SI Engineering/Operations Management Survey

Engineer/Operations Management is at the heart of every system integration organization. From its inception, an SI must harness the appropriate resources and develop the necessary processes to consistently deliver projects that meet customer requirements and expectations. Engineering and operations managers must juggle priorities from balancing workloads, investing in R&D, and ensuring quality within budget constraints and project deadlines. Often, it’s part science; part art. Given the importance of this role, Exotek is conducting this short survey to gain insights about engineering/operations management in our industry.

Our major takeaways thusfar include:

• Responsibilities – The most common response (88%) is ‘Improving systems and processes’ so managers recognize the importance of developing good project methodology and tools. Not surprisingly, allocating resources (76%) and monitoring project budgets (71%) are also a common responsibility. We also found it interesting that ‘customer service’ is also commonly owned by engineering management and not relegated to another group. Finally, we also saw mentions of ‘sales’ and ‘safety’ as unsolicited responses.
• Goals –  The overwhelming goal is ‘collective project success’ getting 4x the responses of lesser goals such as project methodology consistency and employee development. We noted that project success didn’t necessarily equate to profitability, but rather included other factors, namely customer satisfaction.
• Challenges – The responses regarding challenges are more evenly dispersed with ‘People’ garnishing the most attention. Comments included the need to recruit and retain engineering talent, but also employee development and identifying/nurturing leaders. We’ve also heard in our peer groups that on-boarding and mentoring young engineers has become more challenging in our largely remote work environments during the pandemic.

If you haven’t completed the survey, we would appreciate you doing so. It will only take a couple minutes for you to complete.  We will use your responses for research purposes only and report results in aggregate. We will make the collective results available, but individual responses will be kept confidential.

As a thank you to participants, we have already awarded 5 participants an Amazon gift card and recommended The Manager’s Path – A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change.