Planning your first engineering project

Engineering students frequently must complete some kind of design project as part of their studies. The comment students involved in these endeavors often make is that they learned more from the design project than from any other challenge attempted during engineering school.

Nevertheless, real-world engineering projects bear little resemblance to academic simulations. Engineers must navigate their work through such obstacles as departmental turf wars, managers with little technical background, and economic realities for which school projects provide scant preparation. Because of such factors, the planning process for actual engineering work differs greatly from what the experience of a senior design project might lead you to believe.

All too often, new engineers armed with too much theory make huge mistakes by not asking the right questions of the right people up front. In a previous article, I suggested that new engineers run trial projects through their organization (“When You Don’t Have a Mentor,” Machine Design, Aug. 25). Lessons learned while interacting with company departments in low-pressure situations come in handy when planning a first real project. Before I begin, I can hear the purists screaming that my arguments are incomplete. I would agree with them. The advice that follows is a single possible plan of attack. Based on your organization, I am sure you will want to make changes.

Planning encompasses two phases: internal (your department) and external (other departments). The experience of walking a sample project through the organization is valuable in the planning process. The key information it tells you are the number of steps in the entire process and, when expenses are involved, how much each department would charge to work on the project. Information gained in this exercise will help you create a crude method of estimating costs.