Checking Other Engineers' Calculations
Checking Other Engineers' Calculations
(OP)
My previous employer was very lax about formal checking of calculations (specialized industry), and now my current employer has an extremely formal checking process. I am not very comfortable and take longer than I should with checking other engineers' calculations due to rarely if ever been required to do so. Does anyone have any advice or maybe experienced the same thing? I am in the civil (structural specifically) engineering field.





RE: Checking Other Engineers' Calculations
The more you automate the calculations, the less you will need to check the calculations. But you will need to review the data going in to the machine.
RE: Checking Other Engineers' Calculations
If you feel you're taking too long, don't worry, they'll tell you. It's tedious and inefficient to review others calculations. You have to get into their head, follow a procedure you might or might not of chose. What I found was that normally the mistakes I found were not significant. But every once in a while....
I feel that time can be better spent by looking at drawings rather than reviewing calculations. But if they're paying you to review calculations, that's what they want.
RE: Checking Other Engineers' Calculations
It's too easy to fall into the trap of checking that the right arithmetic was performed on the wrong equations, or that the wrong number was correctly carried throughout the entire process.
Often it's better to do your own completely independent calculation first. Then if you come up with a different answer start looking for why.
RE: Checking Other Engineers' Calculations
RE: Checking Other Engineers' Calculations
RE: Checking Other Engineers' Calculations
RE: Checking Other Engineers' Calculations
When reviewing someone else's work, I have a couple of coloured pencils, sticky notes, a pad of paper, whatever is appropriate for the amount of work this will entail. More preparation is needed for a long report than is for a simple one-page change order, of course. Each of these is associated with drawings, references and other documents, so have these handy before you start. Talking to the drafter/writer/analyst helps a lot. That sounds obvious, but I've caught myself puzzling over things that I should have asked the person explain, before I started looking at it.
STF
RE: Checking Other Engineers' Calculations