Managing Performance in your CAD Department (Part II)

Barrie Mathews, Softco Engineering Systems
November 23, 2004

In Part 1 of this article, I discussed ways to gather historical data from which you gain useful information to help you manage your projects. Now with data obtained from your time sheets and classification of your projects, you can develop unit rates for estimating the work for future projects. That estimate can then be used as your target to better manage those projects, bring them in on budget, and have everyone happier in their work.

Estimating for New Projects

Your unit rates for estimating work are based on matching components of work that will apply within the scope of another project. What you want to get is the total time for each of the 4 components of work that were listed on the time sheet I proposed to you in Part 1 of this article. For example, Consultation Time will probably be comparable if retrieved for conditions of historical data that you have stored in these fields:

• Kind of Construction
• Type Classification
• Modularity (design is modular or not modular)
• Prototype (re-use of prior designs)
• Difficulty Factor due to Site Conditions
• Difficulty Factor due to Complexity
• Duration of the Project (number of days from start to completion)

When you search your project records you can get the sum total of "Consultation Time" for conditions based on a range of values for these fields that are appropriate to the new project. Until you have a broad base of data, you may need to either widen the range, drop one of these conditions, and make considered adjustments based on your own intuition. If you have values of other fields which are appropriate to add to the conditions, that will help you to get closer.

Do the same for Design Time, Drawing Time, and the time required for Field Work. For Design Time and Drawing Time, you ought to also get the "Number of Sheets in Drawing Set" for your project conditions, and then produce your rates expressed as Time/Sheet. If the "Difficulty Factor due to Complexity" is higher for the new project, you should allow for additional sheets and calculate the Design Time and Drawing Time as the "Number of Sheets" times that rate. To estimate the time for Field Work, use a rate expressed as a ratio proportional to "Unit Size of the Project" and "Duration of the Project". Now you should have the estimated total times for the new project and you will calculate your tendered quotation as:

1. Labor Costs = "Time" X your current "Journeyman Rates" for each of the time components
2. Direct Job Overhead (e.g. Supplies and Transportation) = a percent of the Total Labor Cost
3. General O.H. (e.g. Rent, Utilities, Employee Benefits, Maintenance) = a percent of Total Labor Cost
4. Profit = a percent of the Sub-Total of items 1, 2, and 3 above.

Keep your actual costs and time requirements entirely independent from profit. Profit is used as the capital to buy equipment and to finance the growth of your company. If you have financed the company startup, then it pays the interest for risking the capital. Profit and interest are really one and the same. Profit also varies with market conditions and is solely a function of the management of the company itself, the supply and demand of companies, and it is not in the domain of project revenues. To emphasize this, if one had the attitude that "there is a lot of money in this job so we can afford the time to perform the ultimate design on this one" then your company will end up in trouble. Your actual time estimates are the budget targets from which you must manage and schedule your staff time accordingly. If you can beat those, then you will be justified in slacking off or getting a raise in pay.

Scheduling your Resources

Now that you have a breakdown of the required labor components you can lead the project's participants to achieve those targets. That is, the targets are your objectives and you need to manage the people and resources to meet the objectives. Staff members in your organization need to be trained by circumstances and be given the means to organize themselves to meet the objectives.

In a design firm there are a lot of project managers competing for support staff and resources. The result is that each project manager independently, wants to tie up the support staff for his/her own purposes as much as possible. This is done without enough regard for whether work will be timely, efficient, or even necessary. If you are the one trying to manage the work distribution from above, that will be impossible unless the project managers are able to rely on support staff being available to them.

By designating a Department Manager to receive and handle bookings for support staff in advance, s/he can more efficiently organize the staff and resources below, and the project managers are forced to plan and schedule their work in advance and be more organized. The General Manager above can also determine in advance when to schedule more work or arrange more staff.

From the Project Estimate, the Project Manager should prepare a schedule in advance setting out the nature of the tasks and the earliest and latest dates for starting and completing the tasks. In this way, s/he can notify the both the client and the support staff what will be needed to meet the objectives, and when. Using a "Staff Requisition Form", the Project Manager makes all arrangements with the Department Manager for booking support staff within the time frames needed. Below is the kind of form to help you implement this.

Staff Requisition Form

Date _________________ Project ______________________

Project Manager ________________

Work Category (Consulting, Design, Design, Drawing, Field Work) _________________________

Staff Member Preferred _____________________________________

Experiment with this procedure to see how your project managers warm up to it. All requisitions will go to the Department Manager who keeps the time sheet records and a schedule of current workloads for each staff member. Each staff member is given copies of the requisitions assigned so that they know what is currently assigned to them and what other work is ahead. Over time, the Department Manager will get a closer idea of the time required to complete various tasks and that will provide more information that can be added to your database. The support staff now also have objectives from which they can better organize themselves too.

The key to good management is to have a system that forces staff to plan in advance, get others to see the benefits, and then get them to follow from example. You ought to encourage that bookings be made with as much lead-time as possible. But if you make it too far ahead at the beginning, you run the risk that your project managers will slip in work from another project or circumvent the Department Manager with side deals to swap time with other managers and thereby defeat the process. That's a bad thing if the number of hours is being exceeded and it displaces work scheduled for another project manager.

See how this works for you by building your own system along these lines and improve on it through experience, but ensure that the procedure is strictly enforced without exception. Remember the adage "Lack of planning on your part does not constitute action on my part". A bit of discipline helps in getting everyone to plan ahead, including the designers and the client. For the requisitions to work best your operation needs to have 3 or more managers and 3 or more support staff. It will work better as your operation grows in size and will help you overcome the growing pains.

About the Author

Barrie Mathews is President and Manager of product development at Softco Engineering Systems Inc., developers of the S-MAN Cad Standards Management Systems for AutoCAD, and may be contacted by email at barrie.mathews@softcosys.com.

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