Engineering Management Institute

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Who Are Quantity Surveyors and Why Are They Important?

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This is a guest post by Mike Johnston
Quantity Surveyors

Civil engineering is a discipline many people are not really familiar with. This is a real shame since civil engineering impacts our society so much. Namely, it comprises various professions, including structural, geotechnical, environmental, water resources, construction management, and transportation engineers.

One particularly interesting area is quantity surveying, a profession that blends engineering, construction, and economics. The emphasis is on the last part, albeit there are many other tasks that these experts perform.

Word up

To avoid any confusion, let us just provide a quick clarification of terminology.

Those who live in Canada or the US might have heard the term construction cost estimator.  On the other hand, a quantity surveyor is widely used in countries like UK and Australia. The roles of the two are more or less similar depending on the region. For instance, a construction cost estimator in the US is equivalent to a quantity surveyor in the UK, even though there are some extra requirements for each one.

Sometimes, the terms cost managers and cost consultants get thrown around. But, in this article, we are going to use only quantity surveyor, though in a broader sense that transcends local and project-to-project differences.

What do surveyors do?

[Read more…]

Designing Sustainability into your Engineering Career

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sustainability

Whether you like the “s” word or not, sustainability is here; it’s all around us. As engineer’s, many of the actions we take every day are about managing the myriad of project issues that arise now, today; and managing issues to shape future outcomes and when everything goes right, delivering planned benefits at the end of a project. What many engineers don’t do, however, is recognize how the project they’re working on impacts both the local environment and the larger regional or global environment.

I know that during my career, sustainability wasn’t something that I overtly considered during initiating, planning or executing a project. Sure, when I was leading facility management efforts, I had the design review process include a line item for ensuring maintainability considerations of facility and infrastructure projects. A little later when I was building a house I made sure to use materials — roof tiles and siding for instance – that would result in less maintenance and a longer service life.

But these actions were more a result of experience and a good idea versus a conscious decision to assess a project from initiation through its life cycle for sustainability factors. In the world in which we implement our projects, whether business or public sector, I suggest we develop greater understanding of the challenges the global WE face. We recognize diminishing resources on earth, the long-term impacts of environmental degradation, and the changing weather patterns. When thinking about our future existence, we realize we will have to put in more effort to maintain the same quality of life. Sustainability is not just about human survival; it is about our quality of life – and the quality of life for generations to come – here on earth.

WHAT IS SUSTAINABILITY ANYWAY?

[Read more…]

Be Grateful When You Want To, Not When Someone Tells You To

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This is a guest post from Clementina Esposito

be grateful

“Be grateful.” It’s what every trending blog-post, business book, and bystander are telling us we need to do to get where we want to go.

Want to make more money? Be grateful.

Improve a relationship? Be grateful.

Get noticed at work? Be grateful.

What’s that you’re thinking? You don’t always feel grateful.

Of course, you don’t.

Were you hoping this would be a pithy post where I too would tell you to be grateful?

I promise, I won’t tell you how to feel.

I respect you too much for that. [Read more…]

12 Rules of Zen Monks that may Help You Reduce Stress and Improve Quality in Your Engineering Career

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Like many professions today, engineering can be a stressful profession due to the project deadlines, shrinking budgets, and client demands. In this post I want to provide some principles that Zen monks follow, and how you might apply them in your engineering career, to help you reduce some of the day-to-day stresses, and be more engaged and in the moment (or present).

I have to start this post by saying that it was inspired by a wonderful post that I read entitled 12 Essential Rules to Live More Like a Zen Monk by Leo Babuta. Leo Babauta is a simplicity blogger & author. He created Zen Habits, a Top 25 blog (according to TIME magazine) with 200,000 subscribers, mnmlist.com, and the best-selling books Focus, The Power of Less, and Zen To Done (Amazon affiliate links).

I want to give Leo full credit, as I will be using the 12 rules from his post for the basis of this post, however as you will read below I attempt to take these 12 rules and describe how engineers can use them on a daily basis in their engineering career development: [Read more…]