One of London's most important thoroughfares, the Battersea Bridge, recently reopened to traffic, gaining a good deal of coverage in the national media. Beyond the fact that this was great news for those that relied on the bridge to get to work, it was also covered widely by the press for a different and altogether more significant reason. This was simply that the bridge had reopened ahead of schedule, with Mayor Ken Livingston wasting no time in providing a suitably ebullient comment, claiming it was "another confirmation of TfL's excellent track record of delivering major projects on time or ahead of schedule and to budget."

In the Evening Standard, the fact that repairs completed ahead of time was mentioned in the first sentence of its coverage begs a question; why is this such a surprise to the media? Why is this news within itself?

The unfortunate reality is that media coverage of projects of this nature is usually in terms of spiralling budgets and delays. Wembley Stadium being the latest and most high-profile case in point but there are plenty of others that the media has gleefully sunk its teeth into in recent years (see Scottish Parliament, Millennium Dome et al).

So what can the industry do to shake off this reputation? Is the industry missing a trick or do project overruns just come with the territory? The answer lies in effective project management to ensure that operations of this kind regularly complete on time or even better, ahead of schedule.

This seems like an obvious response - simply saying 'manage projects better' is not going to help project managers (PMs) get the job done quicker. What engineering consultancies really need, and PMs in particular, are the tools to improve the project management process and provide a framework that can underpin and support projects from start to finish.

By employing tight resource planning and forecasting to budget accurately and with sufficient granularity minor bumps in the road that previously would have sent projects reeling - especially if hit at full speed - can be avoided. Using next-generation technology to give a clear view of who is doing what and when, moves PMs closer to the project itself and gives them a great view of exactly what team members have achieved. 

Ensuring that the right solutions are in place to take the IT burden away from PMs so they can focus on what they do best - managing people and resources - is also key in keeping projects running smoothly. Integrating financial control and project management into one solution gives PMs the opportunity to view and drill into revenue and profit by company, business unit, department, customer, project, and employee. And if all financial and project related information can be viewed in real-time, to ensure that there are no surprises along the way, then all the better.

Fully utilising resources is among the greatest challenges facing engineering companies today. Providing an instant, online view of resource loads is therefore of great value to a beleaguered PM looking to create and change bookings easily. With a company-wide view of employee skills, capacity and expected load, PMs can detect overcapacity and skills shortages early on, enabling them to proactively address low utilisation and staffing overloads to ensure that projects are running as they should.

Research conducted on behalf of Maconomy by LoudHouse into the UK's engineering consultancy sector, revealed a lack of automation amongst key business processes meaning that accurate views of billing, staff resources, and profitability are absent from day-to-day management processes. Despite 83% of engineering consultancies recognising the role that operational efficiencies have in improving profitability, only 13% of engineering consultancies have fully integrated management processes in place. And although two-thirds of engineering consultancies believe that technology has a key role to play in delivering better project management, more than 72% of those surveyed do not use automated processes to support project management.

Real time changes demand real time information, and this component seems to be lacking in the majority of UK engineering consultancies. An experienced consultancy will factor contingency plans into a project equation, but without the right management information at hand and without a clear picture of team skills, resource, and status, this becomes a dangerous guess at best.

Once these resources are in place, stories regarding projects that don't complete on time will quickly become a thing of the past. In turn projects that do complete ahead of schedule will become the norm and no longer justify column inches. Only then can PMs look forward to picking up a national paper and find that no news is indeed good news.