Bunny in the Brink

As many of you know, I'm currently working on a big jail project. Well, I'll be on the road in a few minutes to go to what's called a VE meeting. VE stands for "value engineering" which is an oxymoron if I've ever heard one. If you're not careful, value engineering results in an inferior design and an unhappy Owner.

Basically what happens is the Owner hires a company separate from the design team (fresh set of eyes) and they review the design and brain storm ways to make the design cheaper. This is a multi-day event. On the first day, we give a presentation of our design to the VE team. This is so the VE team doesn't have to reinvent the wheel and go into our drawings and specifications blindly. It also gives us an opportunity to explain why we used the Cadillac model AHU instead of the Ford model. VE is what these guys do for a living and they're pretty sharp so they try and poke holes in everything. It costs the Owner tens of thousands of dollars to hire these guys so they are required to provide at least that much value and more back to the Owner.

In some sense, I kind of like VE meetings because I like to give presentations and I'm very proud of my work. On the otherhand, I don't like people who've only seen my project for an hour criticize my design that I've worked on nearly every day for the past several months. Sometimes these VE people are like Torquemada from the Spanish Inquisition. All in the fun, I guess...