Before I was a projects director, I was a cost and design engineer. That ordering matters, because it shaped how I think about project economics ever since: not as a finance function bolted onto engineering, but as a discipline that has to be built into the design itself, from the earliest sketches.
Across a decade of turnkey infrastructure delivery — tank farms, depots, and aviation fuel facilities across four Nigerian regions — the projects that stayed within budget weren't the ones that found clever savings during construction. They were the ones where the cost discipline started during design, when the most consequential decisions were still cheap to change.
Cost decisions are cheapest before they're built
This sounds obvious stated plainly, but it's routinely ignored in practice. A change to tank layout, pipe routing, or material specification costs almost nothing on a drawing. The same change after steel has been ordered, or after foundations have been poured, can be the most expensive correction on the entire project.
The role of a cost engineer, properly done, isn't to audit spending after the fact. It's to sit close enough to design decisions, early enough, to flag the cost implications of a choice before it's locked in. On the projects where this worked well, cost engineering wasn't a separate phase — it ran alongside design as a continuous check, not a gate at the end.
The most expensive mistakes are rarely about materials
It's tempting to think of cost overruns as a function of material prices or currency exposure — and in Nigeria, those are real and significant factors. But in my experience, the costliest mistakes on a project are almost always rework: building something correctly to a specification that turns out to be wrong, then having to undo and redo it.
Rework costs more than the original work, because it includes the original work, the cost of removing or modifying it, and the schedule delay that ripples through everything scheduled afterward. A cost engineering approach that focuses purely on unit prices and misses the rework risk in a design is optimizing for the wrong variable.
What good cost engineering actually looks like on site
- Cost engineers embedded in design reviews, not just reviewing finished drawings after the fact.
- Procurement decisions cross-checked against constructability, not made on price alone — the cheapest component is not cost-effective if it complicates installation or maintenance later.
- A clear, honest contingency built into the estimate from the start, rather than discovered through overruns later. Pretending uncertainty doesn't exist doesn't make a project cheaper — it just moves the cost to a worse time to discover it.
- Regular reconciliation between what was estimated and what's actually being spent, frequent enough to catch drift early rather than at project close-out, when it's too late to correct.
Why this still shapes how I run Awimax
Founding an engineering company after a decade as a cost and design engineer, then a projects director, means this discipline isn't something I delegate and forget. It's built into how Awimax approaches every project from the first conversation with a client: cost is a design input, not an afterthought, and the cheapest time to manage it is always now, on the drawing, before anything has been poured, welded, or ordered.