Fundamental Principal of Engineering

From Zanecorpwiki

div class=blockquote Engineering is the process of taking a set of constraints, along with a valuation system, then designing a solution which meets all constraints, minimizes cons, and maximizes pros to achieve the greatest net value according to the given valuation. /div

I'm not really trying to quote myself, I just want to set off the principal itself. ;)

The real key to engineering, and to my mind this is the thing that is so often missed, is that engineering cannot and should not attempt to eliminate cons. This is the thing that project managers, sales people, and especially engineers themselves need to realize: when you make eliminate this con a constraint on the system, you almost always diminish the net value of the result.

An anecdote: A friend of mine is a high level trouble-shooter at a company that sells support. When he first started working there was a group of people that answered the phones, identified the problem, and then queued the call for an engineer, sales person, or trainer. Calls for engineers and trainers were the most frequent, but customer's didn't really know or care about the roles within a company and just wanted someone that could make their problem go away. The first line phone people were never this person, so the customers were often frustrated that they couldn't talk to an engineer right away. This was the con in system.

Managers, being what they are, decided that this was a problem to be fixed so they decreed that engineers would henceforth staff the phones themselves, taking shifts to do so. This system had it's own problems. First, a good portion of the calls weren't for engineers at all, but should go to trainers. However, by having an expert who emcould/em help answer the phone, it effectively tied that person to the problem. Second, the engineer couldn't spend any time on hard problems because they knew the phone could ring at any moment so a large portion of their time was now spent waiting on the phone to ring.

So now you have a situation where trainers are being underutilized and the phone receptionists (who were not let go, BTW) are doing nothing. The most expensive and capable resource is now guaranteed to spend 20-40% of their time every month doing low level, low value work that someone else could and should be doing. Even worse, you now have slower turnaround times because the engineers--who were already at capacity--now don't have enough time to do their actual job--and in fact, cases now pile up faster than they were answered.

Engineering (and rationality) says that that the original arrangement was better. Customer's complained, but the effect/cost of the complaints was relatively small compared to cost of the solution which was implemented to fix the problem. The original problem should have been addressed with a better script, training the phone people, or simply accepting the complaints as part of the process.