Feast or Famine

That's what describes the workload at many A/E firms. My firm has a really big backlog of work, but that doesn't mean that things don't get slow every now and then. Sometimes we're waiting on government agencies to get budgets approved, and other times there's more back-and-forth between the Architect and Building Owner getting floor plans approved than anticipated. Engineers can't really do any work until there's an approved floor plan.

So for the past month or so, it was kind of slow going for me. I finished my big jail job right before Christmas so there was kind of a let down after that. I'm currently working on some jail studies, but they haven't kept me overly busy.

So this past Friday, we got a huge project dumped on us. One of other offices is working on a new building for a local university. Our other offices typically sub out the engineering to other firms because our engineering staff in Richmond is only big enough to support the workload right here in Richmond. But this is a special situation. The design development stage just finished, and the other engineering firm said that they couldn't finish the final construction drawings by the due date. Since delaying the due date isn't possible, we told the other firm to "take a hike" and we'll finish the drawings here in-house.

It's great to have a brand new project to work on, but I'm less than thrilled that we only have 5 weeks to finish up the project. Fortunately, I'll be working with two other good engineers and we'll split up the workload so it won't be THAT bad. I'd rather be under a tight deadline that sitting around with my thumb up my ass!