Ingeniería Industrial

member forum

by jesse brogan

performance engineering for better education
Engineering is practical problem solving, and it is not limited to production areas. Take education, for example.Industrial engineers measure performance. Public schools now evaluate their efforts by comparing students to each other. Assuring that some students test higher than others serves no valid purpose. In ourpresent environment, education has no defined product to deliver that provides a basis for evaluating school performance, making modern education technically unmanageable. Organizations exist becausethey deliver value to those outside themselves. A public school success will be through delivery of value to the public. The public (composed of past and present parents) receives only the value thatgoes to parents of students. The performance purpose of the school is meeting the purpose of these parents, which generally is raising the next generation of effective citizens. We can defineperformance purpose. Parents of students have something to gain through the operation of the school, and they, acting as a group, naturally will represent the larger public. Any gathering of parents (as in aPTA) should be empowered to demand school performance. Our engineering application will support parents who give a performance evaluation to the school, to its administrators, and to those whodeliver value to parents. This will be in terms of a “grade” for the school and a grade for its principal officers and performance workers. Remember that value is determined by customers. Only what theparents receive can have value. Only what the parents value will have value to the public. The proper focus for operating a school is delivery of that value to parents. The grading is direct and obvious:• A: Parents receive what exceeds their needs for support in their raising of the next generation. • B: Parents receive what meets and fulfills their needs for support in their raising of the next...