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Efficiency Improvement

Recommendations to improve efficiency in the context of quality.

General

This document provides recommendations to improve company efficiency and so its quality. It is mostly written in the present time to prevent using constructs as “should have”, “must have”, “could have” or “should have had”. As the company grows the need for structure is apparent since a department does not exist out of a single person anymore. Information and request for information need to be shared among departments and cross company.

Areas of efficiency improvement:

  • Onboarding procedure for new hired staff.
  • Project management and access to project information by project members.
  • work-instruction provisioning for the company as for each department.
  • Communication cross department and cross company meetings, e-mail.
  • Document control as in traceability for each department as well as cross department.
  • Departmental Questions/RFI’s internal as external.
  • Securing important (operational) information and knowledge which is currently in the heads of the people which are with company the longest.

Communication

General

There are many types of communication each with advantages and disadvantages. Asynchronous communication prevents staff from shifting focus and being more efficient in what they do. Communication where decisions are made must be documented and so accessible by current or future members. Procedures on handling company communication is documented in a QA work-instruction.

Meetings

A meeting is verbal and thus synchronous communication where all participants need to be present at the same time. A meeting without a agenda is per definition a brainstorm session and therefore not efficient.
To make meetings efficient an agenda is mandatory and sets the boundaries about what is to be discussed. Minutes-of-meeting are mandatory so that decisions are well documented and available for all meeting and project members. The context of a meeting is always project. When external company meeting members are present they receive a copy of the MOM (PDF) as well.

E-mail

E-mail communication is only to exchange information externally and is never be a means to archive project information. The information is only available for the individual receiver. Project members can not access the information. In order to make the received information available for others the only important e-mails are saved as document is the designated folder in the project folder. Subjects are always prefixed with a project numbers to provide context and traceability. Other additional numbers for more context are advised.

MS-Teams Teams

Microsoft Teams 365 is a way to have discussions like a meeting but asynchronous which members can add comments or ask questions in several topic channels. Each channel name has project number to establish the channels context and boundary so that decisions made in the discussions are documented in the appropriate project directory and available for the project members.

Intranet / Wiki

Internal company website/wiki to make general company information easily available and searchable. The GitLab provided wiki does not provide the required features and is there for unsuited for this task. Software from MediaWiki provide open source software that is used by WikiPedia has all features like content indexing and version management. WikiPedia has proven itself through the years.

Ticketing Software Application

Questions are asked but not registered or documented most of the time. To efficiently handle questions in the company true ticketing software is required. Unlike question asked in e-mail a ticket keeps popping up until answered. The tickets/questions are assigned to a group of staff members (i.e. department) rather than to an individual staff member. This is to improve efficiency and tickets are handled even when a staff member is out of commission through sickness or a vacation for example. Tickets must be able to be postponed its due date into the future and not thus not visible in the current active list to promote efficiency in handling unresolved tickets. Tickets are linked to projects so that all unresolved tickets of a project can be listed to improve efficiency there as well. In short a ticketing system has the features:

  • Web portal
  • Assignment to staff member groups
  • Assignment to a project number
  • Assignment of a status (i.e. Open, Closed, Suspended)
  • Postponement of a ticket’s active/due date.
  • Filtering for active/due entries per project number.
  • Filtering for active/due entries for a member group
  • Filtering for active/due entries for an individual staff member.

This means that tickets are visible for all groups that the member is part of.

  • Search/filter into ticket texts.
  • Notification by e-mail to assigned group members when a new ticket is created with a link to the ticket in the ticket web application.

Project/Activity Management

General

Projects provide a context for all the work done in a company. Projects are used for registering worked hours and is a context for storing information in the form of documents. This requires a well documented directory structure on a fileserver. This is provided as QA work-instruction and is easy accessible to company staff (i.e. Intranet/Wiki).

Project Initiation Document

What Is A Project Initiation Document (PID)?

A Project Initiation Document defines the project scope, management, and overall success criteria that the team can go back to during the project. It contains the basic information of the project such as context, scope, team, and collaboration. It is equally important as an internal guide and for external stakeholders.

Why Is A Product Initiation Document Important?

A solid start to a project is key, no matter how small or large a project is. A Project Initiation Document helps guide the team early on – to a successful project start without creating too much extra work upfront. The PID can be a living document that the team can fall back on. It also provides a safeguard if there is a change in resourcing or new team members are brought on to the team and is an ideal starting point for ramp-up. The Project Initiation Document (PID) is the first basic step to ensure your project sets off on the right foot. It sets the tone, context, expectations, and constraints.

QA work-instructions

General

QA work-instructions for all departments are essential to improve efficiency. It provides staff the guidelines to operate within the department. QA work-instructions for the company as a whole is efficient. New staff members are up-to-date after reading it. work-instructions are easily available as a document or through the company’s intranet. work-instruction are living documents and changed when needed. The instructions are written in such a way that staff is referenced by function and not by name.

Company

The company has work-instructions on about everything that is regularly done or used. Topics dealt with in the work-instructions are:

  • Code of Conduct and Ethics (rules of how to behave at the workplace).
  • Dress code
  • Locking the building and setting the alarm (keys, procedure when alarm is tripped accidentally).
  • Coffee machine (simple maintenance, replenish beans and storage location).
  • Printer operation (refilling paper tray, paper storage location).
  • Ordering office supplies.
  • Working hours.
  • Lunch and break hours (times).
  • General responsibilities.
  • Reporting travel to HR (travel compensation, work at home days).
  • Availability of non-technical description of operational systems. (sales?)

Departments

Quality Assurance

The QA department has a work-instruction which deals with:

  • General document archiving and referencing (project, product, templates)
  • General e-mail (Subject references, signatures)

Software

The software department has a work-instruction which deals with:

  • Operating version control systems (Git, SVN, Branches).
  • Code (styling) conventions as also directory structure, file naming, doc-blocks (doxygen).
  • Securing passwords (individual, department)
  • Design specification documents (templates, references/versioning)

Embedded

The embedded department has a work-instruction which deals with:

  • Handling version control systems.
  • Code (styling) conventions as also directory structure, file naming, doc-blocks.
  • Securing passwords (individual, department)
  • Design specification documents (templates, references/versioning)
  • Document directory structure (traceability by reference)

System Administration

The system administration department has a work-instruction which deals with:

  • Operating Git and GitLab (Custom scripts)
  • Securing passwords (individual, departmental, who has them and where to find them)
  • Securing software licenses.

Assembly

The assembly department has a work-instruction which deals with:

  • Dress code (safety shoes).
  • Heavy lifting restrictions.
  • Work floor prescriptions and restrictions.

Sales

The sales department has a work-instruction which deals with:

  • Document archiving structure (project exception) for customer related correspondence. (i.e. Project named “General Customer Sales”).
  • Templates for sales activities and when to use and where to find them in the customer archive structure.
  • Procedure for handling existing and new customers. (AFAS and fileserver)

Logistics

The logistics department has a work-instruction which deals with:

  • Handling new suppliers in the ERP software.