There’s no better way to build momentum early for a successful project.
I was taught from the very beginning of my engineering career to always start with a system flow diagram. The phrase, “A picture is worth a 1,000 words,” doesn’t do justice to the true value of a system flow diagram. However, I am routinely reminded of how many design engineers I interact with don’t start with a flow diagram when designing a job, troubleshooting a problematic system, or commissioning a system. Had the designer started with a flow diagram and wrote their own sequence of operation at the very start of schematic design phase documentation, so many of the systems that fail to achieve client satisfaction and/or result in contractor “requests for information” followed by changeorder proposals to make things right could have been avoided.
This got me to thinking that maybe there should be mandatory design engineering steps, the likes of which I introduced (with help from Amanda Parolise) in a book titled, Handbook On Process, Project, Profits – A Practitioner’s Guide To The Building Industry. It’s an online, chapter-by-chapter writing venture at a time when the industry is at an interesting crossroads between continuing down the 20th-century technology road or making a course correction to the 21st-century process of HVAC engineering. Our online publication is also at a similar crossroads, as we have reached an editorial roadblock with chapter 2-3 titled, “Construction Document-GMP.”
We believe that in this phase of the engineering design process, we need to rethink what needs to be produced once the design development phase of the work is completed. Namely, the following steps should occur to follow the correct course and realize the most efficient design engineering method: