Question: How long does your average project take?

Ivanka Brown answered on 13 Mar 2012:

Unfortunately this is the kind of ‘how long is a piece of string’ question for me as there is no average project. In civil engineering we design and build whatever is needed/wanted. So Crossrail in London is a vast new railway network which has been in planning for decades (since the 1970s!) and is now being constructed after years of design (I think about 10-15 years of design). It all needs to be designed togather to ensure everything works the same way so if can be maintained easily.

However, I have also worked on small project for providing an extension to someone’s house. It involved searching existing information for blueprints of the house and information on the ground, then we dug some holes to confirm what the ground was and take some samples, we tested the samples to find out how strong and ‘stretchy’ the soil in the ground was, we designed some foundations (another team designed the above ground bit, including timber and steel beams to hold up the roof and another team designed the outsides and air conditioning and lighting) and then once we had a set of drawings showing everyone’s designs, we went out and built it. It all took about 8 months.
My involvement on this project was just for the ground investigation which took about 6-8 weeks. I decided what information on the soil we had, so then I could decide what equipment we needed to test the ground and take samples and then analysed the report that came back to me to provide the foundation designers the strength and other properties of the soil.