Engineer Productivity - the impossible dream - Summary

Steve Downton, Downton Service Management Consultants Ltd, Noventum Group

A report released by Gartner's recruitment specialist, people says that IT staff will be expected to work 50% harder by 2005 as technology lifecycles speed up and companies struggle to fill gaps. With this will come the need for employers to look closely at staff retention as demand exceeds supply. This issue is already coming to a head judging by a recent article in the publication, "Computing", which reports on the conflict produced within a major company in the service industry in their drive for engineering productivity.

The need to optimise the productivity of service engineers while providing motivational work and a structured career path will become increasingly harder and demand much more management attention. Productivity from service engineers is one of those intangibles that many service organisations struggle to quantify with any accuracy. What is the most satisfactory measure - visits per day, customer satisfaction, profitable customers? The problem in the past has been that the decision as to which measure to use has been decided by reference to what could be measured, as opposed to what should be measured and what the best measure might be.

As a result when the existing measures fail in the purpose for which they were established they become viewed as unfair measures and act as de-motivators for staff and can cause much unrest and can result in losing the staff you want to and need to keep.

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