Like in life or in a chess game, you need to have a proper strategy and tactics for achieving your project goals. And remember – it is better to have a bad strategy and tactics than no strategy and tactics at all – because even bad strategy and tactics follow sequence of meaningful steps, so you can change it in the project process, but not having it at all creates chaotic state, which cannot be repaired so easily in some cases.
Planning, planning, planning – Yes, the most important thing for successful engineering project is deep and detailed planning. Planning is in the core of everything. In this article, we will explain importance of strategy and tactics, or let’s say general planning and detailed planning and give some examples of common strategies and tactics.
“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” – Sun Tzu
Strategy and tactics play for the same team. Strategy presents long-term goals and general plan for achieving them. Tactics present small steps toward achieving the goal or significant part of the goal.
General strategy in engineering project is to complete the project in desired time frame with the lowest costs. Your tactics will be to create as many different material-labor combinations and options and to compare them to find the best one. Put out all your ideas and all possible solutions and compare them. Go deeply into every variant of project. Try different machines, work force, different technologies.
The best usually means with lowest cost, but reliability should be taken into account also. Maybe mechanization you’ve chosen can be easily broken. Maybe the contractor that sent you the lowest bid can make you spending more in the end, or lead you to unsuccessful project, because of their lack of competence.
When you have chosen the best solution, then do a detailed estimating, divide that project variant into as many project phases as you can and get detailed insight into every aspect of project costs. See at which project phases money will go on mostly, will it go more on material or labor. Understand your project.
Cost analysis and evaluation of different project variations you can easily do with MB Estimating Spreadsheet.
Important strategy will be to establish stable communication system and data transfer. Especially if you work on international project, usually communication language is English. Not everybody have same level of English communication and there is high chance that there will be misunderstanding. Also many engineering English expressions are hardly translated into domestic language of project participant. Misunderstanding can often lead to project mistakes and even project failure. Tactics will be to evaluate communication levels of project participants and use simplest, clear English with detailed explanations. Make sure that people understood you well. Ask them to explain you what you have told them.
At following links you can find dictionaries of construction terminology:
You can share data through emails or some other traditional way of sharing data, but better tactics are to create one mutual management platform, where all key participants will have access to latest data. That way, everybody will have latest revisions of drawings, calculations and other important data. This way you can avoid potential problems.
Here are some management tools, suitable for engineering project management:
- Box
- Huddle
Every responsible manager will have plan B – for every project aspect. Something always comes out in a way you don’t expect. Strategy should be to detect potential problems before they occur. Tactics should be to do a research on project similar to yours. Identify if there were some common problems on these projects. Find out which are solutions to these problems. Find out if contractors had history of problems. Think about possible solutions and replacements. Think about how implementation of these changes will affect the project.
The better you are prepared, the more successful your project will be. Train yourself to think several steps ahead. And again – it is better to have bad strategy and tactics than no strategy and tactics at all. Always.