Evaluations, Investigations, Problem solving
Evaluations, Investigations, Problem solving
(OP)
When engaged by a client to evaluate a special structural condition and provide explanations or repair methods, time can be spent in aquiring knowledge and information not yet possessed by the Engineer. The Engineer's expertise goes to being diligent and economical in obtaining such added knowledge for the benefit of the client. However, his base of knowledge also increases, which will be helpfull in future work. Often it is necessary to buy new materials such as computer programs and literature (these items, depending how specialized, should be probably be considered part of the cost of doing business). Since charges for evaluatiion work can exceed the client's expectations and become hard to explain, I wonder what are the colleague's opinions on the subject, with the idea of collecting adequately and keeping a happy client.





RE: Evaluations, Investigations, Problem solving
RE: Evaluations, Investigations, Problem solving
RE: Evaluations, Investigations, Problem solving
What a really good question. I don't have any particular answer but this is how we deal with some of the issues.
We employ people with all sorts of levels of experience. Often, we find that the inexperienced graduates need longer to do their design than more senior engineers. Here we allow the graduates to 'learn' on the client's time. That is partially why they are cheaper. Now so of them get it wrong and have to re-do their designs several times or we have to take the work away from them. This usually costs us money as we would find it hard to justify to the clients. This extra cost is part of our overhead and is covered by our fees is a less transparent way.
Expert witnesses get hourly rates which are many times greater that we do. These rates cover the costs of the various engineers working behind the scenes who produce the work.
So it's all a matter of degree. If you are a commercial organisation the client has to pay one way or another...
RE: Evaluations, Investigations, Problem solving
my mentor engineer would pickup the worst jobs with leaking and moldy buildings to work on. The symptoms were the same, but the cause(s) were always different. we went back to square one so many times that the jobs were a joke in the office. All of them worked out though, which is very important. Each one of these jobs had tough client management aspects. In evaluation and remediation projects, the client will not be comfortable until the problem is understood, and not satisfied until fixed. i know this about clients on this type of work: you can't let yourself magnify your self-doubts (inherent engineer defense mechanism) by your perception of client's satisfaction until you're out of the water. Or the client will think you're selling snake oil.
All the jobs we did, we went over budget. But, we had taken the work to establish relationships for big & easy new construction projects.
RE: Evaluations, Investigations, Problem solving
Mike McCann
McCann Engineering
RE: Evaluations, Investigations, Problem solving