A team that has grown quickly
Capable engineers, but everyone doing things their own way. Drawings look different depending on who produced them, and nobody is quite sure which version of a document is current.
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Training, mentoring & systemsBetter engineers, and better ways of working.
Two related problems, often found in the same organisation: people who need developing, and processes that were never really designed. I work on both, and having spent years leading and mentoring a design team, I know how differently the two need to be handled.
Who this is for
Three situations where this tends to be needed
Experience leaving the building
A senior engineer is retiring or moving on, and a great deal of undocumented knowledge is about to leave with them. Junior staff need bringing on faster than would happen naturally.
Work that keeps coming back
Submissions rejected, drawings reissued, the same mistakes recurring. Usually this is a process problem rather than a competence one, and it is fixable.
Training
Sessions built around your team, not off the shelf
Every session is shaped to the standards your organisation works to and the schemes your people actually deal with. Delivered remotely to teams anywhere in the UK, or in person in Kent, to one person or to a room.
Highway design standards
Practical interpretation of TSRGD 2016, the Traffic Signs Manual, DMRB and Manual for Streets, including which governs when they appear to conflict.
AutoCAD 2D for highway designers
Not a generic CAD course. Drawing production as highway design actually requires it, taught by a former in-house trainer.
CDM 2015
What the regulations require of designers and Principal Designers in practice, and what genuinely useful design risk information looks like.
Project management principles
PRINCE2-based project management for engineers running schemes without ever having been taught how. Non-accredited, and aimed at daily practice.
Process mapping
How to map what your team actually does, spot where the time and the errors go, and design a better way through.
Section 278 submissions
What highway authorities look for, why submissions come back, and how to get a package approved without three rounds of comments.
Mentoring
Developing people, not just teaching them
Training transfers knowledge. Mentoring is slower, more individual, and usually what actually changes how someone works.
I mentored engineers and project managers throughout my time leading a highway design team, and it is the part of the work I care most about. The approach is to help someone arrive at their own way of tackling a problem rather than to hand them mine, with support and a straight answer available whenever they need it.
That includes getting people onto site regularly. A great deal of highway design only makes sense once you have stood in the road and looked at it, and desk-bound engineers are held back by not having done so.
Mentoring is normally arranged as a regular commitment, a half day a fortnight or a day a month, so the relationship has time to be worth something. It can be delivered remotely anywhere in the UK, in person in Kent, or a mix of both.
Process review & systems set-up
Designing how the work gets done
Most engineering teams have processes that grew rather than were designed. This is a structured way of fixing that, and it is work I did continuously while developing systems for a local authority design team.
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Review what happens now
Mapping the process as it is genuinely carried out, not as the manual says it should be. This is done by talking to the people doing the work, and it usually surfaces several things nobody realised were happening.
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Audit against what is required
Comparing current practice against your own standards, contractual obligations and statutory duties. Where there is a gap, it is recorded as a corrective action with a clear owner rather than a vague observation.
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Design the improved process
A workflow that reflects how the work actually needs to flow, with the right checks at the right points: enough to catch errors, not so many that people start working around them.
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Set up document handling
Protocols for how project documentation is stored, named, shared, versioned and retained. Unglamorous, and the single change that most reliably reduces wasted time and rework.
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Implement and embed
New processes fail when they are announced rather than introduced. Staff are trained and supported through the change, and the process is adjusted where reality proves it needs adjusting.
What it delivers
What is different afterwards
The point of any of this is not the documentation it produces. It is that the work becomes more consistent, more defensible, and less dependent on any one person remembering how something is done.
- Drawings and documents that look the same whoever produced them
- A clear, current version of everything, findable by anyone
- Fewer submissions rejected for avoidable reasons
- New starters productive sooner, with less senior hand-holding
- Statutory duties demonstrably discharged, with the record to prove it
- Knowledge held by the organisation rather than by individuals
Tell me what your team needs
Whether that is a single training session, ongoing mentoring for one engineer, or a proper look at how your processes work, a short conversation will establish what would actually help.