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Project Controls Engineer vs Planning Engineer

3 replies [Last post]
Salman Ahmed
User offline. Last seen 13 years 40 weeks ago. Offline
Joined: 2 Mar 2010
Posts: 54
Hi all,

Is there any difference in roles and responsibilities between a Project Controls Engineer and a Planning Engineer.

Replies

Ahmed Abdelrhman
User offline. Last seen 7 years 1 day ago. Offline
Joined: 14 Jan 2017
Posts: 3
Groups: None
Hi all, There're two points to ask First project control engineer can be planning engineer or not Second salary ranges and as a career path which is better
Wilfredo Barbacena
User offline. Last seen 8 years 6 weeks ago. Offline
Joined: 13 May 2009
Posts: 30

Hi Salman,

It all depends on how big the company's organization and project, in smaller company they tend to combine the roles interactively from planning to control while in bigger one's thay have a department for project control and planning department.

During my stint in Nigeria with offshore/subsea engineering and fabrication work we have a planning department which tends to cover from tender to monitoring the project status as based on the plan or baseline schedules and alerts or notify the team if there is any slippage or anything that can delay the schedule. While the project control tends to lean more on cost, i.e. resources, equipment, tools, materials, production productivity, and etc. and the two works closely with contracts, estimating, engineering, accounts, and operation group.

Regards,

WSB

Samer Zawaydeh
User offline. Last seen 5 years 2 weeks ago. Offline
Joined: 3 Aug 2008
Posts: 1664
Dear Salman,

For small projects, usually people do more than one role, hence their might not be ANY difference.

On big projects, you have a lot of work to do, and one person can not do all the work. Hence, the work is divided between people and they have different titles.

Planning is done primarily at the stage before the Schedule is made. So if you are a Planning Engineer, you will spend time trying to form the plan to complete the project. Ultimately, making sure that the WBS contains all the information in the Contract Documents necessary to complete the deliverables.

Project Controls Engineer is in Charge of the Monitory and Control of the project at different levels. Starting from the Crew, Supervisor, Engineers, Project Manager, Upper Managment, Administration and Finance. At each stage you need to be able to have an input and output format to be able to control the process that each station is contributing to the overall success of the project.

With kind regards,

Samer