Dinosaur Wrote:Seems that way, certainly what can and can't be done within budget/timescale. Also, they by-and-large tend to have a somewhat rose-tinted memory from their now-distant fieldwork days when it comes to how much s**t a shovel-operative can move in a day.....Rose-tinted? I suppose some might ...
It sounds like your managers are not adopting a suitably organised approach to costing up their sites. Excel is a great tool for tracking costs versus time versus area and staffing, and giving ball-park figures for all those things on any given site. When all this data is recorded consistently and accurately, they ought to be able to put together more accurate costings. That said, the managers are expected to cost up the sites on the basis of what is expected to be there, while putting in a quote that will actually win the job. The resultant quotes might be seen as over-optimistic as Windbag suggests, or it might just be that they are trying to get the work to keep everyone employed and they have to cut the costs to win the jobs. Seems to me that they are on a hiding to nothing whatever they do, unless they are lucky enough to win a job even though they have submitted a comfortably realistic tender. Makes me glad I am not one.
'Reality,' sa molesworth 2, 'is so unspeakably sordid it make me shudder.'