Tom Gilb and Kai Gilb's blog
Engineering Productivity: how to measure it and manage it – ten principles.
Published
by Tom Gilb
on Mon 25 of Dec, 2006
Many of our large multinational clients have thousands of product development and maintenance engineers employed. If they need more, they hire more. But sometimes you cannot hire enough. Increasing the productivity of the ones you already have is tempting. But how do you manage this? I am writing a paper on the subject and here is the first part. The full paper will be on this website when it is done.
Best wishes
Tom
Introduction:
There are often too few qualified engineers. I am mostly referring to product design engineers – software engineers and systems engineers. One reason we have too few is that we misuse their time so badly – we waste at least 50% of it. But when we can longer desire or afford to solve the problem by hiring or off-shoring to get more warm-bodies, we need to consider getting more productivity from the engineers we already have. There is one great advantage from that tactic – they already have plenty of experience in our company! There are several tactics to improve productivity. They can take many years to come to full effect, but a steady long term improvement, and dramatic short term improvement, should be possible. The key idea in this paper is that we can define our own productivity quantitatively – and manage the improvement of it quite systematically. Your own definition of productivity demands several simultaneous dimensions of productivity. The definition of productivity also requires substantial tailoring to your organization, and to its current environment.
The Engineering Productivity Principles:
Here are some basic suggestions for a framework for getting control over engineering productivity:
1. Productivity is our subjective opinion of what values we want to create for our critical stakeholders.
2. Productivity can be defined as a set of quantified and measurable variables.
3. Productivity can be developed through the individual competence and motivation, the way we organize people, and the tools we give them.
4. The initial attack on productivity improvement should be reduction of wasted effort
5. The next level of attack on productivity should be to improve the output of an organization that does not waste effort.
6. Productivity improvement can always be done: there are no known limits.
7. Increasing system performance costs far more than increasing volume of output.
8. Product attributes are viewed and valued quite differently even by members of the same stakeholder group.
9. You cannot be sure how well a productivity improvement strategy will work until you try it in practice
10. Yesterday’s winning productivity tactic may not continue to work as well forever.
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Best wishes
Tom
Introduction:
There are often too few qualified engineers. I am mostly referring to product design engineers – software engineers and systems engineers. One reason we have too few is that we misuse their time so badly – we waste at least 50% of it. But when we can longer desire or afford to solve the problem by hiring or off-shoring to get more warm-bodies, we need to consider getting more productivity from the engineers we already have. There is one great advantage from that tactic – they already have plenty of experience in our company! There are several tactics to improve productivity. They can take many years to come to full effect, but a steady long term improvement, and dramatic short term improvement, should be possible. The key idea in this paper is that we can define our own productivity quantitatively – and manage the improvement of it quite systematically. Your own definition of productivity demands several simultaneous dimensions of productivity. The definition of productivity also requires substantial tailoring to your organization, and to its current environment.
The Engineering Productivity Principles:
Here are some basic suggestions for a framework for getting control over engineering productivity:
1. Productivity is our subjective opinion of what values we want to create for our critical stakeholders.
2. Productivity can be defined as a set of quantified and measurable variables.
3. Productivity can be developed through the individual competence and motivation, the way we organize people, and the tools we give them.
4. The initial attack on productivity improvement should be reduction of wasted effort
5. The next level of attack on productivity should be to improve the output of an organization that does not waste effort.
6. Productivity improvement can always be done: there are no known limits.
7. Increasing system performance costs far more than increasing volume of output.
8. Product attributes are viewed and valued quite differently even by members of the same stakeholder group.
9. You cannot be sure how well a productivity improvement strategy will work until you try it in practice
10. Yesterday’s winning productivity tactic may not continue to work as well forever.
{SUBMITBLOG()}{SUBMITBLOG}
