Small Project Setup

Question

I am curious how your organization handles project setup in InEight for those small projects - i.e. call outs, warranty work, small scopes, etc. Do you go through the entire setup process? Do you keep the same CBS hierarchy minimum structure?

Tim.Mowery · Accepted Answer

Honestly, I hesitate to say we have a "standard" approach, but after 17 years here, I can confidently say—it depends! For smaller projects like call-outs, warranty work, or limited-scope efforts, our setup process is typically driven by the level of risk involved.

We usually begin with a task-based structure. Since we're an engineering firm, that often means aligning tasks with labor categories—either rate sheet-based or using a markup multiplier tied to specific roles. It’s a simplified setup at first, but we allow it to evolve. If the scope starts to drift or change orders come into play, we expand the structure accordingly—very similar to how we manage change control.

All of this is managed in our Oracle Cloud, where we create and pass charge numbers over to the project. And like many engineering firms, we’re known for overthinking things—so yes, sometimes we make it more complex than it needs to be!

😂

samehtalat · Accepted Answer

For small projects, we typically manage them at a single level within the CBS. For example, if we have 100 small projects, we create one consolidated project in InEight and treat each individual project as a line item, sometimes up to five lines items per project, resulting in approximately 500 items. We also leverage the Explorer module to report these projects either collectively as a single bucket or individually. This flexibility is one of the key strengths of the Explorer module