Creative Engineering Reviews

Great advice! KPI: Still not there on KPI's. Very hard to implement without it feeling like a sweatshop. I'm open to ideas! DIRECTION: Providing explicit direction is always a goal and always a challenge. I have recognized that it is human nature to overestimate how much other people know and understand, and I try to compensate for that. It's not a solved problem. DELEGATION: I'd like to think we are doing that a lot more now. WORKING ON THE BIZ INSTEAD OF IN THE BIZ: At our small size this can be a challenge, and also I love doing the engineering and prototyping. But I hear you and understand that it is critical to our success. Not sure I'm at 50% but this is very much on my mind. PROJECT REVIEWS: Years ago we started doing two "lunch reviews" a week where the company buys lunch and we spend an hour learning about something or going over projects. During covid, we added three more 9:00 AM meetings. So five days a week we do a standup and have an hour blocked out for project discussions or whatever else would be a good use of time. We don't always use it fully, but we always meet. BI-ANNUAL PERFORMANCE REVIEWS: Within the last two years I fixed this by telling my operations stakeholders that I will participate in any system they set up, but I can't be counted on to be the one to make it happen. So they did it, and now we have them. I guess that goes in the "delegation" bucket too! WEEKLY BIZ MEETING: We go over all the sales leads and open projects every Tuesday in a meeting that usually takes 30 min, but can go to 1 hour. We talk about what is stagnating, next steps, what should be billed etc. We've had a version of this meeting for years, but it is now much more efficient. And I don't run it!