Optimizing Design Technician Productivity

Optimizing Design Technician Productivity

All Utilities are conscious of their need to design additions to their infrastructure in keeping with engineering standards; therefore, technical design work activities are a critical aspect of the end to-end fieldwork planning and scheduling process. The performance of Design Services teams is vital to both the planning process, costs, and efficiency.

At the same time, the Design Technician is dependent on being ‘set up’ properly by those upstream in the end-to-end process. At times, the Design Technician can get pulled back into support various tasks long after they have finished their core design work. In effect, some Design Technicians are pulled away from their core responsibilities by problems upstream or downstream. Therefore, this paper offers an optimized future state vision for a day-in-the-life of the Design Technician. This day-in-the-life perspective aligns with the optimal future state seen in complementary lines of business, such as utility Planning and Scheduling and, specifically, job Schedulers who work with Design Technicians the most.

A key driver in this day-the-life role description is that Design Technicians are seen as specialists who ought to focus on doing design work by minimizing time spent on activities that do not advance design work or are more effectively accomplished elsewhere.

Inescapable Aspects of Design Work

When we think about some of the inescapable aspects of design work that will forever influence what Design Technicians do daily, we suggest the following elements are relevant:

• With both customer and Utility program work, the Design Technician will often be the first person in the planning process with technical training to put eyes on the customer’s situation or the assets to be repaired or replaced as part of sustainability programs. On the customer side, the Design Technician will be the one to contemplate how best to do what the customer is looking for from a technical design perspective. On the program side, Design Technicians often start with a list of jobs to do a design around from Asset Management and will inevitably need to be aware of the possibility that the situation on the ground may differ from the data presented to them.
• Design Technicians will inevitably spend some of their time in the field and some of their time in the office. The implication is that they will only sometimes be able to be reached either because they are driving to do a field visit, or they are out of Wi-Fi and cell phone coverage. In addition, opportunities to reduce travel time by either bundling design work geographically or avoiding unnecessary trips are all valuable considerations in optimizing Design Technician productivity.
• Design Technicians will always have to manage multiple open design jobs. They will have several designs on the go at the same time. Some designs will be simple, perhaps not even requiring a field visit; some will be complicated and may have to be paused waiting for information to come from others. There will also be times when the Design Technician thinks they have finished a design, but a change is required as part of the approval process. The bottom line is that the design process will never be linear, and any attempt to schedule Design Technicians linearly will fail.
• While it is possible to calculate an average time to do a design, that average will be of limited value for scheduling. The inescapable reality is that some designs will be quick, some will take more time, and in some cases, the time required will only be known once the Design Technician has had an opportunity to scope out the situation.

These inescapable aspects of design work must be embraced in thinking about how Design Technicians do their job. For instance, building a Design Technician’s schedule based on an average design time may be easy for the Scheduler, but it does not provide value to the Design Technician.

If the focus is to make it possible for Design Technicians to focus on doing design work, the focus of support roles and business processes must be to reduce the administrative burden on the Design Technician. That means IT tools must also be configured to add value to the design work process.

IT Tool Configuration

The following inescapable characteristics related to systems are worth highlighting:

• Planning and scheduling tools are extremely valuable for the Design Technician, provided it is done correctly. From a systems perspective, that means that systems need to help the process of design work and not hinder it.
• The Planning and Scheduling group is obligated to ensure all customer requests and program requirements are being actioned somewhere by someone. They must be able to direct work to a Design Technician somewhere in the company. It will not work if Design Technicians are free to cherry-pick the work they like to do, as that will mean that some undesirable jobs wi