an obstacle course using ladders, ropes, poles and planks”

The decision reached by the group is likely to be less important than the way in which the group works
together to reach its decision – these tasks aim to test your teamworking and negotiation, as well as
your problem-solving, skills.

A logic puzzle to test your problem-solving skills

• There are eight adjoining houses in a row in different colours: blue, orange, green, red, white,
grey, brown and yellow.
• In each house lives a person of different nationality: British, Chinese, African, German, French,
American, Pakistani and Dutch.
• Each person drinks a different beverage: grape juice, coffee, milk, tea, water, coffee, green juice
and orange juice.
• Each person has a different job: journalist, postman, magician, teacher, janitor, astronaut and
actuary.
• Each person keeps a different pet: tiger, zebra, parrot, shark, cobra, dog, cat and chimpanzee.
• The British person lives in a red house.
• The Chinese person lives in a brown house
• The Dutch person keeps in a green house.
• The Pakistani drinks tea.
• The green house is on the left of the white, next to it.
• The owner of the green house drinks coffee.
• The journalist rears parrots.
• The owner of the yellow house is an actuary.
• The person living in the house in the centre drinks milk.
• The American lives in the first house.
• The astronaut lives next to the person who owns a tiger.
• The man who keeps a zebra lives next to the actuary.
• The postman drinks grape juice.
• The German is a magician.
• The American lives next to the blue house.
• The astronaut has a neighbour who drinks water.

SHARE HOW YOU SOLVED THIS PROBLEM IN THE ONLINE CLASSROOM PLATFORM.

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 Learning unit 2

The Engineering Professions

2.1 Introduction

Engineering profession has been largely viewed as rigid, dull, boring, lonely and quiet, structural, aloof,
secluded and all about memoralisation. Indeed, it has been more of those things and more. Often
overlooked, it’s been more in the sense of innovation, creativity and competition. Undeniably, order is
necessary even when one is being creative hence the structural aspect of engineering shouldn’t
necessarily cloud one’s reasoning and end up a slave of memoralisation of existing techniques and
procedures. Those exist as a guide towards quality and competitive designs. Life is not static. Those
rules and methods were not developed for them never to be modified. Innovativeness are means of
modifying working designs to become more relevant in addressing dynamic demands across societal
issues.

2.2 Innovativeness, creativity and competitiveness

In vast changing global demands across all spheres of life from health, environment, economies,
lifestyle, education, technology; constant innovation, creativity and competitiveness are undeniable.
These are essential to set the trends and or catch up for some developing and least developed
economies. Thus, innovation, creativity and competitiveness vary from one industry to the other.
Regardless of one’s industry it remains futile to negate importance of these skills set. If one is about
success and excellence they have to meet and perform beyond mere expectations tapping into
innovativeness, creativity and competitiveness. The variability of these elements is such that, while
creativity in visual arts can be depiction of abstract images that inspire viewers, in theatre, it can be
compilation of great music into an appealing ensemble. On the other hand, innovation in healthcare
delivery might mean devising new systems for monitoring provision, producing a new range of inspiring
training materials to motivate staff, or creating new ways of sharing limited resources. For example, by
introducing electronic devices that help staff share same information about staff and resources.

On the other hand, in financial services, it might involve the development of new ways to make
contactless payments, or the use of biometrics to increase security. In engineering, innovation does not
always mean product orientation, though it often does. It can also involve the development of new
products or systems, innovative ways of capacitating staff and new strategies for quality control.

Individual’s task:

Search online and identify “fresh ideas” that depict innovativeness and creativity along
with some of engineering designs. Submit this in the platform provided for you
on Blackboard.

2.3 What is innovation?

Simply, it’s an improvement on an existing product of manner of doing things, such as improvement of
how administrative staff members do their work. Generally, the definition of innovation is contested.
Below are few of the definitions applicable to engineering design context. According to Sternberf et al., it
is “the channelling of creativity so as to produce a creative idea and/or product that people can and wish
to use.” On the other hand, Myers and Marquis argue that “innovations are the units of technological
change.” Furthermore, they claim that “innovation is not just a single action but a process of interrelated
subprocesses. It is not just the conception of a new idea, nor the invention of a new device, nor the
development of a new market. The process is all of these things acting in an integrated fashion toward a
common objective.” In technology fields, innovation is often regarded as “the use of new knowledge to
offer a new product or service that customers want, is invention + commercialization.” In reviewing this
definition (so and so) regard it as the definition that trends towards entrepreneurship, with which they
wish to distinguish.

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Therefore, they indicate that: “innovation is the act of creating something new and worthwhile,
entrepreneurship is the act of carrying an innovation to market in a commercial manner.” They also
stress that “innovation and innovative design play a major role within entrepreneurship, but it is
upstream from the commercialization stage, which is a major component of entrepreneurship.”
Additionally, they reveal that oftenly, innovation is considered as “the artifact, i.e., the end result, and
not the process that is examined.” However, they argue that innovation, “is a socio-technical process,
and attempts to define innovation in purely technical terms misleads in that it is divorced from human
influence.” More importantly, they reveal that:

“innovative engineering design methods apply to new processes, systems, and services, as well as
to new products. Engineering design is a social process that begins with an opportunity (a
problem) that is resolved though a question-driven divergent process that develops knowledge
about clients, stakeholders, users, needs, specifications, market assessments, and current
technology that is used to contextualize the innovative processes for concept generation. However,
some proponents stress that group dynamics is the key to innovation and hence advocate
methods such as synectics (“the bringing together of diversity”), mind mapping, and brainstorming.
The benefits of diversity in the engineering industry cannot be overlooked. Different perspectives
influenced by diverse worldviews born from multiculturalistic values. According to various sources,
innovative designs is the chance intersection of knowledge and circumstances, necessity, dictate, genius,
unique childhood experiences. This can be associated with the adage that, ‘opportunity knocks.’ Thus,
when you realise an issue and have means to address it; do so. However, “innovations may also come
from methods that are learnable”. Rogers, claims that “as a learnable process, innovative engineering
design fits within the larger framework of engineering design.” In support of this notion, Horváth
proposes framework for order in design research, and places design innovation within the broader
research into design methodologies. Accordingly, design innovation is a methodology that can be
studied, analysed and ultimately learned. Along this, design innovation research is concerned with both
innovative products and innovative processes.

Some managers in engineering industry consider innovation as inefficient because they view it as
undisciplined1, contrarian2 and iconoclastic3. Their preference is of an innovation occurring according to a
prior schedule. In support of this notion, Pugh claims that “what is required is a process of disciplined
creativity rather than innovation.” He sternly recommends that companies should employ a “Total
Design” process, one in which the design process “connects the selling function (output) back to the
market or user need (input) and links together all the other activities, including specifications of the
need, concept design, and manufacture.” Hence, engineers that know innovative design methods and
techniques for fostering innovation should be of great value to companies.

A useful approach to classifying innovation concepts is shared by Carayannis et al. [7], along four
dimensions:
1. Process: how an innovation is developed, diffused, and adopted
2. Content: the specific technical or social nature of the innovation
3. Context: the environment in which the innovation emerges
4. Impact: technological and social change that results

1.4 Types of innovation

There are different types of innovations across fields and industry, some examples are:
1. A new product, system or service aimed at an existing market/task, e.g. introducing a robot
that bathes a bed ridden patient
• An existing product, system or service which is used in a new way, e.g. a tracking system
used in manufacturing, which is then applied to tracking workers on site.
• A new product or service which discovers – or even creates – an entirely new consumer need
or market. (When you realise a new product you never thought you need till it’s introduced).

1
Undisciplined refers to not belonging into a specific ‘box’ field or discipline.
2
Contrarian means that it rejects/opposes popular ideas or status quo.
3
Iconoclastic refers to criticising and attacking popular beliefs.
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Online duet’s research engagement: Exercise

Work in pairs. Choose one other student to work with and submit your work on blackboard, answering
these questions:

What are your favourite examples of innovation in Engineering and Technology?

When you look at any one of them, is there anything you’d wish to improve?
Whether yes or not: Why so? If yes, what innovation would you suggest improving on the
existing product?

Rase calls on engineers to strive to do new original and creative work and not be content with the route
and unimaginative work which, while necessary, should be done as efficiently and effectively as possible.
Secondly, he highlights the need for engineers to take on broader responsibilities and seek to work
across all spheres of a project rather than allowing themselves to be consigned to be the servants of
those who lead only by virtue of being the master of finances.

According to Claudiu Pirnau, Daniel Ghiculescu, and Ion Niculae Marinescu (2017:1), the future
engineers’ education is based on two fundamental factors: creativity and innovation. The limitations
needed in developing the creativity and the innovation can be analysed from two perspectives: (1) the
individual who learns (intellectual capital) and (2) the creative community (Creative & Connected
Community, Creative Bio - Community etc.).

2.4 What is creativity?

Some researchers have studied people who are considered creative to determine attributes necessary
and the conditions that urge creative thinking. Among different theories developed on creativity (see, for
example, the review in Richards, three main elements are necessary for creativity or innovation: (1)
acquisition of domain skills, (2) developing creative thinking skills, and (3) intrinsic motivation.

The creative thinking skills enable engineers to create hypotheses, to produce and outspread ideas, to
explore their imagination and to pursue innovative alternatives for solving problems. Uniting ideas can
result in “another way” of doing things, to the continuation of “the same way” of doing things or to ideas
about “how not to continue” working that way. For long it has been considered that creativity and
innovation are vital drivers of the economic growth sustainability and the competitive achievements in
knowledge-based economy. Along this, engineering departments of the technical universities have been
urged to develop new disciplines and programmes to develop creativity, based on an original and
valuable implementation of creativity increase techniques, providing practical solutions to include
creativity in the engineering programmes.

Many companies prefer brainstorming often exclusively, to foster creativity, along this, Osborne crafted
the term “brainstorming” to promote his notion that creative ideas were sealed up in people’s minds but
were not released for fear of rejection. Accordingly, in a judgment free environment, the ideas are often
released in a flood. Along this notion on, research reveals that brainstorming certainly has its place, the
reliance of engineering designers on this technique—e.g., a survey of 400 Japanese companies in 1989
showed 87% using this technique, well above all other techniques even though it was developed for
marketing, not engineering. Another recent study by Simón examined the use of creativity methods
within Swiss companies and found that over 90% use brainstorming (or its variants) and a few other
techniques. It seems that no companies employed more than a handful of different methods. Clearly
with this background, there is a large benefit to be gained from learning innovative and creative design
techniques.

In a nutshell, within the terrains of a social framework, an individual can creatively innovate and invent
excellent products that lend value to the livelihoods of others; informed by preferred theoretical
foundations. An innovative and creative individual complemented with excellence might even have
clarity on whether to become an employee or an entrepreneur for creating employment for others. An
employee refers to an individual who works for somebody else or an organisation, whereas an
entrepreneur could be the owner of company that one works for or an individual employing the
employee.

The engineering industry has many companies with highly competitive positions that engineers compete
for to become and continue being their employees. If they decide to be an employee, they’d thrive to
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show their excellence, creativity and innovativeness through the service and performance of at their
workplace as stipulated and agreed upon between the employer and an employee, thus, employment.
On the other side, if they settle on becoming an entrepreneur; excellence, creativity and innovativeness
would still be crucial for their entrepreneurship aspirations to flourish.

2.5 What is competition?

2.5.1 Competition and engineering

There are top engineering companies requiring competitive engineers. However, overall, careers in
engineering won't be cut short any time soon, especially in software development (there's a debate on
whether or not that's actually engineering, but that's for another time). Just strive to be the best that
you can be, and be smart when competing against others.

Engineering, at large is competitive because there is a huge demand…and there is a huge demand for
good engineers and good talent. Due to dynamic advancements, we are witnessing so many changes
that require immense resources and mostly competitive engineers to develop. It’s competitive because
people see this demand and see that you can just type on a keyboard write code and get paid lucratively
and even work from anywhere in the world just git push your code. It’s attractive and many people
choose this safe and highly compensated route.

In the study of Engineering: Engineering is not an easy subject and typically requires intense study.
Naturally, the pressure to succeed at it appears competitive.
In engineering Employment: Once in the workforce, management consistently seeks those who work
hard and produce the most successful results.

2.6 Entrepreneurship and employment in engineering

“Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. The act that endows resources
with a new capacity to create wealth.” – Peter Drucker

The engineering skills have long dominated entrepreneurship. For example, many established and
influential companies such as, Rolls Royce, Dyson, Intel, Oracle and Yahoo!, Edison, Sasol, Natref, Acer
Mittal, Eskom (have also been powerful engineering company in South Africa, regardless recent bad
news about it). This reveals the influence that engineering impeccably employed alongside main
business ideals and principles.
Vast recent changes in the world order impose both challenges and opportunities to the engineering
education. The environment is dominated with difference from engineering in a decade ago. The practice
of engineering has been changing with the globalization of manufacturing, research and development.
New interdisciplinary fields have come to life and traditional engineering is increasingly influenced by the
information technology. Employment shifts to smaller entrepreneurial firms often located offshore.
Engineering education seems poised to follow the jobs. Entrepreneurship is becoming the most powerful
answer. Entrepreneurship in engineering is something that engineers, have been able to learn on their
own, usually well beyond their university stage of their careers. However, this has been changing rapidly
recently. This change is becoming reflected in the curricula, but more importantly, in the attitude at our
academic institutions.
Several institutions with engineering studies have long incorporated entrepreneurship in engineering
curricula. Conventionally, courses on entrepreneurship situated in business or management schools. But
this has change when many educational institutions began to realise the importance entrepreneurial
education in the engineering curriculum.
Nowadays many prominent institutions including VUT offer exemplary programmes wide range of
courses in launching, managing, and growing technology based businesses available to engineering and
science students. The courses use a variety of teaching methods: case studies, internships, guest
lectures, external reviews of student assignments by venture capitalists and student projects. All courses
involve teamwork and focus on presentation skills.

2.7 Manufacturing and Infrastructure in engineering

Nearly everything we use in our daily life is man-made or manufactured. The desk and chair you’re
sitting on, shoes on your feet and clothes you’re wearing, even the pen and the notebook you’re using
are manufactured.

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All manufacturing designs are born from an idea to a concept generated right through to end products
that we use. The cars we drive and the smartphones we use and cannot live without them because they
have become part of things we value in life, started as concepts.

So, manufacturing influences our lives and our lives influence manufacturing. Which one comes first?

The reality is complex and interesting.

2.7.1 What is Manufacturing Engineering?

It is the designing and operating of the manufacturing systems for a product. They select top
technologies and process to manufacture a product, plan and design the factory that will produce the
product and manage the running and maintenance and continuous improvement of the manufacturing
process.

Manufacturing engineering is the branch of engineering that focuses on finding and using the best
equipment needed to turn raw materials into a finished product in the most efficient and effective way
possible.

2.7.1.1 The importance of manufacturing engineering

Our lives are rapidly changing due to vast and advanced innovation, technology and sustainability. Both,
the public and private sectors are lamenting for a need of manufacturing engineering interventions. The
branch of manufacturing engineering is concerned with understanding, analysing and improving complex
industrial, manufacturing and infrastructure systems. It is responsible for certifying that manufacturing
is carried out (and the end product is produced) in the most time-efficient and cost-effective way while
still maintaining overall product quality.

2.7.1.2 What do manufacturing engineers do?

The roles of manufacturing engineers vary from organisation to another. For instance, in new facilities or
production setups, they might be involved in the establishment of systems and determining the best
process of manufacture. However, in existing manufacturing set-ups, they are more likely to work in the
monitoring of equipment and identifying opportunities for improvements to increase productivity while
maintaining product quality. Manufacturing Engineering is probably the most flexible and marketable of
all the engineering disciplines. Many engineers that originally studied other engineering disciplines will
end up practicing as Manufacturing Engineers.

Due to the responsibility of verifying efficiency and effectiveness of the produced products, they may
also be responsible for inventory control, quality management and control, material flow, cost analysis,
procurement and supply chain management. Their main goal is to create the stages of a manufacturing
system that ultimately produces a product in the most time-efficient and cost-effective way possible,
while always maintaining staff safety and product quality. Some of the examples of what manufacturing
engineers do are to:

• Design a product, such as cell phone manufacturing processes to reduce costs and improve
product quality
• Automate an engine manufacturing facility through use of robotics and computer integrated
technology
• Figure out the most optimal layout of machines and equipment for manufacturing cells in discrete
parts manufacturing.
• Develop and implement fabrication processes for microprocessors
• Identify the most cost-effective material handling and facility layout alternative for an aerospace
manufacturing company
• Design the tools or equipment to manufacture a product if none exist
• Select the best technologies and processes for manufacturing it,
• Plan and design the factory that will produce the product, and
• Oversee the running, management, maintenance and improvement of the factory.

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Tasks of manufacturing engineers may vary greatly between roles depending on the final product of
manufacturing, but examples of tasks include:

• Conceptual design of the manufacturing process.

• Analyse the product and design a method to produce that product efficiently
• Production management including managing of production targets and inventory control
• Continuous improvement and elimination of waste through ongoing analysis and identification of
inefficiencies within the system
• Installation of new equipment
• General oversight and monitoring of machinery, including project coordination for maintenance,
upgrades and repair when needed
• Working with manufacturing staff to train on new equipment or optimisation processes
• Help with troubleshooting of problems within the manufacturing process
• May have budgetary responsibilities
For one to be a great Manufacturing Engineer, it is also important to keep up to date with new
technologies and improvements in the field.

2.7.1.3 What skills do Manufacturing Engineers need?

Manufacturing Engineering is based on core mechanical engineering skills, including important elements
from mechatronics, commerce, economics and business management. For example, a modern factory
would ask or hire a manufacturing engineer, not only does the factory need to produce a product, it also
needs to produce it efficiently and be able to meet the demand for the product, and do so at the right
cost, quality and delivery timeframe.

Manufacturing engineers are trained to see the ‘big picture’ as well as ‘the specific details’.
The skills needed to be an effective manufacturing engineer include:

• Analytical Skills: is the ability to identify areas of low, medium and high efficiency and work to
provide improvements
• Critical Thinking Skills: is the ability to draw parallels between different scenarios and choose
the best for quality product
• Lean Manufacturing Skills: is the ability to identify and eliminate waste within the system
• QA and QC Skills: ability to tackle ISO 9000, Six Sigma, Statistical Process Control, etc
• Communication Skills: is the ability to communicate verbally and nonverbally, effectively as
you will work with manufacturing colleagues at all levels and need to be able to effectively
explain the relevant points of equipment to each. Also needed for successful project management
• Technical Skills: is the ability to work with different technology to provide a solution that
produces the required result in the most efficient way possible
• Commercial Awareness: is the ability to have the “bigger picture” in mind at all times when
considering each step of the manufacturing process
• Problem Solving Skills: is the ability to develop a concept of a process and establish the
equipment needed to make it happen
• Time management and Organisational Skills: is the ability to prioritise tasks, set schedules
and work between different projects to achieve overall business goals

Note: In the USA and EU Manufacturing engineering is equivalent to ‘Industrial Engineering’.

2.7.1.4 What are the top manufacturing engineering and job types in the Mzantsi?

• Vehicle technicians, mechanics and electricians

• Metal working production and maintenance fitters
• Routine inspectors and testers
• Electrical and electronic trades
• Engineering technicians
• Welding trades
• Metal machining setters and setter-operators
• Metal working machine operatives
• Assemblers (vehicles and metal goods)
• Skilled metal, electrical and electronic trades supervisors

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2.8 What is infrastructure?

As a term, Infra- means below and often its foundations are exactly below the ground, like water and
natural gas supply systems. Contemporary infrastructure is viewed to be any facility we expect but don't
think about because it works for us in the background, unnoticed, below our radar. Against this, the
global information infrastructure for communications and internet involves satellites in space, but not
underground at all, yet we rarely think about how that last Tweet got to us so quickly. Through
satellites.

As a phenomenon Infrastructure refers to the framework of interdependent networks and systems

often regarded by architects, engineers and urban planners to describe critical facilities, services and
organisational structures for communal use, most commonly for populations in cities and towns. From a
political perspective, infrastructure is considered as a means for a nation to deliver services and help
corporations operate and deliver goods such as water, electricity, sewage and entire production, of
which are all about movement and delivery through infrastructure.

Infrastructure is not exclusive to particular country. For example, engineers in nations across the globe
have developed customised high-tech solutions for their own societal needs. Those are solutions focused
on protecting their entire nations. Thus, all countries have some form of infrastructure, which can
include these systems:

• Roads, tunnels, and bridges, including the Interstate Highway System

• Mass-transit systems (e.g., trains and rails)
• Airport runways and control towers
• Telephone lines and cell phone towers
• Dams and reservoirs
• Hurricane barriers
• Levees and pumping stations
• Waterways, canals, and ports
• Electrical power lines and connections (i.e., the national power grid)
• Fire stations and equipment
• Hospitals, clinics, and emergency response systems
• Schools
• Law enforcement and prisons
• Sanitation and waste removal facilities for solid waste, wastewater, and hazardous waste
• Post offices and mail delivery
• Public parks and other types of green infrastructure

2.8.1 What is infrastructure engineering?

An infrastructure engineer is a unique position that has evolved as the Internet has become mainstream.
An infrastructure engineer is responsible for designing, coordinating and maintaining the infrastructure
of an apartment complex, public facility or entire cities, as “Infrastructure” can be largely regarded as
the systems that support a community. In today’s digital world, an infrastructure engineer is
prominently an information technology position. The needs of a community such as a road and highway
networks, water and sewage, electricity, railways, telecommunications and gas lines, instead of
networks of these, today’s infrastructure engineer builds and maintains the digital network of these
systems within a community work in unison with each other.

Infrastructure engineers can be employed by public facilities such as hospitals, schools and libraries.
They can also be employed by the government at the city, province, district or national level. The role of
infrastructure engineers is a white-collar position, with most having a bachelor’s degree in engineering,
computer science or a related field. Their typical work environment is either in the office, or in the field
analysing or working on a system’s infrastructure. Their duties and responsibilities vary and may have
several duties in their quest to maintain the infrastructure of their employer or client. Some of these
include the following list of the core duties and responsibilities of an infrastructure engineer.

• Conducting a root cause analysis of network malfunctions

o Identifying the cause of issues within their employer or client’s network infrastructure.
o This requires knowledge of how devices communicate with each other, as well as an
understanding of the equipment that makes this communication possible.

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 • Create and implement network repair strategies
o Once a problem is identified, the Infrastructure Engineer devises and implements a repair
strategy.
o They then test these repairs to ensure the issue is fixed completely.

• Document network malfunctions and corresponding actions taken

o It is the responsibility of the Infrastructure Engineer to document all infrastructure issues,
as well as the actions taken to address said issues.
o This requires analytical skills and proficiency with spreadsheets.

• Provide training and technical support for users with varying levels of IT knowledge
o The Infrastructure Engineer is responsible for teaching new software or applications to
their coworkers.
o They are also responsible for diagnosing and fixing any technical issues with individual
devices on their employer’s network.

• Complete routine preventative maintenance of network infrastructure

o This duty is all about network security.
o This involves implementing software and operating system updates.
o It also includes looking for and addressing potential cybersecurity threats.

2.8.2 Infrastructure Engineer Skills

The most important skills of an infrastructure engineer are the comprehensive understanding of the
principles of how a network of devices functions, as well as deep knowledge of the hardware involved in
this process. Apart from that, the skillset of an infrastructure engineer is not entirely technical. However,
it is also very crucial to be able to work well with others, especially at larger companies. Below, are
some of the skills for an infrastructure engineer. These are the Core Skills: required to find
employment as an infrastructure engineer:

• Proficiency with network hardware and technologies

• Proficiency with shared storage technologies
• Proficiency with Microsoft operating systems
• Extensive knowledge of data privacy laws
• Precise attention to detail
• Ability to prioritise tasks
• Advanced organisational skills
• Analytical skills
• Problem solving skills
• Ability to work under pressure

Advanced Skills: The following skills are not required by most employers, but possessing them will put
you at a competitive advantage:
• Active listening skills
• Project management skills
• Presentation skills

Tools of the Trade: There are a handful of software tools an Infrastructure Engineer uses to complete
their duties. Below are some of those tools:
• Web platform development software, such as Drupal or Enterprise Javabeans
• Enterprise resource planning software, such as Infor ERP Baan or Microsoft Dynamics GP
• Developmental environment software, such as Assembler or Eclipse software
• Database system management software, such as Alpha Four.

2.8.3 Why infrastructure is important?

Infrastructure is important because we all use it and we all pay for it. Using and paying for infrastructure
can be as complicated as the infrastructure itself. Most people depend on transportation systems and
public utilities, which also are essential for the economic vitality of our businesses. These are considered
as public works systems. We expect the infrastructure systems to function all the time for us because we
use them but we don’t like to pay for them. Who likes paying tax? People pay it because they are
37
obliged and regulated to pay, if not penalised. Often the cost is hidden in plain view, such as the added
taxes to your utility and telephone bill, for example, may help pay for infrastructure. Even teenagers
with motorbikes help pay for infrastructure, unknowingly with every litre of gasoline used. A "highway-
user tax" is added to each gallon of motor fuel (e.g., gasoline, diesel) sold. This money goes into what is
called the Highway Trust Fund in order to pay for repairs and replacement of roads, bridges and tunnels.
Likewise, each airline ticket you buy has a federal excise tax that should be used to maintain the
infrastructure needed to support air travel. The infrastructure may begin to crumble if the tax doesn't
keep increasing enough. These excise taxes are consumption taxes that are in addition to your income
taxes, which also can be used to pay for infrastructure.

2.8.4 Failures of infrastructure

On the most basic level, every community requires access to clean water and sanitary waste disposal.
Every citizen should expect to live in comfort and safety. Poorly maintained infrastructure can lead to a
devastating loss of life, poor health and property. Kevin Wall who was the lead researcher in the 2006‚
2011 and 2017 South African Institution of Civil Engineering infrastructure report cards warned that
infrastructure maintenance has been on the slide for the last dozen years and it has not gotten any
better. He stresses that “We cannot afford to build only to permit decay. We want to move from a
situation of ‘patch and pray’ to one of ‘find and fix’. Maintenance is crucial.” 4 He also indicates that a
combination of limited resources‚ public sector restructuring‚ inefficiency‚ skill shortages and “less than
optimum governance,” had led to “extreme pressure on the condition of the public infrastructure asset
base.” Moreover, he also reveals “concern that the water and sanitation fixed infrastructure of the
country appears to be stuck in a condition that is at best ‘satisfactory for now’... to ‘at worst‚ unfit for
purpose’, yet “mostly at risk of failure‚ [because where the] infrastructure is not coping with demand and
is poorly maintained. It is likely that the public will be subjected to severe inconvenience and even
danger without prompt action.”

Wall also highlighted that “The current replacement cost of [government] infrastructure‚ excluding that
owned by state-owned enterprises‚ is immense. The replacement cost of water and sanitation
infrastructure alone would be of the order of R1‚400-billion – or half of national GD.” Consequentially, he
stressed, “If the government spends its maintenance budget on fixing infrastructure only after it has
already broken down‚ then it’s effectively throwing away a large proportion of that budget‚ funds that
could rather have been used elsewhere. If infrastructure is not looked after‚ the people who suffer the
most are the poor.” With the rampant challenges with South African infrastructure across the country;
metropolitan areas infrastructure is fit for supply and sanitation, sadly, the rural areas infrastructure is
at imminent risk of failure as it has not been upgraded for years. Undeniable failures of infrastructure, of
which some have claimed human lives have been witnessed across board. The South African Institution
for Civil Engineers (SAICE), with the help of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR)
recently published report card on infrastructure. The research reveals that failure to maintain our
infrastructure is not only costing the country huge amounts of money, it could also kill us (literally and
figuratively). The research was conducted across all kinds of infrastructure, ranging from:
• Water,
• Sanitation,
• Solid waste,
• Roads,
• Airports,
• Railways,
• Electricity,
• Health and
• Education

Based on the findings, the grading was of the categories and subcategories. The ratings range from
“world class” (A) to “unfit for purpose” (E), as follows:
A. “world class”
B. “fit for the future”
C. “satisfactory for now”
D. “at risk of failure”
E. “unfit for purpose”

4
See the speeches of the 2018’s ‘Water Institute of Southern Africa conference’ in Cape Town
38
The overall rating of South Africa's infrastructure is D+, down from a C- in 2011, just after the Soccer
World Cup’s infrastructure upgrades. This means that SA's infrastructure, according to the civil engineers
(including those that work for the state), is “at risk of failure.” Among the 29 subcategories there is only
one A (the Gautrain) and four Bs (national roads, airports, ports and heavy load freight lines). There are,
however, 13 Ds and two E's (the latter for sanitation in non-urban areas, and all gravel roads).
According to SAICE, this rating is the result of a continued lack of maintenance and neglect. Considering
a lack of long-term planning, inadequate funding, no management systems, poor data collection and
skills, hence, a country with infrastructure on the verge of collapse. Infrastructure such as water,
sanitation, roads and educational facilities are public assets that impact everyone and it’s crucial to have
such timeously maintained. These help to improve life expectancy, facilitate social mobility and access to
economic opportunities and help boost economic growth and development. Without infrastructure, no
progress is possible, especially the progress that is envisaged by the government through the National
Development Plan, nor the realisation of rights that the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa
entrusted to Government as their mandate. Some of the examples of failed infrastructure in SA into the
following categories:
1. Broken/Debilitated in need of repairing and maintenance
2. Not extended/upgraded to the population growth
3. Inequitable along geo-political designation
4. Deficiency of literacy on the importance of infrastructure.

Group work:

Groups of people from the same neighbourhoods/provinces

Talk with your colleagues, look around and identify pertinent issues in your neighbourhoods and or
surrounding areas where you are now, to determine:
1. What has happened, where, which you identify as infrastructural disaster or failure?
2. What can be changed?
3. Is your infrastructure maintained? If yes: How? If not: Why is our infrastructure not maintained?
4. Who needs to do what for repairing and maintenance of our infrastructure?
5. What would happen to the citizens when ambulances are not serviced?
6. Whose responsibility is it to ensure that the electrical substations do not blow up?
7. Does the country have enough human capital with adequate skills to help manufacture, maintain
and repair infrastructure? Elaborate.
8. What can be done to prevent infrastructural disaster/s?

NOTE: There’s a platform on blackboard provided for you to submit your work.
This essay can also be uploaded onto your electronic portfolio of evidence.

The effectiveness of governmental service delivery largely depends on adequate infrastructure that helps
to prevent various disasters such as the fatalities of unborn infants due to unavailability of ambulances
and some fatalities of children due to drinking contaminated water in the rural areas. The consequences
of failed infrastructure are captured graphically in the SAICE report card. The physical space in which we
need to grow the economy, where education and training must be offered and where service delivery
must be spread across the poor, is at risk to fail and in some cases, has already failed. The catastrophe
is that the poorest of the poor live in rural areas and services are not delivered to them as they could be
like in affluent areas.

2.8.5 Government’s role in infrastructure

Some might think that it’s unique in South Africa to expect a government to invest in infrastructure.
However, it is nothing new for governments. Thousands of years ago, Egyptians built irrigation and
transportation systems with dams and canals. Ancient Greeks and Romans built roads and aqueducts
that still stand today. The 14th-century Parisian sewers have become tourist destinations. Globally,
governments have long realised that investing in and maintaining a healthy infrastructure is an
important government function. Australia's Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development
highlights that “It is an investment that has a multiplier effect throughout the economy, generating
lasting economic, social and environmental benefits.”

Since the 9/11 attacks in the USA, we’ve witnessed upgrades of infrastructure and anti-terrorism
mechanism due to rampant threats and attacks, to secure Americans, "critical infrastructure," extending
the list of examples to systems related to Information and communications, gas and oil
39
production/storage/transportation, and even banking and finance has been a national priority. The list is
the subject of an ongoing debate as threats and attacks are dynamic. Accordingly, the “critical
infrastructures now include national monuments (e.g. Washington Monument), where an attack might
cause a large loss of life or adversely affect the nation’s morale (Congressional Research Service, 2003).

While SAICE in South Africa researches and shares a report card on infrastructure, in the U.S.
the Infrastructure Security Division and the National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center are
part of the Department of Homeland Security. Watchdog groups like the American Society of Civil
Engineers (ASCE) keep track of progress and needs by issuing an infrastructure report card every year.

List of engineering professions

Fields / Description (focus) SA institutions offering but

Career paths not limited to
Aerospace / Spacecrafts and aircrafts and have two specialties: Wits
Aeronautical astronautical (for plant’s atmosphere) and aeronautical
Engineer (for travel)
Agricultural Promotes the efficient production of quality food in the Western Collage TVET
agricultural-food industry & on the farm linked to the Coastal KZN TVET College
farming. UNISA, UP
CPUT
Stellenbosch University
Architectural Uses principles of engineering, technology, building UJ, CPUT, WITS, NMU, UCT
design and construction for building structures, fire UFS
protection, lighting and cooling systems of a building.
Biomedical Study of human physiology, human pathology, and UCT, UKZN, WITS, UJ, UP
pharmacology to draw conclusions and make UWC, WSU
necessary advances toward solving significant health
problems facing society
Chemical Production, transformation, transport and proper use WITS, Varsity College
of chemicals, material and energy by using chemistry UJ, Rosebank College
and biological applications. UWC, Sedibeng College, WSU
VUT, CUT, UKZN
TVETS
Civil Build, supervise, operate and maintain construction University of Cape Town (UCT)
projects. University of Johannesburg (UJ)
University of KwaZulu-Natal
(UKZN), University of
Stellenbosch
University of Witwaterstrand,
Cape Penisula University of
Technology (CPUT)
TVETS
Computer Computer hardware engineers research, design, University of Johannesburg,
hardware develop, and test computer systems and components Boston, CUT, Unisa, Microsoft
such as circuit board, memory, networks and routers online learning , IT Academy,
Torque IT
Electrical Proper application of large scale of electrical power WITS, Varsity College
UJ, Rosebank College
UWC, Sedibeng College
WSU, Western Collage TVET
Coastal KZN TVET College
UNISA, UP
CPUT, Stellenbosch University
VUT, CUT, UKZN
Engineering Graphical language/communication method of the University of the Witwatersrand.
Graphics and technological world; with emphasis on specific basic Bachelor of Arts: Fine Arts,
Design (EGD) knowledge and various drawing techniques and skills, University of Johannesburg,
so that EGD learners will be able to interpret (read) University of Pretoria,
and prepare (i.e. to create) drawings within the University of Stellenbosch,
contexts of the many various fields of the world of Cape Peninsula University of
technology, Technology,
Tshwane University of
Technology,
Nelson Mandela University,
Stellenbosch Academy of Design
and Photography.
Environment Upending social forces to solve issues of climate WITS, Varsity College
change, energy sources and biodiversity UJ, Rosebank College
UWC, Sedibeng College
WSU, Western Collage TVET
Coastal KZN TVET College
UNISA, UP

40
 CPUT, Stellenbosch University
VUT, CUT, UKZN
Geology Involves methods and knowledge from biology, UFH, UJ, WITS, UP
chemistry, physics and mathematics.
Industrial Use various methods to integrate complex systems Westcol, WITS, Varsity College
and processes. UJ, Rosebank College
UWC, Sedibeng College
WSU, Western Collage TVET
Coastal KZN TVET College
UNISA, UP
CPUT, Stellenbosch University
VUT, CUT, UKZN
Marine Design, development, production and maintenance of DUT, CPUT
the equipment used at sea and onboard sea vessels
Materials Study the relationships between the structure and WITS
properties of a material and how it is made. And also
develop new materials and devise processes for
manufacturing them.
Mechanical Design maximum functionality with a manufactured Westcol, WITS, Varsity College
product that meets the marketplace. UJ, Rosebank College
UWC, Sedibeng College
WSU, Western Collage TVET
Coastal KZN TVET College
UNISA, UP
CPUT, Stellenbosch University
VUT, CUT, UKZN
Mining The extraction of minerals from underneath, above or UJ, WITS, TUT
on the ground
Nuclear Focuses on the benefits of nuclear energy and UCT
radiation.
Petroleum Involved in all stages of oil and gas to maximise Institute of Petroleum Studies,
hydrocarbon recovery at minimum cost and reduces WITS
environmental impact
Rocket scientist Design and testing of rocket-propelled vehicles, such WITS, UCT
as orbiting spacecraft or missiles
Software Involves retrieve, store, and manipulate data to University of Johanesburg,
developer analyse a system's capability and requirements College Campus
Software Build software from the ground up Westcol, WITS, Varsity College
engineering UJ, Rosebank College
UWC, Western Collage TVET,
Coastal KZN TVET College
UNISA, UP, Stellenbosch
University, UKZN
Structural Safety and security of framework of structures to UCT, UNISA
withstand stress and pressure of their environment
Technician Computer security, hardware configuration, and Northlink College, Unisa, CUT,
technical support CPUT. TUT, College Campus
Town, urban and Establishment of towns; designing of towns, industrial UP, NWU, UJ, WITS, UCT
regional areas, business areas and holiday resorts
planning

2.9 What is the best engineering to do?

Several people have unlimited opinions on this, but the answer lies within each and other engineering
student’s desires and capability. According to Joe Francis (2017) of……

The best engineering work to do is not related to a particular field of engineering, but rather the
opportunity to work on something that is really important. Oddly enough, the more important the
task, the better you tend to get paid for it as well. The best engineering to do is to work on
“"wicked” problems that no one has ever been able to solve before.

In my personal experience, I have led projects that saved a lot of children’s lives that have
prevented a lot of criminal activity, and have made people’s lives much simpler. Gosh, that felt
great.
Important Does Not Equate to “Fun”, but it is “Joy”. I make sure that young engineers get
the “fun” tasks. The more amazing of an accomplishment with a finished product, the more it will
take out of you. Find out the history behind the development of the iPhone, Windows NT,
transistors, Facebook, the Sydney Opera House, the New York City subway system, or the first

41
 electrical grid and you will find that it was no less difficult than building a pyramid in ancient
Egypt.

World Series Champions. For each of these accomplishments, there are dozens of people who
quite literally devoted their entire lives to their engineering disciplines with the same passion as a
professional athlete. You don’t know these engineers, but when they stand back and look at what
they have done, they feel like they have just won the World Series or the FIFA cup. You will also
enjoy the respect of your peers in the engineering community. If you mention Claude Shannon or
Alan Turing to me, they have my total respect decades after their deaths.

How Do You Get to Work on Important Things? To get those opportunities requires that you
have to have the best engineering experience, a track record of getting things done consistently,
and the ability to get along well with others.

Working Well with Others? It is a common misconception that engineers are geeky and bad
tempered. Well, if you lock someone in a University for eight years and behind a computer for
another 15 years, their social skills may lag behind their contemporaries. Nonetheless, to go far
in any engineering field is to understand that engineers have the equivalent education to perhaps
a physician, but are typically organized more like an Army - nothing significant in engineering
gets done without genuine teamwork and it is only really good engineers who can lead those
team effectively.

2.91. All engineering fields play important roles across the societies

You might be informed that the computer science, as it is the so called branch of engineering in demand
and it would surely help you to rake up tons of money. Well, there is certainly no kind of branch that
would shape up the future of the humans living on this planet. There is no single branch, highhandedly
shape out the future.

Every single branch out there is equally as important as any other. Each branch of engineering has
got its own role to play in the technological development of this planet. It’s like building a house, or
making a car where each and every component that goes into its making has a huge role to play in
its sustenance. You can’t take out the steering or the wheels and say you can drive. You cannot
take out a brick and say that the house would stand strong for a decade. It doesn't work that way.
A synergistic connection among all the branches exists whatsoever and the totality of development
is due to this fact, that no branch can stand tall and take a walk without the help of the other
branches.

There is so much of place for new works that can be identified in each branch of engineering that it
becomes so hard to identify and pinpoint a particular branch that would shape up the future. It’s
equally likely that any branch in engineering would hold paths for breathtakingly new avenues
which could make the whole process of technological development sprint at a staggering rate. While
recently, computer science is regarded as engineering of the future, one can identify some of the
engineering branches that will still remain vibrantly relevant and some of these are:

• Civil Engineering: Ecological Systems, Resources and Sustainability, Structures and

Design, Urban Systems, Global Systems etc.
• Mechanical Engineering: Mechanis, design + manufacturing, controls, instrumentation,
robotics, energy science + engineering, ocean science + engineering, bio engineering,
micro+nano engineering and etc.
• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science : Applied Physics and Devices, Bio Medical
Sciences & Engineering, Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence), Computer Science
(Systems), Computer Science (Theory), Connection Science & Engineering,
Nanotechnology & Quantum Information Processing, Robotics, Wireless Networks &
Mobile Computing etc.

42
NOTE: These are just a few topics under which immense research is being carried out around the world.
The other important branches of engineering are left out for you to search and find the ones which
interest you. Search through the websites of some highly regarded research institutes and universities in
the world and get to know the kind of research they are doing and the possible endeavours that can be
made in those fields.

Source for the topics mentioned in this learning unit can be found from: MIT - Education

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 Learning unit 3

Engineering and the Environment

3.1Introduction

Engineering does not operate in vacuum and so, for engineers to succeed through dynamic societies
across the globe, they must not only keep with the ever-changing technology but also be active
participants in the real world’s matter. Engineers must always be interested in learning and contributing
fresh ideas and solutions for the citizens. Along with societal issues requiring creative and eager
engineers, rampant environmental challenges continue to exist. Thus, engineering operates in
environments with their own challenges that engineers need to be keen observers of and address
through their expertise.

Across the globe there are engineering within ecological restrictions that present unique dialogues
between engineers and environmental scientists with consideration of some technical as well as social
and legal challenges of environmentally sensitive engineering. This learning unit presents some concepts
of rule, flexibility and risks as they apply to the points where the environmental life support system of
nature interacts with the technological life support system created by humankind.

Among the questions addressed are: What are the implications of differences between environmental
and engineering concepts of efficiency and stability? How can engineering solutions to immediate real
world’s issues be compatible with long-term environmental considerations? How can the environmental
principles be transferred to economic systems?

3.2 The nature of engineering on environment

Engineering practice on environmental matters apply the principles of engineering; soil science, biology,
and chemistry to address and or prevent some environmental problems. Environmental engineering is a
sub-discipline of engineering. It main focus is on protecting the mass from the degrading effects of
environment. An environmental engineer tries to improve atmosphere. Thus, environmental engineers
work to improve atmosphere. Environmental engineers work on varied scope of environmental issues,
such as enhancements of recycling, waste disposal, public health, as well as water and air pollution
control. They also fix global issues, such as unsafe drinking water, climate change and environmental
sustainability.

Environmental Engineering is an old concept that has been in fashion since the beginning of the
civilisation, along the debates between environmental scientists and engineers. The ancient people have
also dealt with the challenges of the environment. They customised relevant methods of the time to
preserve water, treat solid waste and sewage. With the rise of industrial revolution air pollution level
also increased. Thus, people became concerned with the air quality and soil pollution, hence the
increasing need for environmental engineering. Environmental engineering helps in developing methods
to clean the environment.

44
3.3 Duties of Environmental Engineers

Environmental engineers typically do the following:

• Prepare, review, and update environmental investigation reports

• Design projects that lead to environmental protection, such as water reclamation facilities or air
pollution control systems
• Obtain, update, and maintain plans, permits, and standard operating procedures
• Provide technical support for environmental remediation projects and for legal actions
• Analyse scientific data and do quality-control checks
• Monitor the progress of environmental improvement programmes
• Inspect industrial and municipal facilities and programs in order to ensure compliance with
environmental regulations
• Advise corporations and government agencies about procedures for cleaning up contaminated
sites

Environmental engineers conduct hazardous-waste management studies in which they evaluate the
significance of a hazard and advise on treating and containing it. They also design systems for municipal
and industrial water supplies and industrial wastewater treatment, and research the environmental
impact of proposed construction projects. Environmental engineers in government develop regulations to
prevent mishaps.

Some environmental engineers study ways to minimise the effects of acid rain, climate change,
automobile emissions, and ozone depletion. They also collaborate with environmental scientists, urban
and regional planners, hazardous-waste technicians, and other engineers, as well as with specialists
such as experts in law and business, to address environmental problems and environmental
sustainability. For more information, see the job profiles on environmental scientists and
specialists, hazardous materials removal workers, lawyers, and urban and regional planners.

3.4 Important Qualities for Environmental Engineers

Imagination. Environmental engineers sometimes have to design systems that will be part of larger
ones. They must foresee how the proposed designs will interact with components of the larger system,
including the workers, machinery and equipment, as well as with the environment.
Interpersonal skills. Environmental engineers must work with others toward a common goal. They
usually work with engineers and scientists who design other systems and with the technicians and
mechanics who put the designs into practice.
Problem-solving skills. When designing facilities and processes, environmental engineers strive to
solve several issues at once, from workers' safety to environmental protection. They must identify and
anticipate problems in order to prevent losses for their employers, safeguard workers' health, and
mitigate environmental damage.
Reading skills. Environmental engineers often work with businesspeople, lawyers, and other
professionals outside their field. They frequently are required to read and understand documents that
deal with topics outside their scope of training.
Writing skills. Environmental engineers must write clearly so that others without their specific training
can understand their documents, including plans, proposals, specifications, and findings, among others.

3.5 Environmental Engineers’: Career, Salary and Education Information

45
What they do? Environmental engineers use the principles of engineering, soil science, biology, and
chemistry to develop solutions to environmental problems.

Work environment: Environmental engineers work in a variety of settings because of the nature of the
tasks they do. When they are working with other engineers and urban and regional planners,
environmental engineers are likely to be in offices. When they are carrying out solutions through
construction projects, they are likely to be at construction sites.

How to become one? Environmental engineers must have a bachelor’s degree in environmental
engineering or a related field, such as civil, chemical, or general engineering. Employers also value
practical experience. Therefore, cooperative engineering programs, which provide college credit for
structured job experience, are valuable as well.

Salary: The median annual wage for environmental engineers is $88,860. Search in SA

Job Outlook: Employment of environmental engineers is projected to grow 3 percent over the next ten
years, about as fast as the average for all occupations. State and local governments’ concerns regarding
water availability and quality should lead to efforts to increase the efficiency of water use.

Related Careers: Explore occupations that share similar duties, skills, interests, education, or training
with the occupation covered in the profile.

1.5 3.6 Careers Related to Environmental Engineering

There are many opportunities in various fields that one can explore. If one specialises as an
environmental engineer they can have various jobs through the expertise. One more benefit is that it
can provide you with international exposure, which will lend value towards some unique perspectives
about the environment and engineering. Some of the careers are:

1.5.1 Chemical Engineers

Chemical engineers can deal with chemicals related problems. They solve issues related to fuels, drugs,
and food. Moreover, they apply the principles of chemistry, physics & biology to get the solutions. They
do the projects for large-scale chemical factories and plants.
1.5.2
1.5.3 Civil Engineers
1.5.4
Civil engineers work to design, build, construct, and supervise the workers. They take care of the
infrastructures such as roads, airports, dams, bridges, etc. Any kind of construction is taken care by
these people.

1.5.5 Environmental Engineering Technicians

1.5.6
They carry out the plans that environmental engineers develop. Their work includes testing & operating
environment. Plus, they modify equipment used to prevent or clean up environmental pollution. They
also collect samples for testing whenever needed. Along with this, they may work to mitigate sources of
environmental pollution.

46
1.5.7 Environmental Scientists and Specialists
1.5.8
Environmental scientists use the knowledge of natural science to safeguard the environment. They
protect human and various life forms. They bring the ways to clean the pollution of all type.

1.5.9 Hydrologists
1.5.10
They study how water moves through and across the Earth’s crust. Hydrologists use their expertise to
solve problems in the areas of water quality or availability.

1.5.11 Natural Sciences Managers

1.5.12
These managers supervise the work of scientists, including physicists, chemists, and biologists. They
manage and direct activities related to research and development. They also coordinate activities such
as testing, quality control, and production.

1.6 Major works that environmental engineers do

Environmental Engineers work on engineering principles, soil science and biology. With the help of these
principles, they make solutions for environmental problems.

There are various responsibilities to environmental engineer such as:

Preventing the release of hazardous chemicals into the air, water, and soil. This field is a separate
environmental discipline. People concern about water, air and soil pollution. Thus, environmental
engineering is gaining popularity in recent times. Engineers make every kind of efforts to stop the
environmental degradation.

1.7 So, what exactly engineers do to protect the environment?

They first detect the presence of pollutants.

Once they know, they track them to know the source of origin.

When the source of origin of pollutant is known, then it can be reduced.

There are various industries who are polluting the environment. Engineers try to find the ways to reduce
the pollution coming out through such industries. Knowledge of chemistry, fluid dynamics, and biology
help in a great way.

As you all know the population is growing day by day. To settle them various actions have been taken.
Such actions may have a bad impact on the environment. To tackle such things environmental engineers
come up with new ideas regularly. For instance, development of CNG, Gobar gas, solar panels, etc. Such
inventions reduce the pollution and keep the environment clean.

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1.8 Works of Environmental Engineers

1.8.1

1.8.2 Solid Waste management

Humans are the consumer society. They produce a lot of waste. What all dispose of such as food
packaging, broken electronics, excreta comes in waste. Most of the developed countries have efficient
waste management techniques. They recycle the solid waste very easily. But developing countries are
still facing problems. Lack of technology and awareness are the main causes. Environmental engineers
work day and night to provide sufficient ways to dispose of the waste. They are coming up with
strategies to curb the problem of waste management.

1.8.3 Strategies to reduce waste

• Composting
• Incineration
• Landfill
• Recycling
• Window
• composting
• Land-farming
• In-vessel composting
• Mechanical, biological treatment
• Mechanical heat treatment
• Molten salt oxidation
• Plasma arc waste disposal
• Pyrolysis
• Refuse-derived fuel
• Sewage treatment
• Tunnel composting

These are some of the ways to mitigate waste. Engineers are still developing new methods to make life
good.

1.8.4 Water Supply management

Expanding population has expanding demands. Water is essential to sustain. Every form of life is
dependent on water. Freshwater is of vital importance to living. As you know how much there is a
48
scarcity of water in society. On the other hand, there are instances of a flood. Both flood and drought
put a strain on lives. It affects humans directly and indirectly. Over the last decade, Europe faced both
drought and flood. Recently, Cape Town was declared as the zero water country. They faced the biggest
crisis in last one decade. Moreover, the government has to pay high charges for clean up operations.

Environment engineers are playing a vital role here. They identify the origin of the problem. They
develop the tools or machines to fight this issue. Building of canals, irrigation fields, sprinklers are the
inventions to protect from droughts. These things help to provide an adequate amount of water.

Sewage system, water treatment plants, are some of the ways to tackle the floods and recycle the water
for various purposes. Removing waste water is also equally important. If wastewater is out of our houses
only then, we can ensure good health. Sources of wastewater at home are- toilets, showers, cloth
washing. Production of wastewater is not limited to home only. Industries are also the reason for
wastewater. There are many hazardous substances industries produce. If they leak in water, then it
could be a sign of danger. So it is necessary to treat wastewater to ensure a healthy supply of water.

1.8.5 Air Pollution Management

You all are aware of the air pollution. It is a major issue in many countries. To curb this problem various
countries have started clean air act. There are many countries who are the big polluters. Here in SA, the
coal industry, mining industry are few examples. Engineers have developed the ways to fight with the
problem of air pollution. Development of CNG, solar panels for cars and homes, are some of the ways to
clean the air. Engineers are also coming up with the ways to manage toxic substances.

Now the next-next thing that comes in air pollution is a greenhouse effect. Engineers are trying to
reduce the output of carbon dioxide gas to limit the temperature rise.

1.8.6 Some more duties need to be performed by Environmental Engineers

In the above section, there’s a presentation on the duties of an environmental engineer. Here’s a recap
on it in brief.

• They prepare environmental investigation reports. Review it and take actions to protect the
environment.
• Designing of projects to protect environment. Water treatment plants, air pollution control
mechanism.
• Technical support for environment cleaning projects and taking actions for it.
• Obtaining data, analysing it and quality-control checks.
• Monitoring the progress of Environment protection programs.
• Checking industries to ensure compliance with environmental regulations.

49
1.9 How to Become an Environmental Engineer

You must have a bachelor’s degree in environmental engineering to be an environmental engineer. You
can also do courses such as such as civil, chemical, or general engineering. Let’s learn in detail about
this,

You must have a Bachelors degree to get an entry-level job in Environmental Engineering. There are
colleges who give good exposure in this field.

You can also enroll yourself for dual course program. You will get Bachelors and master’s degree in it. It
would be a five years program. Graduate degree makes an engineer do research and development.

What you need to do bachelors in Environmental engineering? First, take science in High school. Have a
good knowledge of physics chemistry and biology along with mathematics.

NOTE: “The more you learn the better you work”. This implies that, give complete attention to your
studies.

If you will not take your courses seriously, then, it may be a negative add on to your career. So, study
properly. Clear doubts, right at the time they occur. You can get help from your teachers. Apart from
this, there are so many tutors ready to provide you online assignment help. You can contact them as
well.

In all, give your 100% to your course.

1.10 Important Qualities of Environmental Engineers

A degree is not enough for this profession. You just need to be passionate about it. Under mentioned
skills can help you to achieve heights in this area. Imagination. Engineers need to design various
systems and plans. They should mind to plan projects and execute them successfully. For that, an
imaginative, and creative mind is required.

1.10.1 Interpersonal skills

Environmental engineers must have interactive skills. They should work with others to achieve a
common goal. They usually work with different people like scientists and mechanics. For that
interpersonal relationships should be good. Moreover, if there will be any conflict, it will hinder in goal
achievement.

1.10.2 Problem-solving skills

Any new invention may have several issues. You need to be calm and compose to solve problems. As an
engineer, identify the problems and solve it carefully. Problems can be of any sort. Workers health
issues, damage to the equipment or anything else.

1.10.3 Reading skills

Engineers may get situations where they have to deal with topics of other fields. They should have an
understanding and reading skills to deal with people outside their field.

50
1.10.4 Writing skills

Environmental engineers must have good and creative writing skills. Their work should be easy to
understand. Whatever the plans, document work, proposals they do should be understandable to for
others.

Environmental Engineering as a subject is not much tough but needs hard smart.

Take a look at the topics discussed earlier. This started with the works of environmental engineers, how
to proceed for environmental engineering, then, in the later part of the discussion, some qualities and
career paths for environmental engineers. These are the areas which I found vital for students.

51
 Learning unit 4

Engineering teamwork

“To be a successful engineer is to develop strong teamwork skills in order to ensure a smooth
workflow process.”

4.1 Introduction

Teamwork refers to a group of people able to work together effectively. In engineering, whether it’s your
individual’s task, it’s one way or the other linked to the other individuals. Whether it is a project team,
product development, or a manufacturing team, effective teamwork is the core of technical and
engineering operations. Here are 3 factors you must always consider and use to work on improving
teamwork skills. Thus, whatever you are working on, wherever you are positioned in the company
(physically, level, virtually), whomever you are working with and or for, whenever you are doing your
tasks and however, as well as for whatever reasons; the bottom line is that, at the back of your mind
you must always be threading on the principles of teamwork.

Simply, while a teamwork comprises of a group of people; as an individual participant, working towards
a company’s common goal, being delegated specific tasks is part of being delegated for the team to
accomplish, thus, an individual in a company also shares some common corporate goals as a team
member for a bigger picture.

4.2 Teamwork in Engineering

A crucial part of managing people is getting them to be as productive as possible, whilst working in
teams. Team working is common in technical or engineering environments. Whether it’s a project team,
product development, a production line, a maintenance team or a manufacturing cell, effective
teamwork is the basis for most modern technical operations. But what constitutes good team working?
As a People Manager what practical tips are there you can use to get the best out of your teams?

Teamwork is defined as a series of activities where two or more people work collaboratively
towards a common aim. Consideration should be given to putting together a balanced effective team -
team building (more in a moment). The team should ideally be cross-functional in its nature, made
up of people with different but complementary skills.

The group environment in which the team operate ideally should be supportive, positive and
underpinned by strong communication and plenty of encouragement. An effective method of tasking
individuals should be established, with an opportunity for everybody to feedback and provide opinions
and draw on others’ experiences to collectively solve problems. The team leader needs to display strong
people management skills to ensure the team operates effectively using these principles.

4.3 Engineering roles within a team

For team members to work well together, they need to be balanced. By having different personalities,
different ways of working, and various job positions, tension might occur, but it can be nonetheless
avoided. According to Dr. Meredith Belbin, there are certain roles within a team that can be identified
for a team to be effective. Some of these found among engineers are:

• Shapers: these members challenge the way things are done and are always looking for ways to
improve both the process and the outcome.
• Implementers: they convert ideas and strategies into manageable tasks other members can
work on.
52
• Team Players: they encourage smooth collaborative work and they usually step up in times of
stress, as they are supportive and encouraging to others.
• Coordinators: they calmly listen to others within the teammates before organising them to
undertake tasks according to the skills they bring. They often make great team leaders.
• Specialists: the experts who contribute their expertise to other team members. They are often
respected for their knowledge and technical know-how.

4.3.1 Why teams exist in engineering?

Teamwork has a number of distinct advantages over working as individuals. They help to increase moral
of the individuals participating for the job to be completed. Problems are solved faster with diverse
perspectives. There’s even greater credibility because teams share different views from different
sources. Members learn and develop their ideas. Additionally, teamwork has advantage such as:

1. Harness diversity for common organisational goals

The different people with different backgrounds and expertise lends value towards effective and efficient
success of a company. However, if the existing diversity is not properly managed, group dynamics might
hamper the envisaged goals. Thus, it’s crucial that the existing diversity is not only acknowledged, by
also embraced by all team members of a company at large and especially in the delegated teams for
specific projects. It is important for the diverse groups of people to understand the goals of their
company. Clarity on the direction and agreement on what people must be doing for the company for its
achievement is essential.

2. Team Support

A successful team has members supporting one another. By demonstrating encouragement, teammates
will be immediately motivated to achieve goals and accomplish the given tasks. A sense of loyalty will
arise and a faster, smoother, and better problem solving process will take place.

3. Communication

To communicate and share varied meanings and eventually streamline things into one common
language. For a healthier and stronger professional bonds, members should feel free to express their
own idea, opinions, propositions and potential solutions to problems that can occur in any phase of the
project.

4. Mutual Goal

Committing to one goal as a team is the recipe to achieve big things. A clear direction and agreement on
what the members are trying to accomplish from the start is the basis of a successful teamwork. And
even if a healthy team environment encourages taking risks and thinking outside of the box, but these
risks should align with the ultimate end-goal.

5. Practical engagement
As much as one would work individually, working in team also lends value towards modifying one’s skills
when working independently. When teams are well-organised, practical engagement becomes a
nurturing experience for the members. They do not only sharpen their technical skills but also improve
their soft skills in more ways they can count, particularly their teamwork. Their projects are the perfect
example of how members work together upon an organisational goal successfully. We all know the
proverb, “Teamwork makes the dream work” and nowhere is this more crucial than within an
engineering’s workshop.

Simply, the definition of good teamwork is to work collabouratively towards a common goal or aim,
whether that is with regard to product development, maintenance of the workshop, being a part of the
production or line or managing a group of people. It is common to encourage teamwork within an
engineering environment through support, positive reinforcement and by encouraging the use and
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development of strong communication skills. A manner in which to measure the extent of productivity
through teamwork is by feedback provided to management and the encouragement of open discussion
regarding each other’s strong points in order to ensure that the engineering team operates effectively
and efficiently towards their goal.

4.4 What Makes a Successful Engineering Team?

Put simply. Delivery.

The best teams deliver. The worst teams don't.

The best teams take calculated efforts to improve delivery while the worst are content maintaining the
status quo.

The worst teams hide behind technical debt, execs that 'don't understand', or fairy tales like 'our product
is unique' and 'our teams work differently'.

1.11 Why does delivery matter?

1.11.1 1) Delivery affects the entire business.

Studies show engineering success highly correlated company success across profitability, market share,
and customer satisfaction. This is further backed by Marc Andreessen who states:

"Cycle Time (delivery speed) compression determines winners & losers in tech".

Which makes sense because better delivery brings more value to customers, which in turn brings more
revenue. Faster delivery means faster experimentation, value to customers, and gets you faster
feedback so you don't waste time building the wrong thing.

Of course, there are things like quality, stability, etc. but it all equates back to delivery.

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 Deploying quality code, quickly.

2) Developers like to deliver.

Developers who deploy more tend to be happier, more productive.

Which makes sense when you think about a team who struggles with tech debt, complex workloads,
unplanned tickets, context switching.

They aren't able to deliver.

And that sucks.

Meanwhile, the team who focuses on delivery invests in removing bottlenecks. Getting their team back
to doing what they love - deploying value to customers.

1.11.2 3) It's a fundamental outcome for success.

If you're not focused on delivering, then what are you focused on?

Now you may say 'I don't care about delivery', which fine. But that's like a company saying 'we don't
care about revenue'. Sure, you can get away with it but you'll end up in a really bad spot if you don't
know your fundamentals.

At the end of the day, if you focus on delivery then everything else (tech debt, process changes,
resourcing) will fall right into place.

2 4.5 Building High Performing Engineering Teams

Ph oto by Ch risti na @ wocintech chat.com on Un splash

High performing eng in eering teams don ’t ju st h appen . They’re created. Here are seven
keys to building an excellent team.

In today’s competitive, Agile world, every business is searching for a way to create more and better
products in a shorter amount of time. They use the latest tools, the greatest technology, and the newest

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management tips, all in an attempt to move faster and produce more efficiently. One thing that often
gets overlooked, though, is the team itself.

On paper, building high performing engineering teams seems simple. Just get the developers with the
best marks from the best schools or with the most experience, put them all together, and let them run,
right? Sadly, this is the approach that many team leaders and project managers take, but it often
doesn’t lead to the best results. It’s usually not the best players who win, but the best team. And to
build great engineering teams, there are a few keys you’ll need to follow.

4.5.1 HIGH PERFORMING TEAMS START FROM THE TOP

High performing teams start with high performing engineering leaders. As a leader, it’s up to you to
define exactly what high performance looks like, establish the protocol to achieve it, and then ensure
that your team is moving consistently toward that high performance.

As the team leader, you need to define the team’s purpose. Throughout the project, many stakeholders
may try to sway you to certain needs which, they believe, need your team’s attention. While you should
not ignore these, you also cannot allow them to hijack your team either.

Purpose and performance should never be at the whim of stakeholders or management. High performing
engineering teams have a clear definition of purpose and performance, which allows them to create
high-quality objectives. These teams are led by a clear and concise vision that aligns with company
values. This allows the team to realize exactly the goals they are working toward and holds them clearly
accountable if they do not accomplish those goals.

4.5.2 HIRE THE RIGHT PEOPLE

Of course, you want people to have the necessary skills to accomplish the work, but, as we said before,
hiring rockstar engineers does not always lead to the best team.

Hiring well is not just about getting the most talented people, but getting the best people for your team.
Bring people on who are a good fit with your company culture, but also encourage diversity and inclusion
on your team. Being a good fit doesn’t mean that everyone has to be exactly the same. High performing
teams usually have people from different genders, experience levels, countries, and lifestyles. This helps
to create a broad range of approaches and ideas. When diverse teams work together, they create new
solutions. It’s difficult to be innovative when everyone on your team is thinking the exact same way.

As a team leader, never feel threatened by engineers who have skills that you don’t have. Find people
who are smarter than you. Find those who have abilities you personally may lack. When these people
want to come and work for you, this is a representation of your success. Once you hire these people,
remember to let them do their job. You hired them for a reason. Be there to support and leverage their
strengths, but, in order to create a definitive high performing engineering team, stay out of their way as
much as possible.

Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash

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Hiring isn’t just about getting the best people. It’s about getting the best people for your team.

A bad hire can have a significant impact on your team’s morale and culture, as well as the bottom line of
your company. It takes an enormous amount of money, time, and energy to replace the wrong person.
Instead, take your time in the hiring process and focus on attracting the right people.

4.5.3 ATTRACT THE RIGHT PEOPLE

High performing engineering teams are able to hire the right people because they attract the right
people. And you attract the right people by building a safe environment.

Psychological safety is defined as the comfort level team members feel in regards to taking risks and
looking vulnerable in front of each other. Basically, it’s about how comfortable your team feels in
working together. High performing engineering teams feel comfortable taking risks and failing in front of
each other.

One way in which you can build a safe working environment is by building a blame-free culture. The best
teams have to take risks. That’s how they evolve and grow. But how comfortable would you feel taking a
risk, knowing that, if it fails, you’ll be blamed for it? For some people, this might not matter, but, for
most, this would keep them from taking any chances at all. To create a blame-free culture, avoid calling
people out publicly for mistakes. If something does fail, accept responsibility for it.

When you step up as the team leader, other teammates will follow suit. Instead of blame, create an
environment where you can learn from each other’s mistakes. Carefully examine “failures” or “mistakes”
as learning opportunities. Take the time to dissect what went wrong, and how you can fix it for next
time. When you create this blame-free environment, your team’s tendency to take risks will naturally
increase. Sure, you won’t always hit a home run, but you’re likely to find many new and innovative
solutions in a culture of creative risk-taking.

In addition, high performing teams are made up of people who feel engaged in what they are doing. One
way to create engagement, other than having clearly defined goals, is to listen to your team members.
Truly take the time to engage with the individuals on your team and hear them out. Sprint
retrospectives are a good time to listen, as are individual one-on-one meetings. Remember that, during
these meetings, you are truly equals. You are learning as much, if not more, from them than they may
be from you. When your team feels engaged and heard, they’ll be more likely to give you their best
performance. This is one key that the best teams know.

4.5.4 GET CLARITY

It can be difficult to get to your destination if you don’t know where you are going. High performing
engineering teams are able to perform consistently at a high level because they are clear on what is
expected of them in every area.

For teams to truly operate at a high level, they must have clearly defined goals. One way to do this is
through the use of SMART goals, defined as:

Specific – These goals answer the five w’s: who, what, when, where, and why.

Measurable – Gather data that you can measure, in order to see the progress from the beginning of the
project through completion.

Attainable – Identify the means that it will take to achieve your highest goals.

Realistic – Create goals that you are willing and able to work toward.

Timely – Can you achieve these goals in the time allowed?

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Not only do the best teams have clearly defined goals, but they also have clearly defined roles and
responsibilities. Each team member should have an understanding of what is expected of them in terms
of skills, as well as the responsibilities for each sprint or project. When team members don’t have this
clarity, it often leads to double-work or missed sections of a project, both of which lead to inefficiency.

Instead, the best teams have a clear outline of the requirements of the project, both as a whole and for
themselves and individuals. They understand the requirements expected by the stakeholders and/or the
customers, and they know the objectives and the deadlines. They also understand the mission and the
values of the organisation as a whole. This all adds up to a clear image of where this project is moving
and the image that, you as the team leader, have for the future. High performing engineering teams
more often than not are moving toward that vision clearly and confidently.

4.5.5 ESTABLISH A CULTURE OF SUCCESS

The best engineering teams expect to be successful. And this culture starts at the top. It begins with you
as the team leader or project manager setting a high bar for success with each word and interaction you
perform. Once you plant the seeds of success, you’ll start to see it grow throughout your team.

Setting a high bar for success doesn’t mean setting unreasonable goals. This often leads to overwork,
burnout, loss of confidence, and loss of quality employees. Instead, it means interacting with your team,
listening to them, and discovering what they’re capable of. When your team starts to have some
responsibility for their own goals, they’ll feel more engaged. And when they feel engaged, they’re more
likely to want to work harder for these outcomes. It’s a win-win for everyone and one of the ways that
high performing engineering teams keep working at the highest levels.

4.5.6 MEASURE WHAT MATTERS

According to Dan Ariely, human beings tend to alter their behaviour according to the metrics they’re
measured against. Simply said, what you measure is what you get. So, if you’re measuring lines of code,
you’ll get more lines of code. If you’re measuring support case closures, you’ll get more closures. But
this doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get more satisfied customers.

High performing engineering teams measure the things that align with their clear definition of
performance. Measurements can vary greatly between teams and projects, but here are a few examples
of what high performing engineering teams may measure.

Velocity - How much work can your team complete in a given sprint? This is the definition of velocity.
Having an average velocity allows you and your team to more accurately predict how much work they
can complete in a given sprint. And this allows you to plan more accordingly. When your team’s velocity
increases or decreases suddenly, this opens up the door for conversation. What changed? How can we
correct it for the next iteration? High performing engineering teams are well aware of how much work
they can accomplish in each iteration.

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Fig 1: Visualisation of the team velocity by Sleeek

Work distribution - Do you ensure that you divide the work equally amongst everyone on the team?
Unbalanced work distribution can lead to an unbalanced team. Each iteration, examine who is doing
what. Is the same person doing the same thing each round? High performing engineering teams take
time to carefully examine who works on what during each sprint.

Fig 2: Visualisation of the assignment by Sleeek

Peer feedback - Occasionally during the year, high performing teams may evaluate each other in areas
like professionalism, collabouration, and team commitment. If a teammate receives negative feedback,
it may call to light an area that they were not aware of and encourage them to engage more fully with
their team. Team leaders can use this feedback to see where their team stands as a whole. Again, create
a safe environment to give this feedback, and use it only as a learning tool. High performing engineering
teams are comfortable working with each other.

4.5.7 IF IT’S NOT WORKING, FIX IT

Finally, high performing engineering teams are not afraid to change things when they are not working.
After all, as software developers, that is a large part of what we do. We build software, look for
problems, and fix them systematically. The same should be done within your team. Each area, from
culture to process to strategy to work environment, should be examined periodically and evaluated on
its performance. Don’t try to fix everything at once. Instead, focus carefully on one area, evaluate it,
adjust anything that needs to be adjusted, and then document the results. Once some time has been
allowed to monitor the new process, move on to the next.

High performing engineering teams are always looking for ways to improve their performance. Attracting
and hiring the right people, creating clear goals and objectives, instigating a culture of success, and
measuring the correct things are all keys to creating high performing engineering teams. If your team is
not functioning as well as it could, use these keys and you just may start to see your team’s productivity
and performance move higher than ever before.

4.6 Differences between Work Groups and Teams

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By Marty Brounstein

Teams definitely are forms of work groups, but not all work groups are teams. In fact, plain work groups
are much more numerous than teams.

Work groups function on three levels:

• Dependent level
• Independent level
• Interdependent level

Here’s the breakdown.

4.6.1 Dependent-level work groups

Dependent-level work groups are the traditional work unit or department groups with a supervisor who
plays a strong role as the boss. Almost everyone has had some experience with this work setup,
especially in a first job. Each person in a dependent-level work group has his or her own job and works
under the close supervision of the boss. The boss is in charge and tells the employees the do’s and
don’ts in their jobs. Helping each other and covering for one another do not occur often and do so
mostly under the direction of the supervisor. In fact, most problem solving, work assignments, and other
decisions affecting the group come from the supervisor.

A dependent-level work group can perform well in the short term. But for the long run, because group
members operate separately and mostly at the direction of the supervisor, such work groups don’t seem
to go anywhere. Maintaining the status quo and keeping operations under control are what they do best.
Creating improvements, increasing productivity, and leveraging resources to support one another are
quite uncommon with dependent-level work groups.

2.3 4.6.2 Independent-level work groups

Independent-level work groups are the most common form of work groups on the business scene. Like a
dependent-level work group, each person is responsible for his or her own main area. But unlike the
dependent level, the supervisor or manager tends not to function like the controlling boss. Instead, staff
members work on their own assignments with general direction and minimal supervision.

Sales representatives, research scientists, accountants, lawyers, police officers, librarians, and teachers
are among the professionals who tend to work in this fashion. People in those occupations come
together in one department because they serve a common overall function, but almost everyone in the
group works fairly independently. If members of an independent-level work group receive the
managerial guidance and support they need on the job, such a work group can perform quite well.

2.4 4.6.3 Interdependent-level work groups

Members of an interdependent-level work group rely on each other to get the work done. Sometimes
members have their own roles and at other times they share responsibilities. Yet, in either case, they
coordinate with one another to produce an overall product or set of outcomes. When this
interdependence exists, you have a team. And by capitalizing on interdependence, the team
demonstrates the truth of the old saying: The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

An independent work group can often be brought up to speed faster than an interdependent group. It
simply takes more time to get a group of individuals to work as a team than to set a group of individuals
off on their independent assignments. Yet when teams move into a high-functioning and high-producing
state, where they capitalize on interdependence, they can outperform all other types of work groups. So,

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if you want a quick fix, don’t look to teams: but if you want to see strong results for the long
term, do look to teams.

To call a group a team does not make them a team: wishing for them to work as a team doesn’t work
either. For a snapshot of the main differences between work groups and teams, take a look at Table 1.
As you can see, work groups have a strong individual focus and teams have a strong collective focus.
The individual is not lost on a team, but that person’s work is coordinated to fit in with the greater good.
Team concerns are much more focused on the outcomes of the overall unit rather than an individual’s
accomplishments.

Table 1: Difference Between Work Groups and Teams

Work Groups Teams

Individual accountability Individual and mutual accountability

Come together to share Frequently come together for discussion, decision making,
information and perspectives problem solving, and planning.

Focus on individual goals Focus on team goals

Produce individual work products Produce collective work products

Define individual roles, Define individual roles, responsibilities, and tasks to help
responsibilities, and tasks team do its work; often share and rotate them

Concern with one’s own outcome Concern with outcomes of everyone and challenges the
and challenges team faces

Purpose, goals, approach to work Purpose, goals, approach to work shaped by team leader
shaped by manager with team members

Table 1 also indicates that teams meet more often than traditional work groups. Work groups may meet
periodically, based on the manager’s style, primarily to hear and share information. Teams, by
comparison, do much more than communicate when they meet. Team meetings are forums for planning
work, solving work problems, making decisions about work, and reviewing progress. In short, meetings
are vital to a team’s existence.

The last item in Table 1 is crucial: Team leadership is participatory, in contrast to the primarily manager-
driven nature of regular work groups. On a team, the manager or team leader frequently involves team
members in helping shape the goals and plans for getting the group’s work done — may as well get
them involved, they’ve got to do the work! But in other kinds of work groups, managers more commonly
work with staff individually to set goals and determine assignments. Of course, in many cases, managers
just assign work with little discussion or collabouration with the staff members. And staff are then left to
figure out what’s expected and how best to get it done.

4.7 An engineering design process

Scenario: Buyiswa is a civil engineer from Motherwell, Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape. She was born
from the Xhosa’s family and has acquired the locally acclaimed philosophy of Ubuntu. Ubuntu, the
African philosophy unlike the prescribed social contracts, has always been the way of living and part of
being, for Africans, which they have transferred since pre-colonial periods to date. It is consisted by
multiple and complex principles, values, procedures, practices, perspectives and conditions and etc. This
has largely been intergenerational influence of Africans for decades, amongst other philosophies within a
social framework.
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Some refer to this philosophy as meaning “I am because we are.” In other terms it can also be
associated with the adage, “No man is an island of itself.”

There’s a busy huge highway from Coega, Bluewater bay via Motherwell location where several
pedestrian citizens who cross the highway have been killed. Buyiswa grows up bothered by these fatal
incidents and decides to use her engineering expertise towards ‘giving back’ to her locals. This is a
means of attempting to address the rampant societal issue.

Moreover, Buyiswa is also informed that she needs a fit model for her to build the relevant building. A
model is an accurate representation of the real world which predicts how the processes operate under
certain conditions (Field, 2005). However, as a point of departure, Buyiswa would need first to
understand various perspectives to avoid building any bridge that would collapse. Perspectives are
ways of viewing things, that often influenced by one’s beliefs or experiences. She would associate
perspectives of interest to relevant philosophies that resonate with her values. The values refer to a set
of things that can be commonly shared and or, that one regards as essential in life, cannot live without
and make their living better.

So, her approach is on collecting data from the real world; by viewing other bridges built before in the
real world and gathers information about what material they are made from, what structures they use
and so on (she might even collect data about whether these bridges are damaged!). Then, she uses that
data to develop a method to guide her to construct a model. An approach is her way of seeking
information about the bridges. On the other hand, a method is made up of steps to build the bridge.

Then, her most almost practical step is for her to build a scale-down version of the real-world bridge
because it is impractical, not to mention how expensive to build the actual bridge itself is. The model
may differ from reality in several ways; it will be smaller for a start – but the engineer will try to build a
model that best fits the situation of interest based on the data available. Once the model has been built,
it can be used to predict things about the real world: for example, Buyiswa might test whether the
bridge can withstand intense winds by placing the model in a wind tunnel. Through this scenario, it
seems obvious that it is important that the model is an accurate representation of the real world. The
diagram below demonstrates the stages of an engineering design process.

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 Source: https://sphero.com/blogs/news/engineering-design-process

The above diagram illustrates the engineering design model that an engineer would use to build for
representation of the real-world bridge that she wants to create. The following diagram shows different
models of engineering. The first model (a) is an outstanding representation of the real world situation
and is supposed to be a good fit (i.e. it has few minor differences, but the model is fundamentally an
actual replica of reality).

If this model is used to make predictions about the real world, then the engineer can be confident that
these predictions will be very accurate, because the model so closely resembles reality. Therefore, if the
model collapses in a strong wind in that tunnel during the test, then there is high probability that the
real bridge would collapse as well.

On the other hand, the second model (b) has some similarities to the real world: the model includes
some of the basic structural features, but there are some big differences from the real world bridge (i.e.
the absence of one of the supporting towers). This is what can be regarded as a moderate fit (i.e. there
are some differences between the model and the data but there are also some great similarities). If the
engineer uses this model to make predictions about the real world then these predictions may be
inaccurate and possibly catastrophic (e.g. if the bridge collapses in intense winds this could be due to the
absence of a second supporting tower). Thus, the use of this model results in predictions that give the
engineer some confidence in it, but not complete confidence.

Then, the final model (c) is completely different to the real world situation. This model bears no
structural similarities to the real bridge and so could be regarded as a poor fit (in fact, it might more
accurately be described as an abysmal fit!). As such, any predictions based on this model are likely to be
completely inaccurate.

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The methods applied by Buyiswa follow prescribed procedures of engineering’s statutory body
(Engineering Council of South Africa, ESCA), of which are primarily on the execution of the steps
(methods). If one of the steps requires working with infrastructure or manufacturing engineers, then,
that is a procedure outlining how to meet those requirements. Therefore, a method is a step-by-step
plan one uses to accomplish the procedure which the Buyiswa follows to build the bridge.

While Buyiswa can use her own techniques throughout the processes towards building the bridge, her
techniques should be in follow the procedures and the principles are guidelines that Buyiswa as the
member of a professional frame (ECSA) rely on to follow the procedures, laws and methods to solve
problems or build the bridge. Techniques are Buyiswa’s personal plan of actions she uses to be effective
in her project. All social/organisational networks have their own guiding principles with sets of norms,
values and priviledges. The priviledges are sort of benefits or treats given to one based on being part
of, or just because the giver can when they want, as well as retrieve them as they wish. For example,
being given an award is a priviledge. Priviledges are different from rights, because rights are necessarily
given by prescribed social framework’s or association’s laws. The laws are constituted by rules in social
frameworks, in this instance, laws of ECSA on building a bridge over the highway; would regulate all the
actions that Buyiswa (as ECSA’s member) follows and failure to do so, she faces the consequence of
penalties. Another example between priviledges and rights is when a lecturer gives an extension after
the deadline of submitting an assignment, that’s a priviledge. The right of a student is for the lecturer to
facilitate the learning process for direction as to how to gather information to craft their assignments.
The lecturer may or may not give any priviledges to students, but students do have a right to be
taught/guided for their learning experience.

Theories are systematic explanations of the underlying phenomenon or behaviour. They offer
unorthodox sets of tools to design for one to better understand the mechanisms behind any particular
field. For example, in physics, the Newtonian Laws of Motion describe what happens when the objects
collide (Newton’s Third Law). Jointly, the three laws institute the source of classical mechanics – a theory
of objects/ likewise, the theory of optics explains the elements of light and how it works in different
media, on the other hand, the electromagnetic theory explains the properties of electricity and how to
generate it, while quantum mechanics explains the properties of subatomic particles, and
thermodynamics explains the properties of energy and mechanical work. An introductory university level
text book in physics will likely contain separate chapters devoted to each of these theories. Similarly,
social sciences also have its own theories.

Sitzman and Wright support this by arguing that "Theories provide structure and order for guiding and
improving professional practice, teaching ... and research." Moreover, they highlight that frameworks
can be studied, evaluated and advanced to provide better logic of new situations.

4.8 Basic principles of engineering project management (plan, organise, lead and control)

Technical engineering projects are complex and multidimensional undertakings, demanding

comprehensive procedures, integrative skills, discipline and a broad management perspective. Receive
an intensive and comprehensive introduction to the process and foundations of project management to
do your job better.

Learn a step-by-step, phase-based approach for successful projects. You will improve your estimation of
project cost, resources and time, and enhance your overall project management skills.

Project Management Basics, Initiation and Planning

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 • Project management basics: types and characteristics of projects, triple constraints of project
management, project methodologies, projects vs. programs vs. portfolios, project stakeholders
• Project conceptualisation and initiation: developing success criteria and determining what "done"
looks like, creating the business case, cost benefit analysis, developing the project charter

4.8.1 Planning and Execution

• Project planning: the work breakdown structure, estimating using effort and duration, techniques
for accurate estimates, methods to calculate start and finish dates of tasks, network diagrams,
critical path method, resource planning, creating a project milestone schedule, creating Gantt
charts, identifying and quantifying project risks
• Project execution and control: creating a high-performing project team, techniques for effective
communication and status reporting, earned value management (EVM)

4.8.2 Control, Close and Action Planning

• Project execution and control: project scope management and developing a change control plan,
monitoring and managing risks and issues, managing stakeholder expectations
• Project closing: scope verification, transferring deliverables to the customer, post-project review

Engineers are not normally taught the principles of project management, although it is a critical function
in their careers. Most engineers see themselves as technical experts, not project managers, but
business is business and every engineer I know of seems to find themselves face to face with the
realities of timelines, budgets, and people management on a regular basis. Project management is a
multi-faceted discipline that contains many individual specialties within it. Indeed, entire degree
programs are devoted to the topic. Some people consider their career to be a project manager rather
than technical expert, particularly on larger projects.

4.8.3 Project Management Organisations

The Project Management Institute (PMI), for example, has more than 600,000 members and offers
multiple accreditations such as Project Management Professional (PMP) and Certified Association in
Project Management (CAPM), the entry level certification that requires no project management
experience. For those in charge of “programs” (collections of projects), there’s the Program
Management Professional (PgMP). There are also various sub-categories such as Risk Management
Professional (PMI-RMP) and Scheduling Professional (PMI-SP). These accreditations involve several
months of part time study and passing an exam. The PMI’s textbook on project management is called
the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), available at most bookstores or Amazon.

The International Project Management Association (IPMA) also issues a certification for project
managers. The four levels, from A to D, correspond to varying levels of expertise. Level D is an entry
level designation similar to PMI’s CAPM. Levels B and C correspond to senior and mid-level project
management. Level A is a program management designation similar to PMI’s PgMP. Each country has
an IPMA member organisation that deals with the certification in that country, and they have quite a bit
of freedom to alter the specifications for the certification so the interested candidate must be certain to
find that member organisation. The IPMA’s textbook is called the IPMA Competence Baseline (ICB).

In addition, there is a certification called PRINCE2, issued by a quasi-governmental organisation in the

UK called Axelos. PRINCE2 is considered the easiest way to get certified because there is no experience,
no resume to submit, and no courses to take (although it might be easiest if you do). All you have to do
is write the exam. The textbook is called Managing Successful Projects with PRINCE2.

4.8.4 The Project Management Body of Knowledge

The most popular guide to project management is PMI’s Project Management Body of Knowledge
(PMBOK). It divides a project into five chronological (generally speaking) process groups, which can be
thought of as phases. For small projects these will be performed in order, but for larger or more
complicated projects you often have to, for example, jump back and perform some more planning.

▪ Initiating. Authorising the project and establishing funding.

▪ Planning. Developing the project schedule, budget, and project management plan.
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▪ Executing. Performing the project work.
▪ Monitoring & Controlling. Ensuring the project stays on track to meet the schedule, budget,
and any other item contained within the project management plan.
▪ Closing. Developing as-built plans, closing contracts, etc.
PMI suggests that the planning phase is significantly underrated on most projects. As a guide, they
suggest that 30% of a project should be spent in the first two process groups. Although this includes
planning during the project (reviewing schedules and resources, performing risk analyses, etc.) most
people would agree that most projects don’t receive this kind of planning effort.

The project management plan developed during the planning phase contains the schedule, budget, and
any other item that defines the “plan” for the project. It should be approved by the project sponsor, and
any changes during the project’s execution phase should be documented in a change log and re-
approved.

Throughout these phases the project manager employs ten knowledge areas. The actions within each
knowledge area are employed at any time but there are generally times at which each is useful:

1. Integration management. The bigger picture stuff that doesn’t fit into specific knowledge
areas, like writing the project management plan, dealing with project changes, etc.
2. Scope management. Defining the project scope and ensuring it doesn’t change except when
specifically planned for (scope creep).
3. Time management. Developing the project schedule and ensuring the project stays on
schedule.
4. Cost management. Estimating the project’s cost and ensuring the project stays under budget.
5. Quality management. Determining what the quality standards for the project are, and how the
project will meet those standards.
6. Human resource management. Defining the job responsibilities of the project team, acquiring
the personnel and giving them the tools to succeed.
7. Communications management. Establishing the communications needs of the project.
8. Risk management. Determining the biggest risks to the successful completion of the project,
how they will be mitigated, controlled, or transferred, and developing written response plans where
necessary.
9. Procurement management. Itemizing the external vendors required to complete the project
and determining how they will be managed.
10. Stakeholder management. Defining the project’s stakeholders and analysing their needs.

Unlike other types of projects, engineering projects have a tendency to need a broad range of these
rather than specialise in one or two.

2.5 Project Organisational Chart

The generic project organisational chart is as follows:

▪ Project Sponsor. This is the person that accepts the project’s deliverables. Whether inside or
outside the organisation, they also authorize the project and approve project funding. They are one
level above the project manager.

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▪ Project Manager. The person who manages the day to day project activities and on whom
responsibility for the project’s success or failure rests.
▪ Project Team. The people who perform the technical project work, on time, on budget, and to
the specifications developed within the project management plan.
▪ Stakeholders. Anyone who has an interest in the project. From government regulatory bodies
to adjacent landowners to funding agencies, they can all derail the project and need to be managed.

4.8.6 Project costing, budgeting and resource management

Organisations aim for their projects to be successful and to meet client expectations as well as their
internal objectives. But what is the reality on the ground? In a MPI report, 14% of the surveyed IT
projects were deemed as failures. Only 57% of the projects finished within their initial budgets, with the
others exceeding the target they had set for themselves. This is certainly not good news for enterprises
as cost overruns not only impact their margins, but also hinder the ability to execute future projects.
Understanding what project cost management is and how to be effective at it can be beneficial for
organisations to stay on course. Below, let us look at what project cost management is, its benefits and
the steps involved in its implementation.

2.6 4.8.6.1 What is Project Cost Management?

Project cost management is the process of estimating, budgeting and controlling costs throughout the
project life cycle, with the objective of keeping expenditures within the approved budget.

For a project to be called successful, it’s necessary that

• it delivers on the requirements and scope

• its execution quality is of a high standard
• it’s completed within schedule and
• it’s completed within budget.

Hence, project cost management is one of the key pillars of project management and is relevant
regardless of the domain, be it manufacturing, retail, technology, construction and so on. It helps to
create a financial baseline against which project managers can benchmark the current status of their
project costs and realign the direction if needed.

2.7 4.8.6.2 Why is Project Cost Management Important?

The importance of cost management is easy to understand. To take a simple, real-life example, if you
decide to build a house, the first thing to do is set the budget. When you have a sense of how much to
spend on the project, the next step is to divide the high-level budget into expenses for sub-tasks and
smaller line items.

The budget will determine critical decision points such as: which designer to hire—a high-end one who
will construct and deliver the project end-to-end, or someone who can help with a few elements and be
able to work for a smaller budget? How many stories should the house have? What quality of materials
should be used?

Without a predefined budget, not only is it difficult to answer these questions, but it becomes impossible
to assess whether you are progressing in the right direction once the project is underway. In large
organisations, the scale of this problem is further magnified due to concurrent running of multiple
projects, change in initial assumptions and the addition of unexpected costs. That’s where cost
management can help.

By implementing efficient cost management practices, project managers can:

• Set clear expectations with stakeholders

• Control scope creep due to transparencies established with the customer

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 • Track progress and respond with corrective action at a quick pace
• Maintain expected margin, increase ROI, and avoid losing money on the project
• Generate data to benchmark for future projects and track long-term cost trends

The Four Steps in Project Cost Management

While cost management is viewed as a continuous process, it helps to split the function into four steps:
resource planning, estimation, budgeting and control. They are mostly sequential, but it’s possible that
some resource changes happen midway through the project, forcing the budgets to be adjusted. Or, the
variances observed during the control process can call for estimate revisions.

Let us look at each of these four steps in detail.

A. Project Resource Planning

Resource planning is the process of identifying the resources required to execute a project and take it to
completion. Examples of resources are people (such as employees and contractors) and equipment
(such as infrastructure, large construction vehicles and other specialised equipment in limited supply).

Resource planning is done at the beginning of a project, before any actual work begins.

To get started, project managers first need to have the work-breakdown structure (WBS) ready. They
need to look at each subtask in the WBS and ask how many people, with what kind of skills are needed
to finish this task, and what sort of equipment or material is required to finish this task?

By adopting this task-level approach, it becomes possible for project managers to come up with an
accurate and complete inventory of all resources, which is then fed as an input into the next step of
estimating costs.

A few tips to consider during the process:

• Consider historical data—past schedules and effort—before determining sub-tasks and the
corresponding resources.
• Take feedback from SMEs and team members—a collaborative approach works well especially in
projects that do not have past data to use.
• Assess the impact of time on resource requirements. For instance, a resource may be available
only after a few months, dragging the project’s schedule. This could have an impact on cost
estimation.
• Although this step happens at the planning stage, project managers need to account for ground
realities. For example, you may identify the need for a resource with certain expertise, but if such
a resource is not available within the organisation, you have to consider hiring a contractor or
training your team to get them up to speed. All these real variables impact cost management.
B. Cost Estimation

Cost estimation is the process of quantifying the costs associated with all the resources required to
execute the project. To perform cost calculations, we need the following information:

• Resource requirements (output from the previous step)

• Price of each resource (e.g., staffing cost per hour, vendor hiring costs, server procurement
costs, material rates per unit, etc.)
• Duration that each resource is required
• List of assumptions
• Potential risks
• Past project costs and industry benchmarks, if any
• Insight into the company’s financial health and reporting structures

Estimation is arguably the most difficult of the steps involved in cost management as accuracy is the key
here. Also, project managers have to consider factors such as fixed and variable costs, overheads,
inflation and the time value of money.

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The greater the deviation between estimation and actual costs, the less likely it is for a project to
succeed. However, there are many estimation models to choose from. Analogous estimation is a good
choice if you have plenty of historical cost data from similar projects. Some organisations prefer
mathematical approaches such as parametric modeling or program evaluation and review technique
(PERT).

Then there is the choice between employing a top-down versus bottom-up approach. Top-down typically
works when past costing data are available. In this, project managers usually have experience executing
similar projects and can therefore take a good call. Bottom-up works for projects in which organisations
do not have a lot of experience with, and, therefore, it makes sense to calculate a cost estimate at a
task-level and then roll it up to the top.

2.7.1.1 Cost Estimation as a Decision Enabler

It’s useful to remember that cost estimation is done at the planning stage and, therefore, everything is
not yet set in stone. In many cases, project teams come up with multiple solutions for a project, and
cost estimation helps them decide which way to go. There are many costing methodologies, such as
activity-based costing, job costing, and lifecycle costing that help perform this comparative analysis.

Lifecycle costing, for instance, considers the complete end-to-end lifecycle of a project. In IT projects,
for example, maintenance costs are often ignored, but lifecycle costing looks long-term and accounts for
resource usage until the end of the cycle. Similarly, in manufacturing projects, the goal is to minimize
future service costs and replacement charges.

Sometimes the estimation process also allows teams to evaluate and reduce costs. Value engineering,
for example, helps to gain the optimal value from a project while bringing costs down.

C. Cost Budgeting

Cost budgeting can be viewed as part of estimation or as its own separate process. Budgeting is the
process of allocating costs to a certain chunk of the project, such as individual tasks or modules, for a
specific time period. Budgets include contingency reserves allocated to manage unexpected costs.

For example, let’s say the total costs estimated for a project that runs over three years is R2 million.
However, since the budget allocation is a function of time, the project manager decides to consider just
the first two quarters for now. They identify the work items to be completed and allocate a budget of,
say, R35,000 for this time period, and these work items. The project manager uses the WBS and some
of the estimation methods discussed in the previous section to arrive at this number.

Budgeting creates a cost baseline against which we can continue to measure and evaluate the project
cost performance. If not for the budget, the total estimated cost would remain an abstract figure, and it
would be difficult to measure midway. Evaluation of project performance gives an opportunity to assess
how much budget needs to be released for future phases of the project.

Another reason to firm up budgets is that organisations often rely on expected future cash flows for their
funding. During the initial phases, the project manager has a limited financial pool and has to set targets
accordingly. It’s similar to building the foundation and one floor of the house in the initial few months
and later completing the rest of the project, as you save more.

D. Cost Control

Cost control is the process of measuring cost variances from the baseline and taking appropriate action,
such as increasing the budget allocated or reducing the scope of work, to correct that gap. Cost control
is a continuous process done throughout the project lifecycle. The emphasis here is as much on timely
and clear reporting as measuring.

Along with the cost baseline, the cost management plan is an essential input for cost control. This plan
contains details such as how project performance will be measured, what is the threshold for deviations,
what actions will be done if the threshold is breached, and the list of people and roles who have the
executive authority to make decisions.
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Earned value management (EVM) is one of the most popular approaches to measuring cost performance.
Let’s take an example.

At the end of a week, you measure the progress of task X and find that it’s 25% complete. Now, how do
you assess if you are on track to meet the task budget?

First, a project manager calculates the planned value for this task (at the planning stage). Let’s say,
Task X has a budget of R4000 and is expected to be 50% complete by the week.

Planned value (PV) of task X by the week = R4000 * .5 = R2000

Earned value (EV) of task X by the week = R4000 * .25 = R1000

Now, you also determine the actual cost (AC) of the work, which involves other variables such as
equipment and material costs (say, R800).

Schedule variance = EV – PV = R1000 – R2000 = -R1000.

Cost variance = EV – AC = R1000 – R800 = R200.

The negative schedule variance indicates that the task is falling behind, but the positive cost variance
indicates that it’s under budget.

While dealing with hundreds of tasks in huge projects, cost control can provide the level of transparency
that decision makers require to respond quickly to the situation.

2.7.2 4.8.6.2.1 Project Cost Software

Cost management, similar to other aspects of project management, gets complex with many variables in
play. The process itself is elaborate, needing attention to detail along with a rigorous approach. The use
of project management software can simplify this process considerably.

Let’s look at a few advantages of using project cost management software:

• Automation of cumbersome quantitative analysis during estimation and measurement helps avoid
manual errors
• Integration of data across planning, estimation, budgeting, and control enables continuous
monitoring and quick, proactive responses, rather than one-off interventions
• Decision-making is made easier as cost software helps evaluate alternate solutions using scenario
forecasting and what-if analysis
• Clear and easy reporting in the form of dashboards and other rich UIs
• The complexity of multicurrency management in projects across different geographical locations
is simplified with project cost software
• Many project cost solutions allow third-party integrations, so data can be pooled and analysed
• Benchmarking and standardization are possible with the availability of performance data across
multiple projects

2.8 4.8.6.2.2 Cost Management and Enterprise Project Performance

In the 2018 MPI Pulse of the Profession Report, 41% of respondents said that their projects are of high
complexity. It’s no surprise then that 40% of the survey participants consider “investing in technology to
better enable project success” as their top priority.

Cost management is closely tied to the capability of an organisation to succeed in current as well as
future projects. Investing in reliable cost management software can result in huge savings. A good
solution to cost management will not treat it as a siloed function but leverage it as integral to project
and portfolio performance, and correlate data across projects.

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 I. Cost Control, Monitoring and Accounting
2.9 I.I The Cost Control Problem

During the execution of a project, procedures for project control and record keeping become
indispensable tools to managers and other participants in the construction process. These tools serve the
dual purpose of recording the financial transactions that occur as well as giving managers an indication
of the progress and problems associated with a project. The problems of project control are aptly
summed up in an old definition of a project as "any collection of vaguely related activities that are ninety
percent complete, over budget and late." The task of project control systems is to give a fair indication
of the existence and the extent of such problems.

In this chapter, we consider the problems associated with resource utilization, accounting, monitoring
and control during a project. In this discussion, we emphasize the project management uses of
accounting information. Interpretation of project accounts is generally not straightforward until a project
is completed, and then it is too late to influence project management. Even after completion of a
project, the accounting results may be confusing. Hence, managers need to know how to interpret
accounting information for the purpose of project management. In the process of considering
management problems, however, we shall discuss some of the common accounting systems and
conventions, although our purpose is not to provide a comprehensive survey of accounting procedures.

The limited objective of project control deserves emphasis. Project control procedures are primarily
intended to identify deviations from the project plan rather than to suggest possible areas for cost
savings. This characteristic reflects the advanced stage at which project control becomes important. The
time at which major cost savings can be achieved is during planning and design for the project. During
the actual construction, changes are likely to delay the project and lead to inordinate cost increases. As
a result, the focus of project control is on fulfilling the original design plans or indicating deviations from
these plans, rather than on searching for significant improvements and cost savings. It is only when a
rescue operation is required that major changes will normally occur in the construction plan.

Finally, the issues associated with integration of information will require some discussion. Project
management activities and functional concerns are intimately linked, yet the techniques used in many
instances do not facilitate comprehensive or integrated consideration of project activities. For example,
schedule information and cost accounts are usually kept separately. As a result, project managers
themselves must synthesize a comprehensive view from the different reports on the project plus their
own field observations. In particular, managers are often forced to infer the cost impacts of schedule
changes, rather than being provided with aids for this process. Communication or integration of various
types of information can serve a number of useful purposes, although it does require special attention in
the establishment of project control procedures.

2.10 I.II The Project Budget

For cost control on a project, the construction plan and the associated cash flow estimates can provide
the baseline reference for subsequent project monitoring and control. For schedules, progress on
individual activities and the achievement of milestone completions can be compared with the project
schedule to monitor the progress of activities. Contract and job specifications provide the criteria by
which to assess and assure the required quality of construction. The final or detailed cost estimate
provides a baseline for the assessment of financial performance during the project. To the extent that
costs are within the detailed cost estimate, then the project is thought to be under financial control.
Overruns in particular cost categories signal the possibility of problems and give an indication of exactly
what problems are being encountered. Expense oriented construction planning and control focuses upon
the categories included in the final cost estimation. This focus is particular relevant for projects with few
activities and considerable repetition such as grading and paving roadways.

For control and monitoring purposes, the original detailed cost estimate is typically converted to
a project budget, and the project budget is used subsequently as a guide for management. Specific
items in the detailed cost estimate become job cost elements. Expenses incurred during the course of a
project are recorded in specific job cost accounts to be compared with the original cost estimates in each
category. Thus, individual job cost accounts generally represent the basic unit for cost control.
Alternatively, job cost accounts may be disaggregated or divided into work elements which are related
both to particular scheduled activities and to particular cost accounts.

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In addition to cost amounts, information on material quantities and labour inputs within each job
account is also typically retained in the project budget. With this information, actual materials usage and
labour employed can be compared to the expected requirements. As a result, cost overruns or savings
on particular items can be identified as due to changes in unit prices, labour productivity or in the
amount of material consumed.

The number of cost accounts associated with a particular project can vary considerably. For constructors,
on the order of four hundred separate cost accounts might be used on a small project. These accounts
record all the transactions associated with a project. Thus, separate accounts might exist for different
types of materials, equipment use, payroll, project office, etc. Both physical and non-physical resources
are represented, including overhead items such as computer use or interest charges. Table 4-1
summarizes a typical set of cost accounts that might be used in building construction. Note that this set
of accounts is organized hierarchically, with seven major divisions (accounts 201 to 207) and numerous
sub-divisions under each division. This hierarchical structure facilitates aggregation of costs into pre-
defined categories; for example, costs associated with the superstructure (account 204) would be the
sum of the underlying subdivisions (ie. 204.1, 204.2, etc.) or finer levels of detail (204.61, 204.62, etc.).
The sub-division accounts in the table 4-1 could be further divided into personnel, material and other
resource costs for the purpose of financial accounting, as described below.

TABLE 4-1 Illustrative Set of Project Cost Accounts

201 Clearing and Preparing Site

202 Substructure

202.1 Excavation and Shoring

202.2 Piling
202.3 Concrete Masonry

202.31 Mixing and Placing

202.32 Formwork
202.33 Reinforcing

203 Outside Utilities (water, gas, sewer, etc.)

204 Superstructure

204.1 Masonry Construction

204.2 Structural Steel
204.3 Wood Framing, Partitions, etc.
204.4 Exterior Finishes (brickwork, terra cotta, cut stone, etc.)
204.5 Roofing, Drains, Gutters, Flashing, etc.
204.6 Interior Finish and Trim

204.61 Finish Flooring, Stairs, Doors, Trim

204.62 Glass, Windows, Glazing
204.63 Marble, Tile, Terrazzo
204.64 Lathing and Plastering
204.65 Soundproofing and Insulation
204.66 Finish Hardware
204.67 Painting and Decorating
204.68 Waterproofing
204.69 Sprinklers and Fire Protection

204.7 Service Work

204.71 Electrical Work

204.72 Heating and Ventilating
204.73 Plumbing and Sewage
204.74 Air Conditioning

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204.72 Fire Alarm, Telephone, Security, Miscellaneous

205 Paving, Curbs, Walks

206 Installed Equipment (elevators, revolving doors, mailchutes, etc.)

207 Fencing

In developing or implementing a system of cost accounts, an appropriate numbering or coding system is

essential to facilitate communication of information and proper aggregation of cost information.
Particular cost accounts are used to indicate the expenditures associated with specific projects and to
indicate the expenditures on particular items throughout an organisation. These are examples of
different perspectives on the same information, in which the same information may be summarized in
different ways for specific purposes. Thus, more than one aggregation of the cost information and more
than one application program can use a particular cost account. Separate identifiers of the type of cost
account and the specific project must be provided for project cost accounts or for financial transactions.
As a result, a standard set of cost codes such as the MASTERFORMAT may be adopted to identify cost
accounts along with project identifiers and extensions to indicate organisation or job specific needs.
Similarly the use of databases or, at a minimum, inter-communicating applications programs facilitate
access to cost information.

Converting a final cost estimate into a project budget compatible with an organisation's cost accounts is
not always a straightforward task. Cost estimates are generally disaggregated into
appropriate functional or resource based project categories. For example, labour and material quantities
might be included for each of several physical components of a project. For cost accounting purposes,
labour and material quantities are aggregated by type no matter for which physical component they are
employed. For example, particular types of workers or materials might be used on numerous different
physical components of a facility. Moreover, the categories of cost accounts established within an
organisation may bear little resemblance to the quantities included in a final cost estimate. This is
particularly true when final cost estimates are prepared in accordance with an external reporting
requirement rather than in view of the existing cost accounts within an organisation.

One particular problem in forming a project budget in terms of cost accounts is the treatment of
contingency amounts. These allowances are included in project cost estimates to accommodate
unforeseen events and the resulting costs. However, in advance of project completion, the source of
contingency expenses is not known. Realistically, a budget accounting item for contingency
allowance should be established whenever a contingency amount was included in the final cost estimate.

A second problem in forming a project budget is the treatment of inflation. Typically, final cost estimates
are formed in terms of real dollars and an item reflecting inflation costs is added on as a percentage or
lump sum. This inflation allowance would then be allocated to individual cost items in relation to the
actual expected inflation over the period for which costs will be incurred.

Example 4-1: Project Budget for a Design Office

An example of a small project budget is shown in Table below. This budget might be used by a design
firm for a specific design project. While this budget might represent all the work for this firm on the
project, numerous other organisations would be involved with their own budgets. In Table 4-2, a
summary budget is shown as well as a detailed listing of costs for individuals in the Engineering Division.
For the purpose of consistency with cost accounts and managerial control, labour costs are aggregated
into three groups: the engineering, architectural and environmental divisions. The detailed budget
shown in Table 4-2 applies only to the engineering division labour; other detailed budgets amounts for
categories such as supplies and the other work divisions would also be prepared. Note that the salary
costs associated with individuals are aggregated to obtain the total labour costs in the engineering group
for the project. To perform this aggregation, some means of identifying individuals within organisational
groups is required. Accompanying a budget of this nature, some estimate of the actual man-hours of
labour required by project task would also be prepared. Finally, this budget might be used for internal
purposes alone. In submitting financial bills and reports to the client, overhead and contingency amounts
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might be combined with the direct labour costs to establish an aggregate billing rate per hour. In this
case, the overhead, contingency and profit would represent allocated costs based on the direct labour
costs.

TABLE 4-2 Example of a Small Project Budget for a Design Firm

Budget Summary

Personnel
Architectural Division R 67,251.00
Engineering 45,372.00
Environmental Division 28,235.00
Total R140,858.00

Other Direct Expenses

Travel 2,400.00
Supplies 1,500.00
Communication 600.00
Computer Services 1,200.00
Total R 5,700.00

Overhead R 175,869.60

Contingency and Profit R 95,700.00

Total R 418,127.60

Engineering
Personnel Detail

Senior Engineer R 11,562.00

Associate Engineer 21,365.00
Engineer Technician 12,654.00

Total R 45,372.00

Example 4-2: Project Budget for a Constructor

Table 4-3 illustrates a summary budget for a constructor. This budget is developed from a project to
construct a wharf. As with the example design office budget above, costs are divided into direct and
indirect expenses. Within direct costs, expenses are divided into material, subcontract, temporary work
and machinery costs. This budget indicates aggregate amounts for the various categories. Cost details
associated with particular cost accounts would supplement and support the aggregate budget shown in
Table 4-3. A profit and a contingency amount might be added to the basic budget of R1,715,147 shown
in Table 4-3 for completeness.

TABLE 4-3: An Example of a Project Budget for a Wharf Project (Amounts in Thousands of
Dollars)

Subcontract Temporary Machinery

Material Cost Work Work Cost Total Cost

Steel Piling R292,172 R129,178 R16,389 R0 R437,739

Tie-rod 88,233 29,254 0 0 117,487
Anchor-Wall 130,281 60,873 0 0 191,154
Backfill 242,230 27,919 0 0 300,149
Coping 42,880 22,307 13,171 0 78,358
Dredging 0 111,650 0 0 111,650
Fender 48,996 10,344 0 1,750 61,090
Other 5,000 32,250 0 0 37,250

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 Sub-total R849,800 R423,775 R29,560 R1,750 R1,304,885

Summary
Total of direct cost R1,304,885
Indirect Cost
Common Temporary Work 19,320
Common Machinery 80,934
Transportation 15,550
Office Operating Costs 294,458
Total of Indirect Cost 410,262.
Total Project Cost R1,715,147

2.11 Forecasting for Activity Cost Control

For the purpose of project management and control, it is not sufficient to consider only the past record
of costs and revenues incurred in a project. Good managers should focus upon future revenues, future
costs and technical problems. For this purpose, traditional financial accounting schemes are not
adequate to reflect the dynamic nature of a project. Accounts typically focus on recording routine costs
and past expenditures associated with activities. Generally, past expenditures represent sunk costs that
cannot be altered in the future and may or may not be relevant in the future. For example, after the
completion of some activity, it may be discovered that some quality flaw renders the work useless.
Unfortunately, the resources expended on the flawed construction will generally be sunk and cannot be
recovered for re-construction (although it may be possible to change the burden of who pays for these
resources by financial withholding or charges; owners will typically attempt to have constructors or
designers pay for changes due to quality flaws). Since financial accounts are historical in nature, some
means of forecasting or projecting the future course of a project is essential for management control. In
this section, some methods for cost control and simple forecasts are described.

An example of forecasting used to assess the project status is shown in above table. In this example,
costs are reported in five categories, representing the sum of all the various cost accounts associated
with each category:

• Budgeted Cost
The budgeted cost is derived from the detailed cost estimate prepared at the start of the project.
Examples of project budgets were presented in the above Section. The factors of cost would be
referenced by cost account and by a prose description.
• Estimated total cost
The estimated or forecast total cost in each category is the current best estimate of costs based
on progress and any changes since the budget was formed. Estimated total costs are the sum of
cost to date, commitments and exposure. Methods for estimating total costs are described below.
• Cost Committed and Cost Exposure!! Estimated cost to completion in each category in divided
into firm commitments and estimated additional cost or exposure. Commitments may represent
material orders or subcontracts for which firm dollar amounts have been committed.
• Cost to Date
The actual cost incurred to date is recorded in column 6 and can be derived from the financial
record keeping accounts.
• Over or (Under)
A final column in the table indicates the amount over or under the budget for each category. This
column is an indicator of the extent of variance from the project budget; items with unusually
large overruns would represent a particular managerial concern. Note that variance is used in the
terminology of project control to indicate a difference between budgeted and actual expenditures.
The term is defined and used quite differently in statistics or mathematical analysis. In the table
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 below, labour costs are running higher than expected, whereas subcontracts are less than
expected.

The current status of the project is a forecast budget overrun of R5,950. with 23 percent of the
budgeted project costs incurred to date.

TABLE 4-4: Illustration of a Job Status Report

Budgeted Estimated Cost Cost Cost To Over or

Factor Cost Total Cost Committed Exposure Date (Under)

Labour R99,406 R102,342 R49,596 --- R52,746 R2,936

Material 88,499 88,499 42,506 45,993 --- 0
Subcontracts 198,458 196,323 83,352 97,832 15,139 (2,135)
Equipment 37,543 37,543 23,623 --- 13,920 0
Other 72,693 81,432 49,356 --- 32,076 8,739
Total 496,509 506,139 248,433 143,825 113,881 5,950

For project control, managers would focus particular attention on items indicating substantial deviation
from budgeted amounts. In particular, the cost overruns in the labour and in the "other expense
category would be worthy of attention by a project manager in the above table. A next step would be to
look in greater detail at the various components of these categories. Overruns in cost might be due to
lower than expected productivity, higher than expected wage rates, higher than expected material costs,
or other factors. Even further, low productivity might be caused by inadequate training, lack of required
resources such as equipment or tools, or inordinate amounts of re-work to correct quality problems.
Review of a job status report is only the first step in project control. The job status report illustrated in
the table employs explicit estimates of ultimate cost in each category of expense. These estimates are
used to identify the actual progress and status of an expense category. Estimates might be made from
simple linear extrapolations of the productivity or cost of the work to date on each project item.
Algebraically, a linear estimation formula is generally one of two forms. Using a linear extrapolation of
costs, the forecast total cost, Cf is:

where Ct is the cost incurred to time t and p t is the proportion of the activity completed at time t. For
example, an activity which is 50 percent complete with a cost of R40,000 would be estimated to have a
total cost of R40,000/0.5 = R80,000. More elaborate methods of forecasting costs would disaggregate
costs into different categories, with the total cost the sum of the forecast costs in each category.
Alternatively, the use of measured unit cost amounts can be used for forecasting total cost. The basic
formula for forecasting cost from unit costs is:

where Cf is the forecast total cost, W is the total units of work, and c t is the average cost per unit of
work experienced up to time t. If the average unit cost is R50 per unit of work on a particular activity
and 1,600 units of work exist, then the expected cost is (1,600)(50) = R80,000 for completion. The unit
cost in Equation (12.2) may be replaced with the hourly productivity and the unit cost per hour (or other
appropriate time period), resulting in the equation:

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where the cost per work unit (ct) is replaced by the time per unit, ht, divided by the cost per unit of time,
ut. More elaborate forecasting systems might recognize peculiar problems associated with work on
particular items and modify these simple proportional cost estimates. For example, if productivity is
improving as workers and managers become more familiar with the project activities, the estimate of
total costs for an item might be revised downward. In this case, the estimating equation would become:

where forecast total cost, Cf, is the sum of cost incurred to date, C t, and the cost resulting from the
remaining work (W - Wt) multiplied by the expected cost per unit time period for the remainder of the
activity, ct. As a numerical example, suppose that the average unit cost has been R50 per unit of work,
but the most recent figure during a project is R45 per unit of work. If the project manager was assured
that the improved productivity could be maintained for the remainder of the project (consisting of 800
units of work out of a total of 1600 units of work), the cost estimate would be (50) (800) + (45) (800) =
R76,000 for completion of the activity. Note that this forecast uses the actual average productivity
achieved on the first 800 units and uses a forecast of productivity for the remaining work. Historical
changes in productivity might also be used to represent this type of non-linear changes in work
productivity on particular activities over time.

In addition to changes in productivities, other components of the estimating formula can be adjusted or
more detailed estimates substituted. For example, the change in unit prices due to new labour contracts
or material supplier's prices might be reflected in estimating future expenditures. In essence, the same
problems encountered in preparing the detailed cost estimate are faced in the process of preparing
exposure estimates, although the number and extent of uncertainties in the project environment decline
as work progresses. The only exception to this rule is the danger of quality problems in completed work
which would require re-construction.

Each of the estimating methods described above require current information on the state of work
accomplishment for particular activities. There are several possible methods to develop such estimates,
including:

• Units of Work Completed

For easily measured quantities the actual proportion of completed work amounts can be
measured. For example, the linear feet of piping installed can be compared to the required
amount of piping to estimate the percentage of piping work completed.
• Incremental Milestones
Particular activities can be sub-divided or "decomposed" into a series of milestones, and the
milestones can be used to indicate the percentage of work complete based on historical averages.
For example, the work effort involved with installation of standard piping might be divided into
four milestones:
o Spool in place: 20% of work and 20% of cumulative work.
o Ends welded: 40% of work and 60% of cumulative work.
o Hangars and Trim Complete: 30% of work and 90% of cumulative work.
o Hydrotested and Complete: 10% of work and 100% of cumulative work.

Thus, a pipe section for which the ends have been welded would be reported as 60% complete.

• Opinion
Subjective judgments of the percentage complete can be prepared by inspectors, supervisors or
project managers themselves. Clearly, this estimated technique can be biased by optimism,
pessimism or inaccurate observations. Knowledgeable estimators and adequate field observations
are required to obtain sufficient accuracy with this method.
• Cost Ratio
The cost incurred to date can also be used to estimate the work progress. For example, if an
activity was budgeted to cost R20,000 and the cost incurred at a particular date was R10,000,
then the estimated percentage complete under the cost ratio method would be 10,000/20,000 =
0.5 or fifty percent. This method provides no independent information on the actual percentage
complete or any possible errors in the activity budget: the cost forecast will always be the

77
 budgeted amount. Consequently, managers must use the estimated costs to complete an activity
derived from the cost ratio method with extreme caution.

Systematic application of these different estimating methods to the various project activities enables
calculation of the percentage complete or the productivity estimates used in preparing job status
reports. In some cases, automated data acquisition for work accomplishments might be instituted. For
example, transponders might be moved to the new work limits after each day's activity and the new
locations automatically computed and compared with project plans. These measurements of actual
progress should be stored in a central database and then processed for updating the project schedule.

Example 1: Estimated Total Cost to Complete an Activity

Suppose that we wish to estimate the total cost to complete piping construction activities on a project.
The piping construction involves 1,000 linear feet of piping which has been divided into 50 sections for
management convenience. At this time, 400 linear feet of piping has been installed at a cost of R40,000
and 500 man-hours of labour. The original budget estimate was R90,000 with a productivity of one foot
per man-hour, a unit cost of R60 per man hour and a total material cost of R 30,000. Firm commitments
of material delivery for the R30,000 estimated cost have been received.

The first task is to estimate the proportion of work completed. Two estimates are readily available. First,
400 linear feet of pipe is in place out of a total of 1000 linear feet, so the proportion of work completed
is 400/1000 = 0.4 or 40%. This is the "units of work completed" estimation method. Second, the cost
ratio method would estimate the work complete as the cost-to-date divided by the cost estimate or
R40,000/R 90,000 = 0.44 or 44%. Third, the "incremental milestones" method would be applied by
examining each pipe section and estimating a percentage complete and then aggregating to determine
the total percentage complete. For example, suppose the following quantities of piping fell into four
categories of completeness:

complete (100%) 380 ft

hangars and trim complete (90%) 20 ft
ends welded (60%) 5 ft
spool in place (20%) 0 ft

Then using the incremental milestones shown above, the estimate of completed work would be 380 +
(20) (0.9) + (5) (0.6) + 0 = 401 ft and the proportion complete would be 401 ft/1,000 ft = 0.401 or
40% after rounding. Once an estimate of work completed is available, then the estimated cost to
complete the activity can be calculated. First, a simple linear extrapolation of cost results in an estimate
of R40,000/0.4 = R100,000. for the piping construction using the 40% estimate of work completed. This
estimate projects a cost overrun of 100,000 - 90,000 = R10,000.

Second, a linear extrapolation of productivity results in an estimate of (1000 ft.) (500 hrs./400 ft.)
(R60/hr.) + 30,000 = R105,000. for completion of the piping construction. This estimate suggests a
variance of 105,000 - 90,000 = R15,000 above the activity estimate. In making this estimate, labour
and material costs entered separately, whereas the two were implicitly combined in the simple linear
cost forecast above. The source of the variance can also be identified in this calculation: compared to the
original estimate, the labour productivity is 1.25 hours per foot or 25% higher than the original
estimate.

Example 2: Estimated Total Cost for Completion

The forecasting procedures described above assumed linear extrapolations of future costs, based either
on the complete experience on the activity or the recent experience. For activities with good historical
records, it can be the case that a typically non-linear profile of cost expenditures and completion
proportions can be estimated. Figure 4-1 illustrates one possible non-linear relationships derived from
experience in some particular activity. The progress on a new job can be compared to this historical
record. For example, point A in Figure 4-1 suggests a higher expenditure than is normal for the

78
completion proportion. This point represents 40% of work completed with an expenditure of 60% of the
budget. Since the historical record suggests only 50% of the budget should be expended at time of 40%
completion, a 60 - 50 = 10% overrun in cost is expected even if work efficiency can be increased to
historical averages. If comparable cost overruns continue to accumulate, then the cost-to-complete will
be even higher.

Figure 4-1: Illustration of Proportion Completion versus Expenditure for an Activity

2.12 Financial Accounting Systems and Cost Accounts

The cost accounts described in the previous sections provide only one of the various components in a
financial accounting system. Before further discussing the use of cost accounts in project control, the
relationship of project and financial accounting deserves mention. Accounting information is generally
used for three distinct purposes:

• Internal reporting to project managers for day-to-day planning, monitoring and control.
• Internal reporting to managers for aiding strategic planning.
• External reporting to owners, government, regulators and other outside parties.

External reports are constrained to particular forms and procedures by contractual reporting
requirements or by generally accepted accounting practices. Preparation of such external reports is
referred to as financial accounting. In contrast, cost or managerial accounting is intended to aid internal
managers in their responsibilities of planning, monitoring and control. Project costs are always included
in the system of financial accounts associated with an organisation. At the heart of this system, all
expense transactions are recorded in a general ledger. The general ledger of accounts forms the basis
for management reports on particular projects as well as the financial accounts for an entire
organisation. Other components of a financial accounting system include:

• The accounts payable journal is intended to provide records of bills received from vendors,
material suppliers, subcontractors and other outside parties. Invoices of charges are recorded in
this system as are checks issued in payment. Charges to individual cost accounts are relayed
or posted to the General Ledger.
• Accounts receivable journals provide the opposite function to that of accounts payable. In this
journal, billings to clients are recorded as well as receipts. Revenues received are relayed to the
general ledger.
• Job cost ledgers summarize the charges associated with particular projects, arranged in the
various cost accounts used for the project budget.
• Inventory records are maintained to identify the amount of materials available at any time.

In traditional bookkeeping systems, day to day transactions are first recorded in journals. With double-
entry bookkeeping, each transaction is recorded as both a debit and a credit to particular accounts in the
79
ledger. For example, payment of a supplier's bill represents a debit or increase to a project cost account
and a credit or reduction to the company's cash account. Periodically, the transaction information is
summarized and transferred to ledger accounts. This process is called posting, and may be done
instantaneously or daily in computerized systems.

In reviewing accounting information, the concepts of flows and stocks should be kept in mind. Daily
transactions typically reflect flows of dollar amounts entering or leaving the organisation. Similarly, use
or receipt of particular materials represent flows from or to inventory. An account balance represents
the stock or cumulative amount of funds resulting from these daily flows. Information on both flows and
stocks are needed to give an accurate view of an organisation's state. In addition, forecasts of future
changes are needed for effective management.

Information from the general ledger is assembled for the organisation's financial reports, including
balance sheets and income statements for each period. These reports are the basic products of the
financial accounting process and are often used to assess the performance of an organisation. Table12-5
shows a typical income statement for a small construction firm, indicating a net profit of R 330,000 after
taxes. This statement summarizes the flows of transactions within a year. Table 12-6 shows the
comparable balance sheet, indicated a net increase in retained earnings equal to the net profit. The
balance sheet reflects the effects of income flows during the year on the overall worth of the
organisation.

TABLE 4-5: Illustration of an Accounting Statement of Income

Income Statement
for the year ended December 31, 19xx

Gross project revenues R7,200,000

Direct project costs on contracts 5,500,000

Depreciation of equipment 200,000
Estimating 150,000
Administrative and other expenses 650,000
Subtotal of cost and expenses 6,500,000

Operating Income 700,000

Interest Expense, net 150,000
Income before taxes 550,000
Income tax 220,000
Net income after tax 330,000
Cash dividends 100,000
Retained earnings, current year 230,000
Retention at beginning of year 650,000
Retained earnings at end of year R880,000.

TABLE 4-6: Illustration of an Accounting Balance Sheet

Balance Sheet
December 31, 19xx

Assets Amount

Cash R150,000
Payments Receivable 750,000
Work in progress, not claimed 700,000
Work in progress, retention 200,000
Equipment at cost less accumulated depreciation 1,400,000

80
 Total assets R3,200,000

Liabilities and Equity

Liabilities
Accounts payable R950,000
Other items payable (taxes, wages, etc.) 50,000
Long term debts 500,000
Subtotal 1,500,000
Shareholders' funds
40,000 shares of common stock
(Including paid-in capital) 820,000
Retained Earnings 880,000
Subtotal 1,700,000
Total Liabilities and Equity R3,200,000

In the context of private construction firms, particular problems arise in the treatment of uncompleted
contracts in financial reports. Under the "completed-contract" method, income is only reported for
completed projects. Work on projects underway is only reported on the balance sheet, representing an
asset if contract billings exceed costs or a liability if costs exceed billings. When a project is completed,
the total net profit (or loss) is reported in the final period as income. Under the "percentage-of-
completion" method, actual costs are reported on the income statement plus a proportion of all project
revenues (or billings) equal to the proportion of work completed during the period. The proportion of
work completed is computed as the ratio of costs incurred to date and the total estimated cost of the
project. Thus, if twenty percent of a project was completed in a particular period at a direct cost of
R180,000 and on a project with expected revenues of R1,000,000, then the contract revenues earned
would be calculated as R1,000,000(0.2) = R200,000. This figure represents a profit and contribution to
overhead of R200,000 - R180,000 = R20,000 for the period. Note that billings and actual receipts might
be in excess or less than the calculated revenues of R200,000. On the balance sheet of an organisation
using the percentage-of-completion method, an asset is usually reported to reflect billings and the
estimated or calculated earnings in excess of actual billings.

As another example of the difference in the "percentage-of-completion" and the "completed-contract"

methods, consider a three year project to construct a plant with the following cash flow for a contractor:

TABLE 4-7: Illustration of contract expenses

Year Contract Expenses Payments Received

1 R700,000 R900,000
2 180,000 250,000
3 320,000 150,000
Total R1,200,000 R1,300,000

The supervising architect determines that 60% of the facility is complete in year 1 and 75% in year 2.
Under the "percentage-of-completion" method, the net income in year 1 is R780,000 (60% of
R1,300,000) less the R700,000 in expenses or R80,000. Under the "completed-contract" method, the
entire profit of R100,000 would be reported in year 3.

The "percentage-of-completion" method of reporting period earnings has the advantage of representing
the actual estimated earnings in each period. As a result, the income stream and resulting profits are
less susceptible to precipitate swings on the completion of a project as can occur with the "completed
contract method" of calculating income. However, the "percentage-of-completion" has the disadvantage
of relying upon estimates which can be manipulated to obscure the actual position of a company or
which are difficult to reproduce by outside observers. There are also subtleties such as the deferral of all
calculated income from a project until a minimum threshold of the project is completed. As a result,
interpretation of the income statement and balance sheet of a private organisation is not always
straightforward. Finally, there are tax disadvantages from using the "percentage-of-completion" method
81
since corporate taxes on expected profits may become due during the project rather than being deferred
until the project completion. As an example of tax implications of the two reporting methods, a study of
forty-seven construction firms conducted by the General Accounting Office found that R280 million in
taxes were deferred from 1980 to 1984 through use of the "completed-contract" method.

It should be apparent that the "percentage-of-completion" accounting provides only a rough estimate of
the actual profit or status of a project. Also, the "completed contract" method of accounting is entirely
retrospective and provides no guidance for management. This is only one example of the types of
allocations that are introduced to correspond to generally accepted accounting practices, yet may not
further the cause of good project management. Another common example is the use of equipment
depreciation schedules to allocate equipment purchase costs. Allocations of costs or revenues to
particular periods within a project may cause severe changes in particular indicators, but have no real
meaning for good management or profit over the entire course of a project. As Johnson and Kaplan
argue:

Today's management accounting information, driven by the procedures and cycle of the organisation's
financial reporting system, is too late, too aggregated and too distorted to be relevant for managers'
planning and control decisions....Management accounting reports are of little help to operating managers
as they attempt to reduce costs and improve productivity. Frequently, the reports decrease productivity
because they require operating managers to spend time attempting to understand and explain reported
variances that have little to do with the economic and technological reality of their operations...

The management accounting system also fails to provide accurate product costs. Cost are distributed to
products by simplistic and arbitrary measures, usually direct labour based, that do not represent the
demands made by each product on the firm's resources. As a result, complementary procedures to those
used in traditional financial accounting are required to accomplish effective project control, as described
in the preceding and following sections. While financial statements provide consistent and essential
information on the condition of an entire organisation, they need considerable interpretation and
supplementation to be useful for project management.

Example 5: Calculating net profit

As an example of the calculation of net profit, suppose that a company began six jobs in a year,
completing three jobs and having three jobs still underway at the end of the year. Details of the six jobs
are shown in Table 4-8. What would be the company's net profit under, first, the "percentage-of-
completion" and, second, the "completed contract method" accounting conventions?

TABLE 4-8: Example of Financial Records of Projects

Net Profit on Completed Contracts (Amounts in thousands of dollars)

Job 1 R1,436
Job 2 356
Job 3 - 738
Total Net Profit on Completed Jobs R1,054

Status of Jobs Underway Job 4 Job 5 Job 6

Original Contract Price R4,200 R3,800 R5,630

Contract Changes (Change Orders, etc.) 400 600 - 300
Total Cost to Date 3,600 1,710 620
Payments Received or Due to Date 3,520 1,830 340
Estimated Cost to Complete 500 2,300 5,000

As shown in the Table, a net profit of R1,054,000 was earned on the three completed jobs. Under the
"completed contract" method, this total would be total profit. Under the percentage-of completion
method, the year's expected profit on the projects underway would be added to this amount. For job 4,
the expected profits are calculated as follows:

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Current contract price = Original contract price + Contract Changes
= 4,200 + 400 + 4,600

Credit or debit to date = Total costs to date - Payments received or due to date
= 3,600 - 3,520 = - 80

Contract value of uncompleted work = Current contract price - Payments received or due
= 4,600 - 3,520 = 1,080

Credit or debit to come = Contract value of uncompleted work - Estimated Cost to Complete
= 1,080 - 500 = 580

Estimated final gross profit = Credit or debit to date + Credit or debit to come
= - 80. + 580. = 500

Estimated total project costs = Contract price - Gross profit

= 4,600 - 500 = 4,100

Estimated Profit to date = Estimated final gross profit x Proportion of work complete
= 500. (3600/4100)) = 439

Similar calculations for the other jobs underway indicate estimated profits to date of R166,000 for Job 5
and -R32,000 for Job 6. As a result, the net profit using the "percentage-of-completion" method would
be R1, 627,000 for the year. Note that this figure would be altered in the event of multi-year projects in
which net profits on projects completed or underway in this year were claimed in earlier periods.

2.13 Control of Project Cash Flows

Project managers also are involved with assessment of the overall status of the project, including the
status of activities, financing, payments and receipts. These various items comprise the project and
financing cash flows described in earlier chapters. These components include costs incurred (as
described above), billings and receipts for billings to owners (for contractors), payable amounts to
suppliers and contractors, financing plan cash flows (for bonds or other financial instruments), etc.

As an example of cash flow control, consider the report shown in the Table below. In this case, costs are
not divided into functional categories as in the earlier Table, such as labour, material, or equipment. The
Table below represents a summary of the project status as viewed from different components of the
accounting system. Thus, the aggregation of different kinds of cost exposure or cost commitment shown
in Table 4-0 has not been performed. The elements in the Table include:

• Costs
This is a summary of charges as reflected by the job cost accounts, including expenditures and
estimated costs. This row provides an aggregate summary of the detailed activity cost
information described in the previous section. For this example, the total costs as of July 2 (7/02)
were R 8,754,516, and the original cost estimate was R65,863,092, so the approximate
percentage complete was 8,754,516/65,863,092 or 13.292%. However, the project manager now
projects a cost of R66,545,263 for the project, representing an increase of R682,171 over the
original estimate. This new estimate would reflect the actual percentage of work completed as
well as other effects such as changes in unit prices for labour or materials. Needless to say, this
increase in expected costs is not a welcome change to the project manager.
• Billings
This row summarizes the state of cash flows with respect to the owner of the facility; this row
would not be included for reports to owners. The contract amount was R67,511,602, and a total
of R9,276,621 or 13.741% of the contract has been billed. The amount of allowable billing is
specified under the terms of the contract between an owner and an engineering, architect, or
constructor. In this case, total billings have exceeded the estimated project completion
proportion. The final column includes the currently projected net earnings of R966,339. This
figure is calculated as the contract amount less projected costs: 67,511,602 - 66,545,263 =
R966,339. Note that this profit figure does not reflect the time value of money or discounting.
• Payables
The Payables row summarizes the amount owed by the contractor to material suppliers, labour or
sub-contractors. At the time of this report, R6,719,103 had been paid to subcontractors, material

83
 suppliers, and others. Invoices of R1,300,089 have accumulated but have not yet been paid. A
retention of R391,671 has been imposed on subcontractors, and R343,653 in direct labour
expenses have been occurred. The total of payables is equal to the total project expenses shown
in the first row of costs.
• Receivables
This row summarizes the cash flow of receipts from the owner. Note that the actual receipts from
the owner may differ from the amounts billed due to delayed payments or retainage on the part
of the owner. The net-billed equals the gross billed less retention by the owner. In this case,
gross billed is R9,276,621 (as shown in the billings row), the net billed is R8,761,673 and the
retention is R514,948. Unfortunately, only R7,209,344 has been received from the owner, so the
open receivable amount is a (substantial!) R2,067,277 due from the owner.
• Cash Position
This row summarizes the cash position of the project as if all expenses and receipts for the
project were combined in a single account. The actual expenditures have been R7,062,756
(calculated as the total costs of R8,754,516 less subcontractor retentions of R391,671 and unpaid
bills of R1,300,089) and R 7,209,344 has been received from the owner. As a result, a net cash
balance of R146,588 exists which can be used in an interest earning bank account or to finance
deficits on other projects.

Each of the rows shown in Table 4-9 would be derived from different sets of financial accounts.
Additional reports could be prepared on the financing cash flows for bonds or interest charges in an
overdraft account.

TABLE 4-9: An Example of a Cash Flow Status Report

Costs Charges Estimated % Complete Projected Change
7/02 8,754,516 65,863,092 13.292 66,545,263 682,171

Billings Contract Gross Bill % Billed Profit

7/01 67,511,602 9,276,621 13.741 966,339

Payables Paid Open Retention Labour Total

7/01 6,719,103 1,300,089 391,671 343,653 8,754,516

Receivable Net Bill Received Retention Open

7/02 8,761,673 7,209,344 514,948 2,067,277

Cash Position Paid Received Position

7,062,756 7,209,344 146,588

The overall status of the project requires synthesizing the different pieces of information summarized in
the above Table 4-9. Each of the different accounting systems contributing to this table provides a
different view of the status of the project. In this example, the budget information indicates that costs
are higher than expected, which could be troubling. However, a profit is still expected for the project. A
substantial amount of money is due from the owner, and this could turn out to be a problem if the owner
continues to lag in payment. Finally, the positive cash position for the project is highly desirable since
financing charges can be avoided.
The job status reports illustrated in this and the previous sections provide a primary tool for project cost
control. Different reports with varying amounts of detail and item reports would be prepared for different
individuals involved in a project. Reports to upper management would be summaries, reports to
particular staff individuals would emphasize their responsibilities (eg. purchasing, payroll, etc.), and
detailed reports would be provided to the individual project managers. Coupled with scheduling reports
described in Chapter 10, these reports provide a snapshot view of how a project is doing. Of course,
these schedule and cost reports would have to be tempered by the actual accomplishments and
problems occurring in the field. For example, if work already completed is of sub-standard quality, these
reports would not reveal such a problem. Even though the reports indicated a project on time and on
budget, the possibility of re-work or inadequate facility performance due to quality problems would
quickly reverse that rosy situation.

2.14 Schedule Control

84
In addition to cost control, project managers must also give considerable attention to monitoring
schedules. Construction typically involves a deadline for work completion, so contractual agreements will
force attention to schedules. More generally, delays in construction represent additional costs due to late
facility occupancy or other factors. Just as costs incurred are compared to budgeted costs, actual activity
durations may be compared to expected durations. In this process, forecasting the time to complete
particular activities may be required. The methods used for forecasting completion times of activities are
directly analogous to those used for cost forecasting. For example, a typical estimating formula might
be:

where Df is the forecast duration, W is the amount of work, and h t is the observed productivity to time t.
As with cost control, it is important to devise efficient and cost effective methods for gathering
information on actual project accomplishments. Generally, observations of work completed are made by
inspectors and project managers and then work completed is estimated as described in the earlier
Section. Once estimates of work complete and time expended on particular activities is available,
deviations from the original duration estimate can be estimated. The calculations for making duration
estimates are quite similar to those used in making cost estimates in previous Sections. For example,
the Figure below shows the originally scheduled project progress versus the actual progress on a project.
This figure is constructed by summing up the percentage of each activity which is complete at different
points in time; this summation can be weighted by the magnitude of effort associated with each activity.
In the below Figure, the project was ahead of the original schedule for a period including point A, but is
now late at point B by an amount equal to the horizontal distance between the planned progress and the
actual progress observed to date.

Figure 4-2: Illustration of Planned versus Actual Progress over Time on a Project

Schedule adherence and the current status of a project can also be represented on geometric models of
a facility. For example, an animation of the construction sequence can be shown on a computer screen,
with different colours or other coding scheme indicating the type of activity underway on each
component of the facility. Deviations from the planned schedule can also be portrayed by colour coding.
The result is a mechanism to both indicate work in progress and schedule adherence specific to
individual components in the facility.
In evaluating schedule progress, it is important to bear in mind that some activities possess float or
scheduling leeway, whereas delays in activities on the critical path will cause project delays. In
particular, the delay in planned progress at time t may be soaked up in activities' float (thereby causing
no overall delay in the project completion) or may cause a project delay. As a result of this ambiguity, it
is preferable to update the project schedule to devise an accurate portrayal of the schedule adherence.
After applying a scheduling algorithm, a new project schedule can be obtained. For cash flow planning
purposes, a graph or report similar to that shown in the below Figure can be constructed to compare
actual expenditures to planned expenditures at any time. This process of re-scheduling to indicate the
schedule adherence is only one of many instances in which schedule and budget updating may be
appropriate, as discussed in the next section.

85
Figure 4-3: Illustration of Planned versus Actual Expenditures on a Project

2.15 Schedule and Budget Updates

Scheduling and project planning is an activity that continues throughout the lifetime of a project. As
changes or discrepancies between the plan and the realization occur, the project schedule and cost
estimates should be modified and new schedules devised. Too often, the schedule is devised once by a
planner in the central office, and then revisions or modifications are done incompletely or only
sporadically. The result is the lack of effective project monitoring and the possibility of eventual chaos on
the project site. On "fast track" projects, initial construction activities are begun even before the facility
design is finalized. In this case, special attention must be placed on the coordinated scheduling of design
and construction activities. Even in projects for which the design is finalized before construction
begins, change orders representing changes in the "final" design are often issued to incorporate changes
desired by the owner.

Periodic updating of future activity durations and budgets is especially important to avoid excessive
optimism in projects experiencing problems. If one type of activity experiences delays on a project, then
related activities are also likely to be delayed unless managerial changes are made. Construction
projects normally involve numerous activities which are closely related due to the use of similar
materials, equipment, workers or site characteristics. Expected cost changes should also be propagated
throughout a project plan. In essence, duration and cost estimates for future activities should be revised
in light of the actual experience on the job. Without this updating, project schedules slip more and more
as time progresses. To perform this type of updating, project managers need access to original
estimates and estimating assumptions.

Unfortunately, most project cost control and scheduling systems do not provide many aids for such
updating. What is required is a means of identifying discrepancies, diagnosing the cause, forecasting the
effect, and propagating this effect to all related activities. While these steps can be undertaken
manually, computers aids to support interactive updating or even automatic updating would be helpful.
Beyond the direct updating of activity durations and cost estimates, project managers should have
mechanisms available for evaluating any type of schedule change. Updating activity duration
estimations, changing scheduled start times, modifying the estimates of resources required for each
activity, and even changing the project network logic (by inserting new activities or other changes)
should all be easily accomplished. In effect, scheduling aids should be directly available to project
managers. Fortunately, local computers are commonly available on site for this purpose.

Schedule Updates in a Small Project

As an example of the type of changes that might be required, consider the nine activity project
described previously and appearing in the above Figure. Also, suppose that the project is four days
underway, with the current activity schedule and progress as shown in the below Figure. A few problems
or changes that might be encountered include the following:

1. An underground waterline that was previously unknown was ruptured during the fifth day of the
project. An extra day was required to replace the ruptured section, and another day will be
required for clean-up. What is the impact on the project duration?
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 o To analyse this change with the critical path scheduling procedure, the manager has the
options of (1) changing the expected duration of activity C, General Excavation, to the
new expected duration of 10 days or (2) splitting activity C into two tasks (corresponding
to the work done prior to the waterline break and that to be done after) and adding a new
activity representing repair and clean-up from the waterline break. The second approach
has the advantage that any delays to other activities (such as activities D and E) could
also be indicated by precedence constraints.
o Assuming that no other activities are affected, the manager decides to increase the
expected duration of activity C to 10 days. Since activity C is on the critical path, the
project duration also increases by 2 days. Applying the critical path scheduling procedure
would confirm this change and also give a new set of earliest and latest starting times for
the various activities.
2. After 8 days on the project, the owner asks that a new drain be installed in addition to the sewer
line scheduled for activity G. The project manager determines that a new activity could be added
to install the drain in parallel with Activity G and requiring 2 days. What is the effect on the
schedule?
o Inserting a new activity in the project network between nodes 3 and 4 violates the
activity-on-branch convention that only one activity can be defined between any two
nodes. Hence, a new node and a dummy activity must be inserted in addition to the drain
installation activity. As a result, the nodes must be re-numbered and the critical path
schedule developed again. Performing these operations reveals that no change in the
project duration would occur and the new activity has a total float of 1 day.
o To avoid the labour associated with modifying the network and re-numbering nodes,
suppose that the project manager simply re-defined activity G, as installation of sewer and
drain lines requiring 4 days. In this case, activity G would appear on the critical path and
the project duration would increase. Adding an additional crew so that the two installations
could proceed in parallel might reduce the duration of activity G back to 2 days and
thereby avoid the increase in the project duration.
3. At day 12 of the project, the excavated trenches collapse during Activity E. An additional 5 days
will be required for this activity. What is the effect on the project schedule? What changes should
be made to insure meeting the completion deadline?
o Activity E has a total float of only 1 day. With the change in this activity's duration, it will
lie on the critical path and the project duration will increase.
o Analysis of possible time savings in subsequent activities is now required, using the
procedures described in Section 10.9.

Figure 12-4: A Nine Activity Example Project

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Current Schedule for an Example Project Presented as a Bar Chart

As can be imagined, it is not at all uncommon to encounter changes during the course of a project that
require modification of durations, changes in the network logic of precedence relationships, or additions
and deletions of activities. Consequently, the scheduling process should be readily available as the
project is underway.

2.16 Relating Cost and Schedule Information

The previous sections focused upon the identification of the budgetary and schedule status of projects.
Actual projects involve a complex inter-relationship between time and cost. As projects proceed, delays
influence costs and budgetary problems may in turn require adjustments to activity schedules. Trade-
offs between time and costs were discussed earlier in the context of project planning in which additional
resources applied to a project activity might result in a shorter duration but higher costs. Unanticipated
events might result in increases in both time and cost to complete an activity. For example, excavation
problems may easily lead to much lower than anticipated productivity on activities requiring digging.

While project managers implicitly recognize the inter-play between time and cost on projects, it is rare
to find effective project control systems which include both elements. Usually, project costs and
schedules are recorded and reported by separate application programs. Project managers must then
perform the tedious task of relating the two sets of information.

The difficulty of integrating schedule and cost information stems primarily from the level of detail
required for effective integration. Usually, a single project activity will involve numerous cost account
categories. For example, an activity for the preparation of a foundation would involve labourers, cement
workers, concrete forms, concrete, reinforcement, transportation of materials and other resources. Even
a more disaggregated activity definition such as erection of foundation forms would involve numerous
resources such as forms, nails, carpenters, labourers, and material transportation. Again, different cost
accounts would normally be used to record these various resources. Similarly, numerous activities might
involve expenses associated with particular cost accounts. For example, a particular material such as
standard piping might be used in numerous different schedule activities. To integrate cost and schedule
information, the disaggregated charges for specific activities and specific cost accounts must be the
basis of analysis.

A straightforward means of relating time and cost information is to define individual work
elements representing the resources in a particular cost category associated with a particular project
activity. Work elements would represent an element in a two-dimensional matrix of activities and cost
accounts as illustrated in Figure 12-6. A numbering or identifying system for work elements would
include both the relevant cost account and the associated activity. In some cases, it might also be
desirable to identify work elements by the responsible organisation or individual. In this case, a three
dimensional representation of work elements is required, with the third dimension corresponding to
responsible individuals. More generally, modern computerized databases can accommodate a flexible
structure of data representation to support aggregation with respect to numerous different perspectives.
With this organisation of information, a number of management reports or views could be generated. In
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particular, the costs associated with specific activities could be obtained as the sum of the work
elements appearing in any row in the Figure below. These costs could be used to evaluate alternate
technologies to accomplish particular activities or to derive the expected project cash flow over time as
the schedule changes. From a management perspective, problems developing from particular activities
could be rapidly identified since costs would be accumulated at such a disaggregated level. As a result,
project control becomes at once more precise and detailed.

TABLE 4-10: Illustration of a Cost Account and Project Activity Matrix

Unfortunately, the development and maintenance of a work element database can represent a large data
collection and organisation effort. As noted earlier, four hundred separate cost accounts and four
hundred activities would not be unusual for a construction project. The result would be up to 400x400 =
160,000 separate work elements. Of course, not all activities involve each cost account. However, even
a density of two percent (so that each activity would have eight cost accounts and each account would
have eight associated activities on the average) would involve nearly thirteen thousand work elements.
Initially preparing this database represents a considerable burden, but it is also the case that project
bookkeepers must record project events within each of these various work elements. Implementations of
the "work element" project control systems have typically foundered on the burden of data collection,
storage and book-keeping.

Until data collection is better automated, the use of work elements to control activities in large projects
is likely to be difficult to implement. However, certain segments of project activities can profit
tremendously from this type of organisation. In particular, material requirements can be tracked in this
fashion. Materials involve only a subset of all cost accounts and project activities, so the burden of data
collection and control is much smaller than for an entire system. Moreover, the benefits from integration
of schedule and cost information are particularly noticeable in materials control since delivery schedules
are directly affected and bulk order discounts might be identified. Consequently, materials control
systems can reasonably encompass a "work element" accounting system.

In the absence of a work element accounting system, costs associated with particular activities are
usually estimated by summing expenses in all cost accounts directly related to an activity plus a
proportion of expenses in cost accounts used jointly by two or more activities. The basis of cost
allocation would typically be the level of effort or resource required by the different activities. For
example, costs associated with supervision might be allocated to different concreting activities on the
basis of the amount of work (measured in cubic yards of concrete) in the different activities. With these
allocations, cost estimates for particular work activities can be obtained.

4.9 DEVELOPING A BUSINESS PLAN

What is a business plan?

Business plans are used either for running a business or a project. A good business plan guides you
through each stage of starting and managing your business/project. Mostly, business plans are used for
business. A business plan describes the nature of the business, background information on the
organisation, the organisation's financial projections and the strategies it intends to implement to
achieve the stated targets. In its entirety, this document serves as a road-map (a plan) that provides
direction to the business. Written business plans are often required to obtain a bank loan or other kind
of financing. Business plans can help you get funding or bring on new business partners. Investors want
to feel confident they’ll see a return on their investment. Thus, a business plan is the tool used to
convince people that working with a particular business or investing in one company is a smart choice.
A general business plan outline would have the following key elements:
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1. Executive Summary

First impression of the business is presented in this section. Though it appears first in the business plan,
it is the last section to be written because it covers the entire plan. It covers the highlights of various
sections of the business plan.

2. Company Overview
A brief description of what the business is about.

Industry/Business Description

Provide information about the business you're starting, including what sort of problem your
products/services solve and your most likely buyers. You can also expand this description by offering an
overview of the industry that your business will be a part of, including trends, major players, and
estimated sales. This section should give a positive perspective on your place within the industry. Set
your business apart from the competition by describing your or your team's expertise, as well as
your competitive advantage.

4. Customer/market Analysis
The market analysis is a crucial section of the business plan, as it identifies your best customers or
clients. To create a compelling market analysis, thoroughly research the primary target market for your
products/services, including geographic location, demographics, your target market's needs, and how
these needs are currently being met. Your purpose here is to demonstrate that you have a solid and
thorough understanding of the people you are planning to sell your products/services to so that you can
make informed predictions about how much they might buy, and convince other interested parties.

5. Competitive Analysis
This presents success of the direct and indirect competitors in the marketplace. This section includes an
assessment of the competitions strengths and weaknesses, as well advantages they may have, unique
qualities that your business stand out from the competition. It also includes an analysis of how you will
overcome any barriers to entry in your chosen.

6. Marketing Plan
Offers a detailed explanation of sales strategy, pricing plan, proposed advertising and promotion
activities, as well as all the benefits of your products/services. This section outlines the business’ unique
selling proposition, describes how you plan to get your products/services to market and how you’ll
persuade people to buy them.

7. Operations Plan
The operating plan offers detailed information about how your business will be run. It provides your
business's physical location, descriptions of facilities and equipment, types of employees needed,
inventory requirements, suppliers, and any other applicable operating details that pertain to your precise
type of business, such as a description of the manufacturing process, or specialty items needed in day-
to-day operations.

8. Management Team
This section outlines your business's legal structure and management resources, including the internal
management team, external management resources, and human resources needs. Include any
experience or special skills that each person in your management team brings to the business. If the
goal of your business plan is to get funding, it's wise to include an advisory board as a management
resource.

9. Financial Plan
Starting a business is usually about making a profit, so it's important to demonstrate that you have a
solid sense of your current finances, funding needs, as well as projected income. In the financial section,
provide a description of your funding requirements, your detailed financial statements, and a financial
statement analysis. This part of the business plan is where you present the three main financial

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documents of any business: the balance sheet, the income statement, and the cash flow statement, or
in the case of a new business, a cash flow projection.

10. Appendix

In addition to the sections outlined above, at the end of your business plan, include any additional
information that will help establish the credibility of your business idea, or bolster your potential success.
You may choose to include marketing studies, photographs of your product, permits, patents and other
intellectual property rights, credit histories, résumés, marketing materials, and any contracts or other
legal agreements pertinent to your business.

2.17 Problems

1. Suppose that the expected expenditure of funds in a particular category was expected to behave
in a piecewise linear fashion over the course of the project. In particular, the following points
have been established from historical records for the percentage of completion versus the
expected expenditure (as a percentage of the budget):

Percentage of Completion Expected Expenditure

0% 0%
20% 10%
40% 25%
60% 55%
80% 90%
100% 100%

a. Graph the relationship between percentage complete and expected expenditure.

b. Develop a formula or set of formulas for forecasting the ultimate expenditure on this activity
given the percentage of completion. Assume that any over or under expenditure will continue to
grow proportionately during the course of the project.
c. Using your formula, what is the expected expenditure as a percentage of the activity budget if:
i. 15% of funds have been expended and 15% of the activity is complete.
ii. 30% of funds have been expended and 30% of the activity is complete.
iii. 80% of funds have been expended and 80% of the activity is complete.

2. Repeat Problem 1 parts (b) and (c) assuming that any over or under expenditure will not
continue to grow during the course of the project.

3. Suppose that you have been asked to take over as project manager on a small project involving
installation of 5,000 linear feet (LF) of metal ductwork in a building. The job was originally
estimated to take ten weeks, and you are assuming your duties after three weeks on the project.
The original estimate assumed that each linear foot of ductwork would cost R10, representing R6
in labour costs and R4 in material cost. The expected production rate was 500 linear feet of
ductwork per week. Appearing below is the data concerning this project available from your firm's
job control information system:

Weekly Unit Costs (R/Lf) Quantity Placed (Lf) Total Cost

Week Labour Materials Total Week To Date Week To Date
1 12.00 4.00 16.00 250 250 4,000 4,000
2 8.57 4.00 12.57 350 600 4,400 8,400
3 6.67 4.00 10.67 450 1,050 4,800 13,200

a. Based on an extrapolation using the average productivity and cost for all three weeks, forecast
the completion time, cost and variance from original estimates.
b. Suppose that you assume that the productivity achieved in week 3 would continue for the

91
 remainder of the project. How would this affect your forecasts in (a)? Prepare new forecasts
based on this assumption.

4. What criticisms could you make of the job status report in the previous problem from the
viewpoint of good project management?

5. Suppose that the following estimate was made for excavation of 120,000 cubic yards on a site:
Resource Quantity Cost
Machines 1,200 hours R60,000
Labour 6,000 hours 150,000
Trucks 2,400 hours 75,000
Total R285,000
After 95,000 cubic yards of excavation was completed, the following expenditures had been
recorded:
Resource Quantity Cost
Machines 1,063 hours R47,835
Labour 7,138 hours 142,527
Trucks 1,500 hours 46,875
Total R237,237

a. Calculate estimated and experienced productivity (cubic yards per hour) and unit cost (cost
per cubic yard) for each resource.
b. Based on straight line extrapolation; do you see any problem with this activity? If so, can you
suggest a reason for the problem based on your findings in (a)?

6. Suppose the following costs and units of work completed were recorded on an activity:

Monthly Number of
Month Expenditure Work Units Completed
1 R1,200 30
2 R1,250 32
3 R1,260 38
4 R1,280 42
5 R1,290 42
6 R1,280 42
Answer the following questions:

a. For each month, determine the cumulative cost, the cumulative work completed, the average
cumulative cost per unit of work, and the monthly cost per unit of work.
b. For each month, prepare a forecast of the eventual cost-to-complete the activity based on the
proportion of work completed.
c. For each month, prepare a forecast of the eventual cost-to-complete the activity based on the
average productivity experienced on the activity.
d. For each month, prepare a forecast of the eventual cost-to-complete the activity based on the
productivity experienced in the previous month.
e. Which forecasting method (b, c or d) is preferable for this activity? Why?

7. Repeat Problem 6 for the following expenditure pattern:

Monthly Number of
Month Expenditure Work Units Completed
1 R1,200 30
2 R1,250 35
3 R1,260 45
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 4 R1,280 48
5 R1,290 52
6 R1,300 54

8. Why is it difficult to integrate scheduling and cost accounting information in project records?

9. Prepare a schedule progress report on planned versus actual expenditure on a project (similar to
that in Figure 12-5) for the project described in Example 12-6.

10. Suppose that the following ten activities were agreed upon in a contract between an owner and
an engineer.

Original Work Plan Information

Activity Duration (months) Predecessors Estimated Cost (R thousands)
A 2 --- 7
B 5 --- 9
C 5 B 8
D 2 C 4
E 3 B 1
F 8 --- 7
G 4 E, F 6
H 4 E, F 5
I 11 B 10
J 2 E, F 7
Original Contract Information
Total Direct Cost R64
Overhead 64
Total Direct and Overhead 128
Profit 12.8
Total Contract Amount R140.8
First Year Cash Flow
Expenditures R56,000
Receipts R60,800

The markup on the activities' costs included 100% overhead and a profit of 10% on all costs
(including overhead). This job was suspended for one year after completion of the first four
activities, and the owner paid a total of R60,800 to the engineer. Now the owner wishes to re-
commence the job. However, general inflation has increased costs by ten percent in the
intervening year. The engineer's discount rate is 15 percent per year (in current year dollars). For
simplicity, you may assume that all cash transactions occur at the end of the year in making
discounting calculations in answering the following questions:

a. How long will be remaining six activities require?

b. Suppose that the owner agrees to make a lump sum payment of the remaining original
contract at the completion of the project. Would the engineer still make a profit on the job? If so,
how much?
c. Given that the engineer would receive a lump sum payment at the end of the project, what
amount should he request in order to earn his desired ten percent profit on all costs?
d. What is the net future value of the entire project at the end, assuming that the lump sum
payment you calculated in (c) is obtained?

11. Based on your knowledge of coding systems such as MASTERFORMAT and estimating techniques,
outline the procedures that might be implemented to accomplish:

a. automated updating of duration and cost estimates of activities in light of experience on

earlier, similar activities.
b. interactive computer-based aids to help a project manager to accomplish the same task.

93
Consolidated sources that helped to develop the learning unit:

References

American Society of Civil Engineers, "Construction Cost Control," ASCE Manuals and Reports of
Engineering Practice No. 65, Rev. Ed., 1985.
Coombs, W.E. and W.J. Palmer, Construction Accounting and Financial Management, McGraw-Hill, New
York, 1977.
Halpin, D. W., Financial and Cost Concepts for Construction Management, John Wiley & Sons, New York,
1985.
Johnson, H. Thomas and Robert S. Kaplan, Relevance Lost, The Rise and Fall of Management
Accounting, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA 1987.
Mueller, F.W. Integrated Cost and Schedule Control for Construction Projects, Van Nostrand Reinhold
Company, New York, 1986.
Tersine, R.J., Principles of Inventory and Materials Management, North Holland, 1982.

Further sources:
1. Cited in Zoll, Peter F., "Database Structures for Project Management," Proceedings of the Seventh
Conference on Electronic Computation, ASCE, 1979.
2. Thomas Gibb reports a median number of 400 cost accounts for a two-million dollar projects in a
sample of 30 contractors in 1975. See T.W. Gibb, Jr., "Building Construction in Southeastern United
States," School of Civil Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 1975, reported in D.W.
Halpin, Financial and Cost Concepts for Construction Management, John Wiley and Sons, 1985.
3. This illustrative set of accounts was adapted from an ASCE Manual of Practice: Construction Cost
Control, Task Committee on Revision of Construction Cost Control Manual, ASCE, New York, 1985.
4. For a fuller exposition of this point, see W.H. Lucas and T.L. Morrison, "Management Accounting for
Construction Contracts," Management Accounting, 1981, pp. 59-65.
5. For a description of these methods and examples as used by a sample of construction companies, see
L.S. Riggs, Cost and Schedule Control in Industrial Construction, Report to The Construction Industry
Institute, Dec. 1986.
6. As reported in the Wall Street Journal, Feb. 19, 1986, pg. A1, c. 4.
7. H.T. Johnson and R.S. Kaplan, Relevance Lost, The Rise and Fall of Management Accounting, Harvard
Business School Press, pg. 1, 1987.
8. One experimental program directed at this problem is a knowledge based expert system described in
R.E. Levitt and J.C. Kunz, "Using Knowledge of Construction and Project Management for Automated
Schedule Updating," Project Management Journal, Vol. 16, 1985, pp. 57-76. Back
9. For an example of a prototype interactive project management environment that includes graphical
displays and scheduling algorithms, see R. Kromer, "Interactive Activity Network Analysis Using a
Personal Computer," Unpublished MS Thesis, Department of Civil Engineering, Carnegie-Mellon
University, Pittsburgh, PA, 1984.
10. A three dimensional work element definition was proposed by J.M. Neil, "A System for Integrated
Project Management," Proceedings of the Conference on Current Practice in Cost Estimating and Cost
Control, ASCE, Austin, Texas, 138-146, April 1983.

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 Learning unit 5

Ethics in engineering

This section is compiled from the work of Denise Nguyen:

5.1 Introduction

Ethics in engineering is used simultaneously as engineering ethics and it refers to “the set of rules and
guidelines that engineers adhere to as a moral obligation to their profession and to the world.
Engineering is a professional career that impact lives. When ethics is not followed, disaster often occurs;
these disasters not only include huge monetary costs and environmental impacts, but also often result in
the loss of human life. Engineering Ethics applies to every engineer and is very important.” Along with
this, engineers should always be aware that their safety and the safety of those around them comes
before anything, including any engineering projects they take on, no matter how wonderful the end
product might be. That being said, engineering standards change from one professional engineering
society to the next because of the work that different type of engineers do. For example, the work that a
civil engineer does (e.g. construct a bridge) will be different from the work that a biomedical engineer
does (e.g. making an artificial heart). However, no matter what type of engineer you are, ethics in
engineering is important because if you do not follow it you can be putting yours and someone else’s life
in danger.

5.2 Example: Electrical Engineering Ethics

Electrical Engineering is a type of engineering profession that deals with the creation of better
electronics. Since our society is heading towards an era of technology, where all members of society will
be affected, it is especially important for electrical engineers to follow a code of engineering ethics. For
electrical engineers, an important set of guidelines is the Electrical Engineering Code of Ethics, published
by IEEE (n.d.), the major professional association for engineers working in the fields of electrical,
electronics, computer engineering, and communications. The Code emphasises above all else honesty
and avoidance of endangerment to the public or the environment.

5.3 Problem Solving in Engineering Ethics

Every engineer will find himself in a conflicting position. For example, consider the case of a biomedical
engineer engineering a potentially working artificial kidney. When he was on the clinical trial phase, he
needs to decide whether to proceed with testing on humans. If he proceeds, and the device fails, a
human test subject could die. If he succeeds, he will be saving the lives of the thousands of people who
need kidneys in the future. Although he is in a touch predicament, he can make his decision better by
using the steps of problem solving in engineering ethics to help him make the best decision. The steps of
Problem Solving in Engineering Ethics are (Johanssen, 2009):

State the Problem: Clearly define what the ethical engineering problem is.

Get the Facts: Obtain all relevant facts to the matter (i.e. the different moral viewpoints) and then
analyse them all.

Identify and Defend Competing Moral Viewpoints: Analyse the pro and cons of different moral viewpoints
and pick the best course of action.

Come up with a Course of Action: Pick the best course of actions, and answer all un-answered questions.

Qualify the course of Action: Back up the course of action with facts or statistics.

In the scenario above, the biomedical engineer can first state the problem, which is whether or not to
proceed with testing knowing that he could save the lives of thousands, or else kill the test subjects. He
95
can then gather all the facts about the test subjects, the device he made, and the different moral
viewpoints from others. He can then make a pro and con list of all the moral viewpoints. From this he
must pick the best action to take and be prepared to defend it.

5.4 Reasons why Engineers Stray from the Code of Ethics

There are two main reasons why Engineers often stray from their code of ethics. The first reason is
because they are overconfident in their work, which in turn causes them to neglect things that might be
wrong with it. They may overlook small mistakes or remain stubborn about their beliefs because they
think highly of their education level. However, in engineering, these small mistakes might be the very
thing that causes a disaster (e.g. the Challenger and O-rings). Another reason why Engineers stray is
that they are impatient. They are excited about their work and want to see it in action in the world, so
they send it out before it’s ready. Sometimes it is not even their fault, but the fault of their authority
figures (i.e. boss or managers). Their authority figures can be impatient and give them a short deadline
to work on the project. Impatience does not allow room for iterations of the processes involved in
design, testing, and implementing a product or project. Iterations are often needed to increase
confidence that the product will work and that, more importantly, it will work safely.

Thus, it is recommended that engineers check their work at least twice and even have others check their
work no matter how little time they have left or no matter how excited they are about submitting the
project. If they know they have a short deadline, they can either manage their time better to have room
for several revisions or ask their boss for an extension. Engineers should also try to be open to other
ideas and admit that they could be wrong.

5.5 Applications of Engineering Ethics

Engineering Ethics in Higher Learning Institutions (Colleges/Universities)

The main engineering ethics problem that college students are face with is academic integrity. Academic
integrity can show itself in the form of cheating by copying someone’s work, intentional cheating,
plagiarism, and/or self-plagiarism. If you noticed, at the beginning of this section, I indicated that this
word is by Denise Nguyen, meaning that, I am not plagiarising (taking someone else’s and presenting it
as if it is mine).

Professional ethics is something that can be learned even when it conflicts with personal ethics, as for
example, a situation where you are personally okay with building a product that can harm the
environment, yet save lives. You can learn professional ethics and realize that something that is harmful
to the environment is not okay. Ethics codes can even help you see the bigger picture. For example, in
the previous scenario, these codes can help you re-evaluate your ethics and realize that something that
is harmful to the environment will eventually be harmful to the people around you and yourself.

Thus, there are many ethics classes in universities across the world. Some universities even require
engineers to take classes on ethics. For example, Cohen et al. (2005) developed a model called the Air
Model (AIR) SM to help students reflect and develop their personal code of ethics. AIR stands for
Awareness (of ethical issues), Investigation (of those issues), and Responding (to those issues).

5.6 Engineering Ethics in the Professional World

In the professional world, ethical engineering problems come up in many cases. One of these includes
the case of a professional using someone else’s work that is published in the widespread market of
publication. Another is the case of a professional using someone else’s work that is not published yet
and stealing their idea. Engineers who have good engineering ethics often have a good sense of the
value of life. They don’t hesitate to admit that they made a mistake because they know that the cost of
not owning up to your mistakes can have disastrous consequences. It might even cost a human life.

5.7 Engineering Ethics in Companies

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Not only do individual engineers have to be conscious of engineering ethics, but also companies.
Companies have to be aware of their Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Responsibility.
Corporate Social Responsibility is a company’s responsibility to give back to the community that they
profit from and to behave ethically so that both they and their community can benefit. Environmental
Responsibility is a business’s initiative to leave the environment (where it is taking its resources from)
the same, if not better, that it is found it.

5.8 Engineering Ethics applied to Student’s Project at University

As a student required to work in a project at varsity, you are making the transition from an academic
environment to a professional environment. Then, later as you are in our career path, the more
important ethics is, especially engineering ethics. Thus, the soon you start defining your ethics the
better, beginning with your minor assignments to your final project in the university. Your first design
project will be made possible by prior work of others. Thus, acknowledge use of those sources’ work
towards the completion of your project.

Cited References

Bowen, W. Richard. (2009). Engineering Ethics. United Kingdom: Springer, 2009. OCLC WorldCat
Permalink: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/262720358

Cohen, P., McDaniels, M., & Qualters, D. M. (2005). Air Model: A Teaching Tool For Cultivating Reflective
Ethical Inquiry. College Teaching, 53(3), 120–127. DOI: 10.3200/CTCH.53.3.120-127

IEEE. (n.d.) IEEE Code of Ethics. Retrieved from http://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/governance/p7-

8.html

Jonassen, D. H., Shen, D., Marra, R. M.,…Lohani, V. K. (2009). Engaging and Supporting Problem
Solving in Engineering Ethics. Journal of Engineering Education, 98(3), 235–254. DOI: 10.1002/j.2168-
9830.2009.tb01022.x

Martin, M. W., & Schinzinger, R. (2005). Ethics in engineering. Boston: McGraw-Hill. OCLC WorldCat
Permalink: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/54029368

NSPE. (2007). NSPE Code of Conduct. Retrieved

from http://www.nspe.org/Ethics/CodeofEthics/index.html

Uff, J. (2002). Engineering Ethics: Do Engineers Owe Duties to the Public? Royal Academy of
Engineering. Retrieved
from http://www.raeng.org.uk/news/publications/list/lectures/engineering_ethics_lecture.pdf

Additional Resources

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