Meandering Mind - Eva Dillner [21]
Participative management
Increased engineering staff productivity 10% by developing new planning model for prioritizing and assigning projects.
When I took over as engineering supervisor for the Paper Mill Engineering group we had about 120 projects on the wish list and six engineers to do all the work. We were responsible for both maintenance and capital projects so the scope of the 120 projects varied considerably, from a simple calculation or minor rerouting of piping to mini-rebuilds of the paper machines.
The projects would come to us as engineering requests, submitted by the production or maintenance departments. When I took over, there wasn't a system in place to effectively deal with long versus short term priorities or a way to decide which project should got done first. We were often in “fire fighting” mode, responding to the urgency of the day. Needless to say, the engineers got jerked around and seldom had the peace to focus on the long-range money making improvement projects.
It became clear to me we needed to do something. I suppose I had an advantage in that I was promoted from the group I was supervising. I knew the work well and all the players involved. They knew my capabilities and I had their respect.
I started chatting with the production and maintenance guys who were our customers. I explored with them the idea of designing some priority system so we could be more effective, where they would have a clearer idea of what projects we were actually working on. They were open to the idea of discussing it.
Good, step one, the customers are at least willing to listen to ideas. Without their buy-in it would have been senseless to do what I did next. I sat my engineers down and solicited their thoughts and feelings. Not surprisingly, they needed to ventilate their frustrations with the current system. The biggest gripe was too many projects assigned and not a clear priority when the urgency of the week appeared.
I asked them what a reasonable project load would be. How many projects were manageable at one time? As we talked back and forth and they pondered this type and that type and allowing for all the phases of a project they gradually came to the consensus that six projects was a reasonable load. If I were to do this today, I would probe for individual differences, someone may do well to carry more, others less or be suitable for particular types of jobs. But hey, it was my first experience as a supervisor. First woman ever in the job to boot.
The other problem we had, with recurring fire fighting issues, got resolved with the help of the maintenance planning engineer and supervisor. The three of us attended the production meetings and were the ones who internally had to sort out how to handle the latest emergency. We came up with a plan to first of all keep track of the fire fighting projects. We then agreed that those that recurred we would assign as projects to be stayed on and kept at until solved at their core. So many recurring problems are never solved at their core. Until they are, they just keep popping back up, like a jack-in-the-box, over and over. Countless hours are wasted chasing your tail. Usually, some other urgent business comes up, this one isn't acting up at the moment, so it is dropped, the engineer is sent off on another goose chase until it crops back up again. A never ending merry-go-round.
So we resolved to keep someone on it until the root problem was solved. We also agreed that when asked to pick up another hot item