Project management for engineering consultancies, week by week

The architect's email lands at 7:42 on Monday, and by 8:30 the director is at the whiteboard with a marker, rubbing out Thursday and Friday for two engineers, because the planning submission has been brought forward a week and the Stage 3 package now sits on top of another job's tender issue. Three people watch and nod, but nobody writes any of it down, so by Wednesday two of them remember the new plan differently, and the graduate is still modelling the thing that got deprioritised on Monday.

Stage packages and dates you do not set

Work arrives as an enquiry and is won on a fee proposal, which is where project management for engineering consultancies really begins. Structural, civil and MEP practices are usually appointed direct by the client with the architect leading the design team, sometimes as sub-consultant to the architect, sometimes novated into a design-and-build contractor's team. Fees are priced against stages: RIBA Stages 2 to 6 in UK-influenced markets, SD through CA in the US. Every stage ends in a package, which is general arrangements, sections, details, schedules and calcs, issued at P01 and later C01, logged on the drawing register with an issue sheet. Somebody else sets the dates that matter, planning submission, tender issue, and the issued-for-construction date, the IFC, and because somebody else is setting them, they tend to move at short notice and rarely work in your favour.

Mid-design, the rhythm is the fortnightly DTM and its action list, plus waiting on the architect's revised GAs before your own drawings can progress, and then construction starts and the job goes quiet without ever ending. RFIs and TQs arrive with a contractual turnaround, often five or ten working days, and a contractor who chases daily, while fabrication drawings and bending schedules need reviewing on top of that. Each engineer carries five to fifteen live jobs at different stages at once: one heavy Stage 4 package this fortnight, and a steady drip of queries from jobs that reached practical completion last year.

Monday morning, without the whiteboard

Project management for engineering consultancies mostly comes down to one question: who is doing what this week. ToDoing puts the whole team's week on one grid, rows by person or by project, with every task sitting on a named person and a named day. When the planning submission moves, the director drags the affected tasks to their new days, reassigns the ones that will not fit, and everyone sees it inside a second, so nobody has to re-brief round the table. Each engineer's My Week is the same data seen from their own side, so the director's plan and the graduate's list cannot quietly diverge over a fortnight.

Anything unfinished rolls forward to today by itself each working day, so nobody has to sit down and tidy the grid. A Someday column holds the work you have accepted but not yet dated. More on the thinking behind that in plan the week, not the backlog.

Resource planning when three tender issues land on one technician

Every package funnels through one or two CAD and BIM technicians, which makes them the real constraint on the schedule even though the fee proposals were never built around that bottleneck. Three architects independently choose the same Friday, and somebody only spots the clash on Wednesday. On the people view of the grid, though, that Friday shows three coloured bars in one row before the week even starts, which leaves enough time to move a package or warn a client well before the clash turns into a scramble.

Leave sits in the same picture. On Pro you book time off with half days, one approver and running balances, with public holidays by country and by region. The team wall chart shows the technician's Thursday off before anyone promises a Friday issue, and the leave calendar feeds in and out of the calendars people already keep.

The job that finished six months ago

Construction-phase work is real, and it rarely shows up in any plan: a TQ on a job everyone considers closed still costs an afternoon, and that afternoon comes out of this month's Stage 4 package whether or not anybody logged it. Site inspections behave the same way: a rebar inspection turns up at 24 hours' notice ahead of a pour, takes a senior engineer off design work for half a day, and arrives long after the week was planned. In ToDoing an RFI is a task on a person and a day, carrying its project colour like every other task, so the old job takes a slot on Thursday alongside the new ones.

Milestone flags live on the same calendar as tasks, which is where stage issues and IFC dates belong. When the package sitting under a Friday flag still has three days of work left on Wednesday, the shape of the week shows it immediately, roughly a fortnight before it would surface in a month-end WIP review, and something like six weeks before the bookkeeper gets around to mentioning that a stage cannot be invoiced yet.

Enterprise adds tracking and estimation. Ticking a task done logs the time you planned for it, and one tap adjusts the number. Each project carries a budget in days or hours, with a burn bar, a breakdown by person and by task type, and a CSV export, and none of it needs timers or timesheets. Estimation reads your own completed history and gives a median and a p80 per task type, which is a sturdier basis for the next fee proposal than the old habit of taking the last one and adding ten per cent, and it prints a client-facing quote too.

What ToDoing leaves alone

Drawing issue control stays where it belongs. Registers, transmittals, revision codes and the contractual audit trail live in Aconex, Asite, ProjectWise, Autodesk Construction Cloud or Viewpoint, and ToDoing has no document versioning, no CAD or BIM link and no QA sign-off workflow for an ISO 9001 audit. Timesheets against fee stages, WIP and invoicing stay in Rapport3, CMAP, Union Square, BQE Core or Deltek. There are no task dependency links either, so you cannot encode "drainage layout starts when the architect's GA lands"; instead you schedule it for a day, and if the GA is late, as it often is, you move it. Calendar feeds are the only integration, so keep every one of those other systems exactly as they are, and let ToDoing take over just the whiteboard and the master job-list spreadsheet that really lives in one person's head.

What is the best project management software for a small engineering consultancy?

That depends on the shape of the practice. ToDoing is built for teams of roughly 3 to 15, which covers most structural, civil and MEP practices with a director, a couple of seniors, a graduate and a technician or two. Past about 15 people, with formal PM roles and a resource manager, you will probably want something heavier. Compare it with Float or Resource Guru if pure resourcing is the whole requirement.

Does it integrate with Revit, Aconex or our CDE?

No. Calendar feeds in and out are the only integration. Your model, your CDE and your document control carry on untouched, and the week gets planned around them.

Can ToDoing replace our timesheets and fee-stage billing?

No. Tracking on the Enterprise plan tells you how a project's budget is burning and who spent the days, and you can export it. It produces no invoices and no WIP report. Rapport3, CMAP and BQE Core keep those jobs.

What does it cost for a five-person practice?

At the time of writing, July 2026, Pro is $2 per person per month, or $20 per person per year. Five people on Pro is $100 a year. Enterprise is $6 per person per month, or $60 per person per year, and adds estimation and tracking. There is a 14-day full trial, and the free plan for 3 people and 3 projects never asks for a card.

Your drawing register keeps a good record of what was issued. It has nothing to say about what happens this week, and that's the part ToDoing is for.

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