Think Big
I’ve recently come across several scenarios where thinking big picture would have saved a lot of time and headache. And maybe some of you might benefit from hearing this. Just before you dive into your next assignment, take a second and ask yourself, “what’s the point of this?”
This might sound a little silly, but here are some scenarios where this could have helped a lot:
A drafter is asked to draft up a pile plan. He puts together the plan with the titleblock, prints to pdf, and sends it off to the engineer. The engineer ends up with an ANSI-D print which is entirely too large for the report he’s preparing. If the drafter understood what the point of the pile plan was from the get go, he wouldn’t have to go back and take the time to adjust the drawing to plot on a ANSI-B sheet.
An engineer is asked to perform a quantity take off. He goes through a large complicated drawing set, taking tedious measurements, and putting together a long list of quantities. A second engineer takes the quantity take off to input into the engineer estimate, and she finds that none of the quantities match with the units in the estimate. If the first engineer knew that the values from the quantity take off were going to be input into the estimate, then he wouldn’t have to go back and recalculate the appropriate quantities.