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What makes your engineering department successful

7 REPLIES 7
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Message 1 of 8
rcmike
666 Views, 7 Replies

What makes your engineering department successful

We are looking at making some changes to our engineering staff/department as a whole. I am looking to see if anyone has any ideas to make a good engineering department great.

 

Thanks in advance for your ideas.

 

Mike

7 REPLIES 7
Message 2 of 8
pendean
in reply to: rcmike

Margarita machine always helps 🙂

 

What's wrong with the environment/department now?

Message 3 of 8
OMCUSNR
in reply to: rcmike

Uhh,

 

What kind of engineering?

Homebuilt box: I5-2500k, MSI P67A-GD65, 12gig DDR3 1600 ram, ASUS ENGTX460 Video card, WD Velociraptor WD4500HLHX HD, Win 7 64 pro.
Message 4 of 8
jggerth1
in reply to: rcmike

Turn the question around --  and ask what are the best ways to destroy/demotivate a groupd of engineers and tech people.

 

then do the opposite.

 

Why?  because it always easier to see what doesn't work, because failure creates problems that are much more visible than something sailing smoothly along.

Message 5 of 8
rcmike
in reply to: pendean

Margarita's would certainly be a great idea.

We have a decentralized engineering team. Each engineer reports to a different boss but still has a engineering team leader. It creates a conflict when the engineering team leader asks an engineer to do some work and then the other boss steps in and says no do this because it suits their needs instead of the needs of the company.

 

 

Thanks,

Mike

Message 6 of 8
rcmike
in reply to: OMCUSNR

We engineer displays for the retail industry.

Thanks,

Message 7 of 8
rcmike
in reply to: jggerth1

I understand what you are saying but my proposal actually changes the engineering team as a whole and pulls the team back together under one boss instead of multiple bosses leading in different directions causing problems. This is why I was asking what works best for your engineering team.

 

What type of model for an engineering team do you follow?

 

Thanks,

Mike

Message 8 of 8
Lance127
in reply to: rcmike

 

a Civil design shop) reported to a different engineer. Each engineer in turn reported to one of 8-9 different "vice-presidents". These engineering "teams" were also responsible for getting their own projects, this lead to multiple teams going after the same project on more than one occasion. It was horrible, with many decisions being made based on what was best for a single team than the company and there was very little cooperation in the company.

 

Now I work for a place that has a single engineering department, we have two supervisors, one is the actual head of the whole dept and the other is like a senior assistant. We each individually have specific areas of a project we “specialize” in to get something out the door. Though we can and do work on every conceivable part of a project if needed. The team work at this place is MUCH better and there is less stress involved in getting things done. For instance if we suddenly need to get a project done “RIGHT NOW” all of us jump in to help no problem. In the decentralized model that isn’t as easy and may even be counter productive.

 

tl;dr version

 

One centralized team is more condusive to a well oiled project.

 

Lance


Lance W.
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