Email Jim at jim.thompson@ipulpmedia.com

The answer likely lies with a definition of your role in the company. If you are a typical project engineer within a mill, it likely starts when you are given a request from an operating department. Listen carefully to them, they are your customer. Yet bring your own professionalism to the party, too. This means don't listen to them wide eyed and gap jawed as if they have all the answers.

Operating departments often have a problem and unwittingly try to solve it before they come to you. Rookie project engineers will likely take their idea and run with it, to the detriment of their career and the mill's capital budget.

My suggestion to get off to a good start is this. Interview the customer. Take them to lunch if you must (you may need to get them out of the mill environment to get their attention). Dig deep and ascertain what the REAL problem is.

Back at your office, write a design basis based on what you understand about the problem. Start with a statement of the problem followed by a section that describes the impact on operations. After that comes a section with alternative solutions with very ballpark (all high) cost estimates. You make them all high, for as soon as they get out of your hands, the numbers will be remembered by all interested parties and you will never have a chance to raise them again.

Write this all up and present it to your customer. If your customer doesn't want to see it, file it in your project file with a notation on when you presented it. If your customer is cooperative, get them to sign and date it. File it.

OK, you hate to write. Sometimes I think I am the only engineer ever born that likes to write. I have news for you--writing is part of your job, just like appropriate calculations. Most schools today teach technical writing and to that I say Hooray!

What you are doing is this, which I wrote in a recent document for a client. All the key decisions that could provide insight into the paths and choices should be made at the very beginning, where a slight movement in choices can make a big difference in outcomes. This can be visualized much like a child's teeter-totter, except the fulcrum is much closer to one end than the other and one can visualize that in such a case a small movement on one end (the front end) would cause a very large movement on the other (successful execution).

Get the beginning correct and the rest will take care of itself--if you are competent.

Be safe and we will talk next week.

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