Nuts & Volts - July 2005

In The Trenches

players. Nor is the coach expected to play on the field. A good coach shapes the team to make the best use of the individual strengths of the players. Athletes — like engineers — want to perform to their best.

Management Suggestions

First and foremost, listen to what your engineers say. In all probability, they are smarter than you. They are certainly able to appreciate the technical situation better. If they are not considering some political or administrative factor, tell them so. Give them the opportunity to consider it and respond. There’s a good chance that they can provide a usable compromise solution. Don’t simply dismiss them with, “You don’t understand the situation.”

Take the time to make them understand. That’s part of your job (making your personnel more effective).

Engineers dislike meetings and consider them a waste of valuable time. Most often, they’re right. Consider this: a one-hour meeting with eight engineers consumes one man-day of engineering time.

On the other hand, suppose you walked around to each engineer and got a personal progress report. At five minutes per engineer, that’s less than one man-hour of engineering time. You increase efficiency, make your engineers happy, and gain their respect. What’s wrong with that? It still takes you an hour with either method. So, unless there is a real need for a meeting, don’t call one.

Allow the engineers to solve resource allocation (or other departmental problems) by themselves. It

often happens that some major piece of equipment is needed by multiple people. If you set the rules, you will be required to settle each and every dispute about equipment use, forever. Is this what you really want?

Instead say something like, “I expect you to be able to share the machine. And I will not take your inability to get machine time as an excuse for being late. If you can’t share, I’ll set an arbitrary schedule nobody will like.” A little psychology can go a long way.

Critical Details

I often say that engineering is common sense with attention to detail. With the most important thing being the details. This is because the details are absolutely critical to the success of the design. Countless catastrophic events have

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