Engineering departments carry a load of work that is neither engineering nor creative: re-entry, lookups, sign-offs and double-checks added over years to guard against risk. This essay argues that the load is a systems failure, not a people failure; that it can be measured with a simple ratio, the return on time; and that removing it returns to engineers the value they were hired for.
Keywords: engineering creativity, return on time, process design, automation, the rising edge
1The work that isn't the work
Watch an engineer for a week and count what you see. Title blocks. Renamed files. The same part data typed into three systems. A revision chased down by email. A check that a rule could have made, made by hand. Waiting on the one person who knows where things are.
None of it is engineering. All of it is done by the most expensive creative people in the building. It doesn't appear on any report, so it doesn't get fixed. It appears instead as late releases, tired people, and a quiet agreement that this is just how engineering goes.1
2A pathology, not a personality
Most engineering processes weren't designed around how good work gets done. They grew around how mistakes got punished. Every error added a check; every check added a form; every form added a signature. Over time the process became a defense against risk rather than a way of producing anything.
The result is a company of directors with nobody to direct, and a workforce treated as the problem. The workforce is not the problem. The systems are. Remove the pathology, and put the work back in the hands of the people who actually do it.
Done right, the system runs itself. Take the vacation. The line keeps running.
3The rising edge
In a digital signal, the rising edge is the instant a line switches from off to on. Nothing in between. In a team, it is the instant people stop waiting and start creating. Most of the delay in engineering lives just before that edge: in the gap between deciding and doing.
4Measuring the return on time
Every company knows its return on investment. Very few know their return on time. It can be measured with one ratio:
ROT = hours returned ÷ hours invested
Above one, the change paid for itself. Below one, it didn't, and that result is published too. The method is deliberately plain, because a number nobody can check is a number nobody should believe.
| Study | Team | Work measured | Before | After | ROT | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Manufacturing engineering | Drawing release; part data entry | — | — | — | Starting |
Each study follows the same five steps (see Data): pick the work that repeats; time it the old way; change the system; time it again on the same kind of project; let the team sign the result.2
5For the people who run departments
An engineering leader is measured on output and rarely sees where the hours go. The return on time makes it visible, puts a number on it, and gives that number back as capacity: hours returned to the work the department exists for.
6Conclusion
Automate the tedious. Never the thinking. Engineers are artists, and every hour of busywork is a painting that never gets made. The task is not to manage engineers more closely. It is to return the value to them.
Notes
- No figures are given here for how much time this costs. They will be published from measured studies, not estimated. ↩
- Teams are named only with written permission. Results are published whether they are good or bad. ↩
About the author
Dane Ross has spent more than two decades inside production engineering, designing and building the machines, automation and processes that run production. He writes on engineering creativity and the return on time. Idea logical. Not ideological.
Ross, D. (2026). Return the value to the engineers. Notes on Engineering Creativity, 1(1).
In this volume
- No. 1Return the Value to the Engineers
- No. 2The One-Person Department (forthcoming)
- No. 3Automate the Tedious, Not the Thinking (forthcoming)
Dane lectures on all three. Lectures
Correspondence
Studies, lectures, and disagreement with the thesis are all welcome.