Teorías sobre la satisfacción laboral

Ultimately, Enexis wants to work towards more uniform processes within the organization. This re- search is carried out for the E&P department with Transport North (located in Zwolle), but there is another E&P department for Transport South (located in Weert, from now on will be referred to as ‘South’, or TP-Z), which carries out the same type of projects in the Southern part of the Netherlands. This department is mainly similar to TP-N, and deals with the same type of problems.

This section will give some details about the situation at TP-Z. In order to compare some of the re- sults found for the E&P department in North, the departments will receive a short comparison, in order to see where they might learn from each other.

Brainstorm session

To tackle some of the problems E&P South was dealing with, they organized a brainstorm session. An important statement that was the starting point for the brainstorm session carried out at TP-Z is that “the common factor in the systems we have built over the years, is that they are built in order to show the data that is missing, or untraceable to us in the SAP system. It would be better to adapt the SAP system, but this is not possible at this point in time. It is something that needs to be addressed in the future, we will focus on the quick wins we can make for now” (Transport Zuid, 2013).

Important outcomes, or actions that resulted from the brainstorm session that connect to the find- ings in this report, are:

• The project engineers/budget holders will be made responsible for the prognoses for their part of the project

• Formalizing the project process, including roles and responsibilities.

• Make everyone in the organization aware of the importance of finances for projects (cost aware- ness)

Problems with the current systems in use, also show resemblance to the problems that E&P North runs into:

• Risks are not taken into account in the VoCa

• The SAP-system is complex, and not user-friendly

From these problems and outcomes, it is already clear that Transport South is dealing with compara- ble problems: responsibilities are not clearly defined, and the systems are not user-friendly.

Differences

In this section, some differences in the way of working between North and South are discussed. It must be noted, that E&P South was only superficially reviewed, on main issues. No extensive inter- views are carried out to dive into the problems for this department.

The project engineer

One important difference between North and South is the role of the project engineer. At transport South they are also called ‘budget holders’, a name implying more responsibility. There is a budget holder for Primary, Secondary and Construction. Although the name implies more responsibility, the same problems arise as in North: while the project engineer may be responsible, he is not held ac- countable, so the role should be formalized better over here as well (which is also an outcome of the brainstorm session). Another factor, which is different concerning the project engineers in North, is that the project engineers in South also incorporate the budget for activities in the construction phase of the project into the VoCa for their discipline. The overall budget is still the responsibility of the project manager, but project engineers calculate their part of the budget in consultation with the technical specialists. This makes sense, since one of the outcomes at E&P North was also that O&S is too much dependent on the engineering work to be solely held accountable for their calculations. This structure may therefore also be something to consider for the projects at E&P North.

The SPT

At TP-Z there is no Small Project Team for projects. There is no role like ‘senior project engineer’, but the way a VoCa is calculated is mainly the same: a specific engineer for each discipline (Prima- ry/Secondary/Construction) is delegated to the project, and technical specialists for both disciplines of O&S are delegated to the project as well. The group of people making the VoCa and project plan is therefore very similar to the SPT, except for the fact that there is no senior project engineer specifi- cally responsible for reviewing projects. The project engineers estimate the largest part: all materials for the project, and the hours needed for engineering. Technical specialists also estimate the hours they need based on the project plan, and the project engineers take them into account. The way of working is therefore relatively comparable.

Evaluating project personnel

As opposed to E&P North, in South engineers are also evaluated by the project manager for the work they do in projects. As the project manager in South explains: “we fill out an evaluation form, rather ‘cold’ in fact, but based on the form we plan an appointment with the engineer to discuss the evalu- ation shortly. I try to explain positive as well as negative points. If the engineer does not agree with me, I also make notes about his point of view. I send the filled out form to the engineer himself, as well as his team manager. I think it is an improvement of the way we did it before, because now I don’t just complain to his team manager, but first discuss problems with the engineer himself”. This difference may be of some importance, for it deals with the friction between the functional and the project organization.

VoCa

E&P South uses standard values for their estimates. Standard VoCa’s are used for all projects, and are basically a checklist of activities that are/are not included in the project: if every activity is reviewed on being included in the project or not, the estimated costs for the project are somewhat ‘automati- cally’ derived from that checklist. This does mean that complete costs for a project may derive more from the initiate estimate. Overall, the sum of these deviations should stay around a mean of zero. This is different from the approach at E&P North, where estimates are usually rather custom-made, but therefore also generally a more exact estimate.

Prognoses and reporting

In forecasting complete costs, the same problems occur as with E&P North. The SAP system is also not structured with defined activities, and it is not possible to attribute owners to those activities, or determine who can or cannot book costs to those activities. Just like at E&P North, most project managers never had a course in how to use SAP. For reporting and forecasting, E&P South has re- cently started using a new budget reporting tool, that they are very happy with. It is more detailed, in terms of costs and working hours than it was before. The budget report should eventually also visual- ize the information in tables and S-curves, providing a direct overview of project status.

The problem of persons booking costs on the project that are not allowed to do so, or that book costs to the wrong activity codes is also encountered at E&P South. Problems concerning prognoses and reporting are therefore also assigned mainly to non-user-friendly tools, that do not support or fit the work done on projects well enough.

Use of this information

The process of projects is overall largely the same for E&P North and South (as far as this can be con- cluded on such a short analysis). The differences mentioned in this section, are those differences that may have implications for this report. They are used in the discussion of the results, and for the pur- pose of finding suitable solutions for the future.