The Engineering Consultant's Luck of the Draw
I was speaking to some long time friends the other day and we got to talking about engineering budgets in major projects.
I told them that in my experience it works like this.
The Owner gathers a team together for a new project and they are all enthused. This time, they say, they are going to watch the budget and get it right.
The first contract they write is to the engineering consultant. So, they call the usual suspects in, vigorously negotiate a contract and award it to the one they beat up the most.
When projects are over, and one analyzes the results, they will find they spent as much on transportation and insurance, not combined, but separately, as they did on engineering. And, when they negotiated transportation and insurance, they largely accepted the prices without any negotiation.
The "luck" of the engineer is that they were first while the team was fresh. They had no chance to do anything innovative, for it is all about the price of their work, not the overall price of the project.
I have seen this happen twenty or thirty times in the last 52 years. It leads to mediocre projects. Time to stop it, folks.
