Biggest workflow & IT complaints

[slushs]

I'm doing some research and have some questions concerning time and expense working on land development projects.

What are the three biggest expenses running a civil engineering firm?

What are work-flow bottlenecks when designing? Particularly in hydrology/hydraulics.

How much is spent on IT/infrastructure each year?

Do you outsource IT? Do you have full-time IT on staff?

Thanks!

 

[MrHershey]

Not hydrology/hydraulics, but we do a little bit of both on the last two questions. We outsource big ticket items like server set-up and items too complex for non-IT professionals to ever hope to tackle. But outsourcing gets expensive for day-to-day maintenance and IT helpdesk type applications. For those we have engineers (usually younger engineers) who just happen to know a lot about computers, then as they continue to serve that function they learn more and more to the point that we rarely call on our outsourced professionals anymore.

We're a small firm though (<20 engineers). If we were much bigger, we'd likely want to look at hiring a part-time IT professional to do some of this stuff. Most weeks aren't bad. But some weeks when computers all seem to go haywire at once, it can seem like need someone who doesn't have engineering responsibilities to take care of this stuff.