Engineering management has several areas of focus that help organizations execute their technical engineering functions.
These professionals plan, coordinate, and manage engineering activities, which encompasses several key responsibilities, like budgeting and project management. If you’re pursuing a career in engineering management, you can benefit from learning about these various focus areas, as it may broaden your understanding and give direction to your learning.
Below, we explore the many areas of engineering management and share some tips to help you develop as an aspiring engineering manager.
What is engineering management?
Engineering management is a specialized form of management that applies to the practice of engineering. Professionals with an engineering management degree Canada are comparable to those with business administration degrees, as they’re trained to apply the administrative, organizational, and planning functions of management to complex engineering processes.
This master’s degree in engineering management equips you to connect business and engineering, ensuring engineering processes align with organizational goals. It combines administrative planning with technical problem-solving to produce leaders that can control and oversee an organization’s engineering practices, bringing them in line with budgets, deadlines, and requirements.
Due to the rapid and constant rise in the demand for engineering managers, many students are choosing to study this discipline because it combines business and engineering and instills unique skills. Degrees in engineering management combine subjects like accounting, HR, quality control, project management, and economics, making graduates of the subject highly valuable to employers.
Studying this subject can prepare you for various high-level positions, including production manager, director, and engineering project manager. It can also give you access to very competitive salaries, making engineering management qualifications high-return investments for most graduates.
Focus areas of engineering management
This unique discipline combines various focus areas from both engineering and management to combine the two in practically useful ways. It seeks to equip professionals with the skills and knowledge to use money, human resources, and technology to analyze, innovate and optimize within organizations. Here are some of the key focus areas of engineering management:
Budgeting
Financing and budgeting for engineering projects is a complex process that involves several considerations, so it makes up an important part of engineering management courses. Engineering managers need to know how to estimate timescales and costs, how to measure progress, and how to plan for contingencies.
Without budgeting skills, projects can’t move forwards because it defines essential project parameters that all stakeholders must agree on before projects can commence. Understanding budgeting also allows managers to measure expected costs against actual costs, which reveals whether projects are progressing according to plan.
Here are some key factors involved in engineering management budgeting:
- Understanding stakeholder needs. Knowing what stakeholders need is key to developing a budget, as this tells you what tasks need to be completed and what resources are available to make it happen.
- Planning for contingencies. Taking time to anticipate what could go wrong during a project’s execution can help you factor in these unexpected costs and create strategies for overcoming problems.
- Relying on expert knowledge. Factoring in the expertise of professionals like suppliers and purchasers can help you develop more accurate cost estimates and stick to budgetary requirements.
- Adapting to change. Keeping budgets dynamic to a degree helps you adapt to the changing requirements of projects, as altering and refining budgets as projects progress helps you stay on budget.
- Setting KPIs. Establishing and monitoring KPIs helps you define success and keep projects on track, and it also helps you adjust budgets according to these indicators.
Project management
While engineering management is distinct from engineering project management, the two overlap in many areas, and both engineering managers and engineering project managers cooperate to drive the success of projects.
As such, engineering management courses cover the essentials of project management, allowing these professionals to manage the people working on projects and guide some of their more technical aspects.
Project managers don’t necessarily require an engineering background, as they specialize in managing and executing projects, but engineering managers can help with specific tasks and manage engineers. Here are some of the main responsibilities of project managers in engineering:
- Ensuring regulatory compliance. Engineering often involves working with hazardous materials, and, as such, is a tightly regulated industry. Engineering managers have a responsibility to keep employees safe and the business free from legal liabilities by maintaining regulatory compliance throughout projects.
- Managing project engineers. To keep up with schedules and KPIs, managers work directly with engineers to provide support and motivation. Engineering managers may also assist the project engineers with specific tasks or offer guidance when they get stuck.
- Setting timelines. Project management involves creating schedules for short- and long-term goals, which helps managers keep track of all project tasks. Long-term projections help with managing stakeholder expectations and creating accurate budgets.
- Facilitate collaboration. Third-party collaboration is sometimes necessary when executing projects, and engineering managers are responsible for selecting appropriate partners and facilitating this collaboration. Managers act as inter-organizational links that ensure teams can cooperate to meet common objectives.
- Administration. Project management involves lots of paperwork, such as budget documents, progress reports, logistical data, and employee-related admin. This all comes under the project manager’s responsibility so that future audits and investigations can be done with accuracy.
People management and leadership
As a fundamentally management-based position, engineering managers need to know how to manage people and lead them effectively. Engineering managers have backgrounds in engineering and STEM fields, enabling them to support engineers effectively and help them with specific tasks.
They also require basic people management and leadership skills, such as interpersonal, delegation, conflict resolution, and mentoring skills. Engineering managers need to know the difference between technical leadership and management, so they may host team meetings to discuss general management topics and one-on-one meetings to gauge where engineers are with their work.
Engineering managers take a hands-on approach to management, as they get involved with engineering activities in addition to acting as managers. Effective leadership also means being able to bring out the best in your team and help with idea generation, producing an environment in which everyone is comfortable expressing their ideas.
These professionals communicate with higher management and stakeholders to get resources and directions and translate them into results by mobilizing their team members. People management also involves basic tasks like dealing with leave requests, staffing, and conducting performance reviews.
Analytics-driven decision making
Understanding how to interpret and apply data is an increasingly important skill in various industries, and engineering isn’t exempt. Engineering managers need to know how to use data insights to drive decision-making, as this leads to more intelligent, evidence-based decisions that lead to better outcomes.
Analytics can also uncover economic or customer trends that can inform innovation and design decisions, making it an indispensable tool for gaining a competitive edge in the marketplace. These professionals can also use people analytics or relational analytics to gather information about employees within the organization.
This can provide statistical insights that can help with hiring and team management decisions. Data insights can also inform decision-making when it comes to risk assessment and management, as they can help managers identify, assess, and mitigate risks to improve project outcomes.
Managers can use data insights to improve productivity and engineering processes by analyzing performance and discovering ways to enhance the way teams work. In the same way, they can use analytics to identify waste and then devise strategies for completing work more efficiently, leading to increased profits.
Product innovation management
Innovation is at the core of engineering and knowing how to manage and drive innovation can help you get the most out of your engineers and create revolutionary products.
Modern businesses don’t have time to wait for innovative ideas to emerge at random, so it’s important for engineering managers to understand how to manage innovation systematically.
This means understanding things like the innovation lifecycle, which typically follows an S-curve model containing the following stages:
- Stage 1: Slow growth involving trial and error.
- Stage 2: This stage involves replicating and building on what works, leading to evolutionary growth.
- Stage 3: The product stabilizes, and growth slows, signaling the need for further innovation.
- Stage 4: If the innovations work, the S-curve and the process repeats.
Innovation should be part of everyday operations for engineering managers, and understanding this process helps them incorporate it. Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT) is another way to innovate, and it focuses on what innovative solutions have in common to make it easier to identify them. It gives users five ideation tools, which are:
- Subtraction. Eliminating elements from an existing product to create something new.
- Task unification. Assigning new tasks to existing resources.
- Multiplication. Achieving quantitative gain by multiplying existing elements.
- Division. Dividing products into smaller units.
- Attribute dependency. Removing or creating dependencies between existing properties.
Students of engineering management can expect to learn about these drivers of innovation and more.
Operations management
This is the most important function of engineering managers, ensuring businesses can maintain their daily operations. The highly competitive nature of engineering markets demands efficiency and productivity from engineering operations, so it’s important to be able to manage them effectively.
Engineering departments must be able to create high-quality products as quickly and cheaply as possible. Managing this aspect of business involves planning, organization, procurement, production, distribution, quality control, project management, strategy, and more.
Skills for engineering managers
Here are some skills these professionals rely on to do their jobs effectively, which you can begin to develop if you’re looking to pursue a career in the field:
Problem-solving
Engineering managers solve problems every day, and this skill is central to their job. Being able to solve problems enables these professionals to translate stakeholder requirements into finished products, mobilizing their teams in the best possible way and using resources efficiently to do so. Other professionals will also approach the manager with problems looking for support, so it’s an important aspect of leadership.
Communication
This job involves communicating with stakeholders, engineers, and external partners, and engineering managers must coordinate all three to achieve outcomes. As such, excellent verbal communication skills are essential. Engineering management also involves lots of documentation and admin, so report-writing skills are also required. Visual communication is also necessary for conveying information graphically and for interpreting diagrams, for example.
Delegation
Knowing how and when to delegate is an essential task for managers in all industries, as it ensures you complete tasks and meets deadlines. The delegation also leads to the professional development of your engineers, so it’s an excellent tool for leaders to use. Effective delegators can get more done in less time.
Leadership
Effective leaders are naturally better at getting people to cooperate and bringing the best out in people, which leads to better outcomes in engineering projects. This means knowing how to inspire people and how to provide feedback.
Good leaders can also get more from team meetings, build morale, instill a sense of purpose, and create feelings of community.
