AFL Technical Supervisor Training

This wiki will function as a repository for the long-form information needed for the position of an AFL Technical Supervisor. Alongside this wiki will be a Dozuki course with guides which explain some specific duties attributed to the position.

A Senior Lab Manager is accountable for the hourly operations of the Advanced Fabrication Lab as it pertains to job management and employee supervision over the course of a shift.

Some key responsibilities are as follows:

• Leading basic and advanced training of technicians
• Prioritizing and delegating tasks to technicians throughout the duration of their shift
• Transfer information across shifts such that pertinent knowledge about jobs or processes are not lost over the course of shift changes
• Supervising staff members to ensure the completion of work
• Demonstrating clear and respectful customer interaction in all forms (face-to-face, over the phone, or in the ticket system)
• Relaying shift changes to the Lab Coordinator

These are just some of the responsibilities that are common for a technical supervisor. While every situation inevitably cannot be documented, this wiki will outline many of the tools and techniques necessary to see to the successful completion of the job.

Technicians are critical to the basic operations and request fulfillment of the AFL. As the direct supervisorial staff TS' must utilize the techs to ensure the successful day-to-day operations of the lab.

Techs can be used to:

• Complete jobs on basic machines
• Answer/handle general helpdesk questions
• Clean up the lab space
• Perform tasks associated with lab improvement projects

Machine Specialists/Technical Coordinators can provide technical advice on the advanced machines which they oversee. Knowing which MS/TC to contact will be a key element to ensuring customer satisfaction. Additionally they can be valuable resources when helping an Tech decide which industrial track to pursue following their advanced training.

The AFL Lab Coordinator is your direct report and should be used to your advantage for knowledge about the space, training, processes and policies. As a TS you may be put into uncomfortable situations, if at any point you are unconfident in your decision making skills, come to the LC.

The AFL staff structure is similar to other Terrapin Works spaces and is outlined in this flow chart

Technical Supervisors are the first tier on the management track and directly oversee trainees and technicians in the space. TSs act as a bridge from the operations of the lab to the overall management done by the LCs. They additionally act as a gate keeper between the techs and the LCs so that issues are not always brought up to the LC level as there are only two of them compared to the ~6 TSs.

A key skill that must be developed to become an effective TS is task delegation. The ability to delegate will have a direct impact on the quantity and quality of the work performed and supervised by TS'.

The first step to becoming a good delegator is knowing your limits. You must remember you are a singular individual, with a limited quantity of knowledge, time, and experience. There has never been and most likely never will be a catch all employee within the AFL, meaning knowing how to do every little thing on every machine. TSs are expected to have a higher understanding of the space but certainly not the answers to everything. The trick to this problem is knowing where to find the answers.

Knowing staff member’s strengths and weaknesses will help an TS decide who should be given a task and where they might find the solution to a problem. For this reason, TSs should work to develop healthy relationships with the Techs and MS’s.

Task prioritization is pivotal to the productivity of staff members. A TS must be able to approach a situation and decide what must be done first. While a loose priority guideline might be:

1. handling customers
2. critical operations
3. maintenance
4. training
5. projects

This wiki certainly can’t cover all the possible situations that may be present in the AFL so it is up to the TSs to use their experience within the space to make efficient use of staff members time.

TSs are a bridge between the technicians and trainees and the LCs. As a part of this connection, TSs are responsible for ensuring that the schedule set by the LCs is being filled in real time and any changes are being relayed back to the LC. This does go both ways so the LC will be notifying the TSs through #mgmt-afl or #lab-afl as to when changes in the schedule are made.

One of the hardest tasks TSs must do is motivating staff members to do work. Most of the time this is relatively straight forward: techs come in, customers submit orders, techs process the orders. The trouble comes when there are limited amounts of apparent work. There will always be more work to do because we are constantly trying to improve our space and processes. There is a backlog of projects on Jira that can be started by most anyone they just need to have the initiative to do a bit of research.

As a part management, TSs will be expected to run weekly meetings on a rotating basis throughout the semester. These meetings are designed to be weekly check-ins and a time for announcements that pertain to that week. Any announcements that need to be made may get passed down from the LCs, but otherwise it will be up to the TS to lead through the meeting.

The TS will have to create a Jira story for the meeting in the Staff Meeting Epic, titling it by the date of the meeting. Then they must write an agenda which includes:

• Current happenings and announcements
• Critical project updates
• Time for comments/input on how to improve the lab
• Blockers discussion

TS' should make an effort to utilize activities or techniques which force audience engagement so that the meeting doesn’t feel like a waste of time to those attending.

The biggest role TS’s play in the growth of the organization is training the next generation of Technicians in the AFL. Tech training is broken up into two sections: basic and advanced.

The goal of basic training is to get trainees prepared to work in the space at the most basic level. Upon completion, trainees will be able to run most of the machines in the front space and will be able to communicate to customers as they walk in.

This section of training should be straight forward with all the information being readily available in the Dozuki guides. TS’s should have a strong understanding of all the content within basic training and should be able to answer most if not all of the questions that trainees may ask.

The goal of advanced training is to further develop a trainees understanding of the machines they’ve learned and the space they work in. Upon completion, trainees will be able to fully operate and maintain all the machines in the front space, talk about all the machines and activities within the space, and have a decision about what industrial track they want to pursue in the coming semester.

This section of training is certainly more complicated than the first and it will rely quite a bit on the teaching capabilities of the TS rather than their ability to help a trainee through a Dozuki guide. Between all the troubleshooting wikis, leading tours and understanding the industrial technologies, there are a lot of points at which an TS’s knowledge level will transfer directly onto a trainee.

Every Dozuki course has a deliverable which has actions that need to be taken or questions that need to be answered so that a trainee can demonstrate their knowledge comprehension. There is no answer key for these questions but every single question draws directly from the guides. If you are unsure about what the correct answer might be, check the guides.

The actual process of reviewing training in Dozuki is relatively easy. There is a guide which is part of the TS course which covers how to do this.

TS’s must serve as role models for other staff members when it comes to customer interaction.

Project management is primarily handled by the Lab Coordinators but may sometimes be handed off to a TS. The information within this next section is pulled from the LC Training Wiki, but is focused on managing projects and reviewing progress.

Briefly review the Jira Usage in the AFL Wiki, especially understanding the organization behind everything in the AFL project.

A critical aspect of project management is ensuring that progress is being made on a project in a reasonable time frame. The weekly staff meetings provide an excellent opportunity to check in on progress; however, effort may need to be taken at different points in the week to ensure that progress is being made, especially if the project is time sensitive.

TS' must also take action to resolve any blocks that may arise whether that be procurement or stagnated communication channels.

Any issue put into the “Ready for Review” status should be reviewed in less than one work week, in order to keep work flowing consistently.

Tips for reviewing content:

• Check comments to see if there is anything the assignee wants the review to focus on
• Make sure the assignee has linked the resources
• Check project against any standards of quality set for projects of that type, ex. Dozuki’s should comply with the Dozuki SOQ
• Make sure the project maintains consistency of language, imagery, etc. as appropriate
• Provide feedback on the project, either through annotated screenshots, or detailed comments in the Issue
• Log time spent reviewing the project to the issue
• Update the status of the issue as appropriate, and make sure the assignee continues work if work needs to be done

Reminders for completed projects:

• Only mark as “done” once ALL work is completed, including release, deployment, etc. as appropriate
• Be sure the completed issue has a descriptive and consistent title, like Dozuki guides should have an issue with their title somewhere in the name