Road Construction Engineer Case Study

LEARNING LOG/JOURNAL Student Name and ID: Mitra Fereidouni---110186602 Month 1

Situation:

The main problem I encountered, after being employed as a cost engineer in the T2T project was lack of experience in road construction projects.

Actually, the cost engineer’s main responsibility in the T2T project was preparing a Cost Breakdown Structure (CBS). That CBS was a list of the activities that need to be done to construct a 4Km non-stop roadway incorporating 3 Km lowered motorway and surface roads. Each activity needed to have a unique cost code to track its financial position.

After defining the CBS, the cost engineer had to monitor and analyze each cost code’s financial situation.

Therefore, to do the job properly, I needed

At the same time, to do the month end process, I had to get all the actual costs and forecasting cost to completes for each activity and enter and analyze them in two different software.

Impact:

Although I had started to find out the project’s basic concepts and job’s sequences, the learning hadn’t been finished yet.

In this circumstance, it was hard to meet the deadlines of preparing the month end reports.

Outcome:

To solve the issue, a time schedule was prepared which included the list of the tasks needed to be done for the month end process. Then, the activities that could be done during the month was defined and put in the first weeks of the month to make the process easier.

Prioritizing the jobs helped me to get lots of information ready before starting to prepare the month end reports.

Therefore, I become able to meet the deadlines and save my time.

Learning:

This experience taught me how to schedule my responsibilities to meet the due dates and be on track. However, in the future it would be better to get a good understanding of all the responsibilities in the first days. Then a schedule should be set and verified by the supervisor or manager before starting the job.

In that case, the time will be saved and the due dates would be met

Actually, as a cost engineer, I had to collate all the project team’s forecasting information for their cost codes. This forecasting includes the costs that they estimate were needed for each cost code to be done, by the end of the project.

Normally, monthly meetings were held before closing the month end’s financial position. However, the problem was that all that meeting was held in rush without having enough time to concentrate on the project’s issues and found the solutions.

Impact:

In the monthly meeting, we only had time to go through the backup data that the project’s team had prepared to support their forecasts. Therefore, other data such as the amount that has been spent for each cost code couldn’t be verified.

Outcome:

To communicate more and better with the project team, weekly meetings were organized.

These meetings helped the team to get together three times before the month end. Therefore, it made a sufficient time to negotiate about the activities’ costs and fix the wrong issues.

Also, it helped the team to talk about the lessons learned and use them in the next month’s