I work for a company that is just starting to develop an engineering design team as part of our project team. As we start to develop our design business I'm trying to find efficient ways for managing engineering resources (aprox 20) in related to work forecast and existing backlog. I'm very interested to hear the experiences of others on how they track and manage engineering backlog and plan engineering resources including plans for hiring additional resources based on future work forecast?

I'm also curious how others track engineering costs on large turnkey projects. We have a way of simply tracking hours that are used but I was looking for a more granular method for tracking costs related to estimates and future cost projections for remainder of project. I'm hesitant to re-invent the wheel on this if there are good methods out there (MS project would required dedicated scheduler which we don't currently have) that are useful for providing engineering cost tracking on projects and a pretty granular level that aren't too painful to update. I also really want a way to track various aspects of design (30,60,90,etc...)and document these costs as baselines for future similar projects.

I appreciate any experiences others may be able to offer.