Scheduling your work

[SuperCAD]

I need some advice on scheduling.

 

Including myself, I have a total of 4 people to work on CAD projects. Based on a rough estimate of 6-7 hours of productive drafting time per day, I can take on between 24-28 hours of work each day.

 

My problem is when the project managers submit work requests and, based upon their due dates and the estimates for how long each project will take, I'm having some days where I'd need to get 48-54 hours of work done per day just to stay on track.

 

How do you, or how should I, handle these kind of situations? We don't (currently) use a project scheduling software (i.e. MS Project Pro) or a Gantt chart so it's hard to show who's currently working on what and how it will affect the company's work flow if something gets shoved in or goes over the allotted time. It also doesn't help that the project managers usually don't play nice so one probably won't give up a slot to help out another one.

 

Help.

[tzframpton]

Recently left my company due to being overworked, being underpaid, and lack of drafting support from new hires that were promised but never delivered. If it's from time to time I didn't worry about it. If it has become a problem, then look into the hand-off procedures from jobs being awarded, to being handed off to the drafters, and see how much time they are actually taking. One thing I did, was stand my ground. I can only design and draft so fast - beyond my skill it just simply overflows into more time - which I informed I will NOT do, due to some recent complications in me being overworked for 3 months straight with zero compensation (I was salary and already worked 45 hours a week normally).

 

If it still is a problem, try logging everything and then presenting it to upper management. Hope this helps some.

[Pablo Ferral]

You definately need to come up with a way of reporting to your managment. Weather it's a Gant chart or a single page 'Executive summary' just make sure that it's in a format that they are used to and will read, and dosen't take you to long to compile!

 

I have always found Robert Green's advice to be very helpful:

http://www.cad-manager.com/

[ReMark]

It's a given that all project managers assume and expect their job to be your #1 priority. When you have several projects being thrown at you all at one time and each manager demanding the top slot (i.e. - the bulk of your time) then it is time to get the boss involved. That's why he gets paid the big bucks. It helps if engineers can come up with realistic time frames but half will claim their job needed to be completed two days ago then once you deliver to them they sit on it for two weeks! If you're lucky there is a least one engineer who tells it like it is. When he says "I need this done by next Tuesday" you know he isn't kidding.

 

At one place I worked, a small consulting engineering office, there were six engineers and I was the only draftsman. Each engineer claimed his job was the most important one in the office. So I would tell each of them, "Yes, your job is my number one priority." They all would walk away happy. Then I would turn around and dump it on the office manager. She saw right through the B.S. and she then decided the real priorities. All the engineers had to accept her decision.

[Pablo Ferral]

Ha! Lucky old you ;-)

 

I tend to set them on each other and then try and get my head down and get some work completed will the flack flies over my head!

[wastewater]

I am so happy that we are not the only company that is fighting this battle. I am the Drafting Manager at a 100+ company. We 4 drafters that feed drawings to the sales staff, Engineering staff, Project Mangers, and Shop. The all expect that when they give us a project to do that it will be done in 30 min or so. You know its not that hard to draw lines and circles right. I can totaly understand where you are coming from. I to wish I could come up with a better way of doing scheduling and stuff.

[shirazbj]

Each engineer claimed his job was the most important one in the office.

 

Just wondering if there is a system to document how many load the engineers have created by their tendcy to change all the time?

[BIGAL]

I just tell them the truth and ask which of the others guys ahead of you will you tell personally that your job must be done first. Very important stand your ground if they go running to the boss thats good at least you can explain, if the boss insists then the other guy gets told the truth why his is not finished, the boss told you not to finish his started job on time.

 

Time management is not an easy task I have a couple of guns turn around and they ask whats next, another I am currently mentoring code word for checking his work he is on notice. You must be creative in what jobs are given to who rather than he/she needs a job give him the next one.

 

A good thing to think about is if you have a job that will take say 30minutes then do it ! its done and back to the others. Working out if its better to do 5 tiny jobs versus 1 big one can in the long run can be beneficial. Sometimes its a number game not size.

[qball]

i agree with standing your ground. I work for a small company, in a relatively small town. But I have found that the few times there are hard deadlines, I finish the drawings, print them, then they sit in the office out box for the client to pick up for 2 weeks. They pick them up then 6 months after they got their building permit they decide they are ready to start building. Certain people get a rush rush mentality in their head. It's just undue stress. I almost never work overtime. There is always more work tomorrow so you have to know when to stop.

[CyberAngel]

Including myself, I have a total of 4 people to work on CAD projects. Based on a rough estimate of 6-7 hours of productive drafting time per day, I can take on between 24-28 hours of work each day.

 

My problem is when the project managers submit work requests and, based upon their due dates and the estimates for how long each project will take, I'm having some days where I'd need to get 48-54 hours of work done per day just to stay on track.

 

The most important point is that this is not your problem. You didn't create it, and you can't solve it. Charts and software will better define the problem, but they won't solve it. Don't take the blame.

 

How does it get solved, then? I'd go with the consensus in this thread, you should get management involved. Ultimately, it's their responsibility, even though the project managers are causing the problem. When the work piles up, you need a clear-eyed, well-informed individual to prioritize it. That individual may be you, it may be the boss, it may be the office manager--anybody without a dog in the hunt. If there are two critical projects at the same time, you may have to work overtime. Otherwise, put in your 8 and go home. Don't let them stress you out.

[SuperCAD]

I'm not letting it stress me out any more. I've taken the position of "we'll be done when we're done" when it comes to how long these projects take. I've also used the line "we can do it as quickly as you want, just tell me what you want us to leave off of the drawings." As far as which one comes first, I force them to prioritize their work. They can't all be number one on your list.

 

However, this one a-hole here submitted a request to me and BACK DATED it a couple weeks with a due date that was a week earlier than the date he submitted it! My response to him was "I don't have a DeLorean and a stretch of road to get it up to 88mph, so unless you've figured out time travel I won't be able to complete your request." We aren't talking anymore.

 

One problem we still have is this one project manager who's always running around like a headless chicken. We call him a project mis-manager. I can understand when one of our better project managers get into a pinch and need a drawing done right away to keep their customer happy, and when that happens I can usually accommodate their request. But this guy is ALWAYS in a panic and everything is so last minute with him, so I make him wait until we can get to it. To him, I'm like the Soup Nazi from that crappy show that ended. NO CAD FOR YOU!

[rkent]

When I worked for A/E firms our lead would always tell the PM that there was too much to do. Funny thing is we always got it done. I kept pointing out to him that crying wolf had ruined our chance of pushing back on the PMs. Finally I convinced them to start missing some deadlines, legitimately, so they would realize that it was true. There had been too many 24 and 36 hour days to get work out that shouldn't have been promised and agreed to in the first place. So the first rule is don't cry "this is too much work we won't meet the deadline" and then make the deadline after all.

[Bill Tillman]

After 32 years of commercial construction experience I've worked almost every angle of the business. I recently have been doing some ACAD drafting of my own to prepare shop drawings because our one and only detailer just can't keep up. I'm seeing again that it's not a matter of just a few hours to produce a full set of shop drawings and to produce a quality job takes time.

 

Having seen all sides of the equation for so many years it boils down to budgets and dollars for me at least. And on most of my projects the engineering takes anywhere from 6% to 10% of the total contract price. If it exceeds this amount we are usually not competitive on the bid. That said one should examine the manhours based on the dollars in this range. If the engineering exceeds this amount then you're over the budget. If you want to say things like "We'll be done when we get done." then I have some swamp land for sale and a bridge as well. I can give you a good price on them. You can't remain competitive in this dog-eat-dog business if you exceed budgets.

[tzframpton]

Industries are full of unrealistic expectations nowadays. Internet, email, and cell phones might be the cause of it. The age of "instant communication" has poured over into the actual work involved. I just have to remind people that it simply takes time to get certain things done - period. Easy as that.

[Jack_O'neill]

Our lives have all become too "instant". We have instant oatmeal, instant coffee, instant breakfast, instant messages. No one has any patience, "time is money" is the mantra. Make things happen before I finish telling you what I want (never mind that I dont' really know what I want yet). You've all heard me mention the dinosaur curtainwall company I worked at for 5 years. They would schedule a job to take say, 6 weeks. But in that six weeks, they did not allow for the 3 hours per day (minimum) every day that we spent in useless meetings, nor did they allow time in that schedule for any revisions that came in from previous jobs. Sure, your due date was 6 weeks away, but in reality you had less than 3 weeks time to do this six week job. In addition, you probably would discover about 2 weeks in that there have been major revisions to the job and that your "project mangler" as we called them had not requested the latest drawings. You were working from a set that was used for a quote 6 months ago. And you could ask for new drawings all you wanted, some would get them for you, some refused saying "we don't have time for that, just get it done." I'd get yelled at sometimes for doing it, but I got so I'd contact the architect or customer myself and have them send in the latest version. At least now I know they weren't the only ones doing that. Wait a minute...why am I comforted by that? What a sad state of affairs our world is in if everyone is operating in this mode. No wonder we have thousands of product recalls...there's no time to do it right, but there's always time to do it over.

[CyberAngel]

Our lives have all become too "instant" ... What a sad state of affairs our world is in if everyone is operating in this mode. No wonder we have thousands of product recalls...there's no time to do it right' date=' but there's always time to do it over.[/quote']

 

It's several problems at once. For one thing, managers usually have no conception of what their employees face on a daily basis (thanks, Bill Tillman, for being an exception). It used to be that managers came up through the ranks, they knew the ropes. Now it's all about productivity and bottom lines and profit centers.

 

Another thing is that software is not keeping up with hardware. Sure, I can render a drawing in a few minutes instead of a whole day, but I can't lay it out much faster. Design work is as clunky as it ever was, if not worse. Corridors in Civil3D are a nightmare. I should be able to define a road cross-section and run it along centerlines all day long; instead I have to individually define all four corners at an intersection.

 

I could go on and on, but there are some kids on my lawn....

[ReMark]

"there's no time to do it right, but there's always time to do it over."

 

We have one contractor that has been onsite for the last 35 years. His motto is "You pay us to put it in and then you pay us to take it out. What's not to like?"

[Jack_O'neill]

[quote=ReMark;364945

We have one contractor that has been onsite for the last 35 years. His motto is "You pay us to put it in and then you pay us to take it out. What's not to like?"

 

I wonder what it might be like to actually get all the ducks in thier respective rows before a job got started. How much money could be saved by having the plans in place before the building/car/whoozit started getting built.? Most of the jobs the curtainwall place did got metal shipped at least twice, most of them 3 or 4 times. The reasons for this were many and varied. Occasionally it was an error on our part, but most of the time it was because the building wasn't quite like the plans said, or the architect changed his mind about something, or the customer decided he wanted a clear anodized finish instead of a dark bronze or any one of a hundred other reasons beyond our control. We had one building that got started early by the contractor. He had a job get cancelled and found a huge void in his schedule so everything got moved up. Architect gave him a rendering of the finished building and said "build this". By the time the plans got to us, the building kinda sorta looked like the one in the picture, but since it was a hurry up rush job, we were already shipping metal when they figured out that it simply wasn't going to fit. Apparently the contractor had done exactly as he was told and built a building based off the picture, but there had been no communication back to the architect about what was being built. Thousands of pounds of aluminum got dumped in the recycle bins, hundreds of man-hours were wasted, the cost of the building went beyond budget by a factor of 2 or more by the time it was done. They had asked us to prefabricate the curtainwall components in an effort to save time, so very little of it could be saved when they discovered that the actual openings varied from the drawings we'd worked from, not to mention that they had pre-ordered the glass, most of which was the wrong size now too. In all, a tremendous amount of effort and materials were wasted.

[SuperCAD]

If you want to say things like "We'll be done when we get done." then I have some swamp land for sale and a bridge as well.

 

I should have clarified this a little better, but I was tired yesterday. My point was when a PM gives us a request and he figured that it would take us 8 hours to do it, I can either give him 8 hours of work and he can take what he gets when the 8 hours is up, or he can wait until the project is actually finished. More often than not, the hours that we are given to complete the project are less than it actually takes. I have repeatedly said that a custom cabinet will take us anywhere from 4-6 hours to complete depending on how much direction we are given up front. PM's are still submitting requests for projects with 3-4 custom cabinets, and only giving us 8 hours for the entire project, all while asking for the project to be completed in 2 days.

 

So I've kind of taken the IDGAF approach when it comes to scheduling stuff. This week is a bit different since we are so far ahead that we're actually waiting for work to come in. I'm going to have to start sending people home early if the PM's don't start getting me requests on time.