Nature of engineering consulting projects

Engineering consulting firms usually collect data such as cost and man-hour expenditures. Although these data help analyze project profit and productivity, they lack the information on the project nature to examine work and analyze the root causes of performance. This study investigates the nature of engineering consulting projects in terms of uncertainty and equivocality (U&E). A questionnaire was designed to collect project U&E data from 108 project managers. The U&E scores were analyzed, further linked to and tested on a consulting firm's profit, productivity, project type, phase, duration, and owner data. It is found that project nature does not affect profit or productivity; engineering design work needs more data acquisition and analysis than problem definition and interpretation. Other results show insightful patterns about engineering projects that can be useful references to the engineering services industry.