Crew Evaluation

Crew Evaluation, what is it? According to Webster, “crew” means a group of people working together, and “evaluation” means to find the value or amount of. By putting the two together, it now becomes, the value of a group of working people. In the line clearing industry, this is commonly achieved by taking the time spent trimming trees and dividing it by the number of trees trimmed, which gives us man-hours per tree trimmed. It is this figure and term that are commonly used to express the value of the crew.

But is this crew evaluation? Yes, if the contributions of management and supervision were factored out in figuring the value of the crew’s contribution to the end product of trees trimmed.

To find crew evaluation, the system used should measure factors governed by the crew in determining their value toward the product, while excluding factors contributed to the product by other parts of the organization. If this is not accomplished by some means, the value expressed for the crew is some type of organizational evaluation expressed as the value obtained from one of the organizational components.

It was for this reason a system called CPPE was created to evaluate crews. It stands for Crew Performance Productivity and Effectiveness. In creating the system, it was necessary to identify the crew’s work activities and code them for easy recording, and establish some standard time periods to complete certain types of work.

Some of the work activities and standard time periods used in the system are as follows:

With these codes, the crew is then instructed to report on a job ticket the work activities they engaged in and the time they spent doing them.

This would show up on job tickets as illustrated in Fig. 1 and Fig. 2. From these job tickets it is now possible to compute the value of a crew and compare their value to other crews and gain some insight on how other parts of the organization may be helping or hindering the crew.

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Figure 1.

Crew No. 1. job ticket

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Figure 2.

Crew No. 2. job ticket4) It can show areas where other parts of the organization may be contributing to the crew’s effectiveness or lack of it.

Before we do this, let’s first compute their value under the man-hour per tree trimmed method.

Without standard times, the only thing possible is to compare one crew against the other, and what are you comparing? What do you do if you have only one crew? In addition, this situation leaves us explaining the difference by reason that one crew’s trees may be larger, travel time greater, or maybe it had something to do with secondary or primary lines. All or one of the reasons may be true but should not be relied upon unless then can be verified by some means.

By using the CPPE system these reasons are verified by breaking down the time spent on the various work activities in three areas — work-related time, line activity hours, and standard times for units. Let’s look at this more closely.

These figures are then used to find:

1. Crew performance

   Performance = a measure of the amount of work produced while on the iob.

2. Crew productivity

   Performance = a measure of the amount of work produced while on the job.

3. Crew effectiveness

   Effectiveness = a measure of work produced as related to the time available for working.

• © 1983, International Society of Arboriculture. All rights reserved.