You can get most of the punch you'd get from Microsoft Project or Primavera by simply sitting your engineers in a room, drawing up a critical path diagram on a whiteboard, assigning "days" to each task, precedents, antecedents, identifying the critical path in a different colored marker, and then adding up the hours at the bottom. Take a cell phone photo, email it to your project team, and there's your plan.
BUT, here's the thing a wise manager once told me. Bidding a project is like poker. You don't bet your hand, you bet his hand. When the higher ups put together their fee, it's likely that they're trying to figure out what fee they think will win the job, and the highest fee they can get given the client and the competition. Then they go back and use your hour estimate as a check, to see whether the job is going to be profitable or not. Just going off of an hour estimate could lead to not getting the job, OR it could lead to leaving a lot of extra money on the table, which could have been used to cover a loss on other jobs with overages.
There's another thing too. It's cheaper to do a job at a loss than it is to sit idle. I learned this from my father, who was in heavy construction.
Those two things aren't often understood by folks in the engineering labor pool trying to pull the project together.
In terms purely of your "staff level," however, the initial exercise of doing a simple critical path analysis is very valuable, and doesn't take long.
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