A monthly people review for electronics and embedded systems companies: ten questions for the owner

An electronics owner usually knows the order book down to the last panel. The people side gets attention only when something breaks. A resignation lands halfway through a firmware release. A bad lot is traced to a joiner. An auditor asks a training question nobody can answer. A short monthly review pulls those surprises forward, and with an unchanging set of ten it fits inside an hour.

Fix the day, for example the morning after the month's last dispatch. Three people are enough: the owner, the plant head and the design or engineering lead. Whoever handles HR prepares the figures two days ahead. Each question traces back to a strain listed on our HR page for electronics firms.

1. Which board, firmware module or test program can now be handled by only one person?
2. Who resigned or left this month, and which line, bench or product did that leave thin?
3. How many new operators finished their first-week sheet, and how many left before day six?
4. Which board or station produced the most rework tickets or test rejects, and is a training gap behind it?
5. Which soldering, static, coating or jig sign-offs have lapsed, or fall due next month?
6. How many nights past eight did the lab or bring-up bench work, and when is the next customer release?
7. Which engineering or technician searches have stayed open longest, and what is holding each?
8. Which engineer or senior technician is most likely to take a call from a larger firm?
9. Was overtime spread fairly across shifts, lines and benches?
10. What new board, revision or customer arrives next month, and is the retraining booked?
For each: answer, one action, owner, date due.

• Questions 1 and 5: the skill grid and the module ownership sheet, scanned for single names and expired dates.
• Questions 2 and 3: the month's joiner and leaver list, with each joiner's first-week sheet.
• Question 4: rework tickets and functional test reject logs, grouped by board and station.
• Question 6: the lab's own late-work log, or gate and access-card times where no log exists.
• Question 7: the open requisition list with each opening date.
• Question 8: the design lead's judgement, informed by stay conversations held that month.
• Question 9: overtime by person, shift and line.
• Question 10: next month's sales and production plan, and any engineering change notes in progress.

When a question cannot be answered because no record exists, starting that record is the month's action. By the third sitting most of those gaps have closed.

• The bring-up logbook, showing which boards kept the lab late and what fault was being chased.
• Rework tickets coded by defect: tombstoning, bridging, head-in-pillow, lifted pads, reversed diodes.
• The wrist-strap tester log and dry-cabinet humidity readings, which reveal whether static and moisture habits slipped.
• BGA and fine-pitch rework sign-offs, with the date each person last did the task.
• Requisitions for firmware, RF or test engineers, each with its opening date and the last shortlisted name.
• Notes from talks with the two or three people the design lead worries about most.

Paper beats memory here. An owner who reads the rework codes will spot a joiner batch struggling with fine-pitch leads weeks before final test complains.

1. 1

   Open with last month's actions

   Read each one aloud and ask whether it is done. An unfinished action carries forward once, with a new date. A second carry-forward means the owner or the size of the action was wrong.

2. 2

   Take the questions in sequence

   About five minutes each. Anything that needs longer becomes an action for someone to bring back next month.

3. 3

   Write one action per question

   Only one. 'Put a second engineer onto the meter board's bootloader' is an action. 'Improve knowledge sharing' is a wish.

4. 4

   Close by reading the list back

   Every action, owner and date, read aloud. The page goes to all three attendees that afternoon.

The page is the record. Keep a year of them in one folder. Patterns appear across months that no single sitting shows, such as rework rising every time a new joiner batch starts, or bring-up evenings bunching before each customer's quarter end.

Single answers matter less than the overlaps. A name under question 1 that also appears under question 8 is the month's biggest exposure. A board under question 4 that matches a revision under question 10 points to retraining before the change, not after. A lapsed sign-off under question 5 on a shift that also carries the most overtime under question 9 suggests a tired, thin team.

• Design houses: the RTOS port, the bootloader handshake or the analogue front end that one engineer alone can modify.
• Bare-board plants: acid copper chemistry and etchant regeneration, known to one process engineer.
• SMT assembly: placement programs and feeder maps for the busiest board families.
• EMS floors: each brand's functional test fixture and its golden unit.
• IoT makers: device provisioning and the over-the-air release pipeline.
• Drive and controller works: burn-in judgement and legacy repairs on discontinued models.
• Finished-product lines: ultrasonic welder settings and hipot tester set-up.
• Sensor makers: the reference bench, deadweight tester and calibration certificates.

Whatever the unit, question 1 has the same purpose. It finds the task that stops when one person catches a fever.

Should HR chair it? No. HR prepares the figures and keeps the page, but the owner chairs, because several questions concern engineers, customers and releases, which are owner decisions. Can questions be added? Change at most one a quarter. A fixed list is what makes one month comparable with the next.

The review shows where to act; other work does the acting. A reporting set-up turns the preparation into a standing pack, so nobody rebuilds it by hand each month. For names under question 8, holding on to scarce electronics engineers covers what that talk should include. For the wider set of numbers, see the founder's six-report pack.