Cindy

"Let’s illustrate with another example. Our middle manager Cindy, the manufacturing process engineer whom we’ve met before, is responsible for maintaining and improving the process by which complex microchips are produced in a plant. She defines her environment as a collection of “objects” and “influences.” The “objects” are new processes and manufacturing tools that have not yet been tested in production. The “influences” are the people who can affect her work directly or indirectly. Development engineers, for example, would like her to require less experimentation and documentation before she chooses to implement new processes they have developed. Meanwhile, production engineers would like her to provide more experimentation and documentation on these same new processes. And finally, there are the product engineers eager to get chips out the door who need her help to do that, along with other members of the production team who put pressure on her to ensure that the new processes are manufacturable and the new manufacturing tools work as soon as they are put to use. Cindy herself works like a consultant, advising each group influencing her about whether something can go into production—the chief coordinator for the set of events required to put a product, a process, or a tool on stream. Her “customer” is the production area itself, and her “vendors” are the engineering groups from production, development, and product engineering. Analyzing her present status, Cindy found that the data and experimentation she needed from the development group always came in incomplete. Looking into matters further, she found that providing complete data and adhering to schedules were not really high on the development engineers’ set of priorities. Determining where she needed to go, it was clear to Cindy that she must have all future new processes and production machinery tested, debugged, demonstrated, and, most important, accompanied by the necessary data for them to be accepted and used by the production engineers, who had become more demanding because of past problems. Cindy then defined her strategy—her plan of action—to get there. She specified exactly what steps had to be completed before any new process was to be implemented or tool deployed. Then she used time offsets (remember the breakfast factory) to determine when each step needed to be done in order for her entire plan to be completed on time. Next, she got the manager of the development engineers to agree to her detailed schedule. She negotiated with him what she had to do and what they had to do—and by what date—in order to meet what became the mutually agreed-upon goals. Finally, to ensure that she stayed on track, she decided to monitor all of her “vendors” on a weekly basis. She would also publish their performance against the schedule to motivate them to meet key dates (an indicator) and to tell her about potential problems (a window in the black box)."

"Whenever a person becomes involved in coordination—something not part of his regular daily work—we encounter a subtle variation of dual reporting. Remember Cindy, the know-how manager responsible for maintaining and improving a specific manufacturing process? Cindy reports to a supervising engineer, who in turn reports to the engineering manager of the plant. In her daily work, Cindy keeps things going by manipulating the manufacturing equipment, watching the process monitors, and making adjustments when necessary. But Cindy has another job, too. She meets formally once a month with her counterparts from the other production plants to identify, discuss, and solve problems related to the process for which they are each responsible in their respective plants. This coordinating group also works to standardize procedures used at all plants. The work of Cindy’s group, and others like it, is supervised by another more senior group (called the Engineering Managers Council), which is made up of the engineering managers from all the plants. Cindy’s various reporting relationships can be found in the figure below. As we can see, as a process engineer in the production plant, where she spends 80 percent of her time, Cindy has a clear, crisp reporting arrangement to her supervising engineer, and through him, to the plant engineering manager. But as a member of the process coordinating group, she is also supervised by its chairman. So we see that Cindy’s name appears on two organization charts that serve two separate purposes—one to operate the production plant, the other to coordinate the efforts of various plants. Again we see dual reporting because Cindy has two supervisors. Cindy’s name appears on two organization charts—coordinating groups are a means for know-how managers to increase their leverage. Cindy’s two responsibilities won’t fit on a single organization chart. Instead, we have to think of the coordinating group as existing on a different chart, or on a different plane. This sounds complicated but really isn’t. If Cindy belonged to a church, she would be regarded a member of that organization as well as being part of Intel. Her supervisor there, as it were, would be the local pastor, who in turn is a member of the church hierarchy. No one would confuse these two roles: clearly operating on different planes, each has its own hierarchies, and that Cindy is a member of both groups at the same time would hardly trouble anyone. Cindy’s being part of a coordinating group is like her church membership. Our ability to use Cindy’s skill and know-how in two different capacities makes it possible for her to exert a much larger leverage at Intel. In her main job, her knowledge affects the work that takes place in one plant; in her second, through what she does in the process coordinating group, she can influence the work of all plants. So we see that the existence of such groups is a way for managers, especially know-how managers, to increase their…"