Engineering Project Management Blogs

Before you jump into some new project and document control software you need to do a software ROI analysis. The biggest impact on your analysis will be search efficiency improvements. If the numbers are compelling, getting the green light from your Finance team will be a no brainer.

Everyone is familiar with the Apollo 13 mission and how NASA brought astronauts Lovell, Swigert and Haise safely home after an explosion on their CSM. Throughout the ordeal, Mission Control always knew exactly where the Apollo 13 crew were. They also knew where they were supposed to be and what lay ahead and constantly improvised and course corrected to land them safely in the South Pacific.

Engineering project control is no different – control is achieved when you have true project status insight always and you can steer it to a successful conclusion (see my blog How to Improve Engineering Project Control). From my experience, this can be challenging – here’s why.

What is document control and why do we do it? In the simplest of terms we control documents when it’s important that the right people have the right information and we need to know who has what. Here’s Apollo 12 astronaut Al Bean collecting lunar soil samples in 1969 - see the checklist on his left wrist?

If you think your cube is small, check out cosmonaut and engineer Nikolai Budarin on the International Space Station authoring a document. Does it need to be controlled? If so, what questions would Nikolai need answers to while exploring document control software?

The downturn in the energy sector is continuing to bite hard. I was at a Project Management Institute meeting two nights ago and spoke with a couple of Project Managers who are out of work after putting in many years with some local engineering, EPC and energy companies.

In 1898, Edwin Seibel invented the vertical filing cabinet. Replete with multiple drawers and file folders, this approach to information management was seamlessly carried forward into the PC age (think of your network drives as filing cabinets and you get the picture). If you use shared network drives to manage and control your engineering project information, consider downgrading your computers back to slide rules.