Demonstrated ability to document engineering design tasks

In my current position as a consulting engineer, I have been involved in several engineering design projects and through these
am able to demonstrate my ability to document engineering design tasks.

The largest of these projects, which lasted for approximately one year, was in assessing the flood risk for Dam X. My employer
was engaged by the client to estimate the change in the probability that flood levels would be exceeded for locations of interest
upstream of the dam. I was responsible for preparing the proposal to undertake the study, carrying out the hydrological and
hydraulic modelling, performing the statistical analysis to assess the change in flood levels, and writing the report. For the
purposes of these selection criteria I will focus on the tasks I completed in documenting the engineering design task.

I prepared the proposal to undertake the study, which was accepted by the client. I discussed the client’s requirements
in a face-to-face meeting with the client. I also discussed the preparation of the proposal with my project manager at
my current employer.

This project involved several hundred runs of the MIKE-11 hydraulic model, involving combinations of initial water level,
inflow flood hydrographs and dam arrangement (pre- or post-implementation of the upgrade). Each run of the hydraulic model
took input from several input files describing the arrangement of the river network, structures on the network, hydraulic
roughness parameters, river cross-sections and inflow hydrographs at 31 locations. I developed and documented a systematic
procedure for naming the electronic files and directories that were used in each run of the MIKE-11 model. I developed a
register in a spreadsheet of the input files and output files produced by each of the model runs. I updated this spreadsheet each
time that I changed the input file, to ensure that current information was available on the hydraulic model that I had designed.
In accordance with my employer’s quality assurance system, I used the document control register at the front of the design
report to document changes that were made to each version of the report.
At the completion of running the hydraulic model I wrote a 95-page report on the work that I had performed, which
documented the hydrological and hydraulic modelling, the joint probability analysis, and the results. Our client suggested
some minor amendments to the text of the report and I incorporated these into the final version of the report that I issued. I
presented the results of the study in a meeting with our client and with consultants engaged by our client to undertake
consultation with the community upstream of the dam. The community was very accepting of the outcomes because the safety
of the dam was significantly improved by the upgrade and the increase in flood levels upstream was very small in all but
extremely rare floods.

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