>My General Manager for the manufacturing plant I work in has determined that everyone needs to rpesent to him Key Performance Indicators. I didn't give him anything in writing and am not really sure what to do.
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>I don't only do programming. I also make sure that all systems continue to function, that hardware functions, that hardware is repaired, that data is repaired when there are glitches, printers repaired, scanners, etc. I am literally on the run all day long; all of a sudden, after this GM starts working here I am not doing enough and he loads up a bunch more programs he wants for various departments. I am glad to do them, but he has no concept of how long some things will take and expects me to continue to do all things even though my workload has increased tremendously.
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>Everyone continually comes to me and wants to be number one on the list of priorities for their program, or hardware fix, etc. Because they cannot all be number one for their particular project, they get angry and complain to the boss about it. I am the only Visual FoxPro progammer in this entire plant of around 200+ people and can only do so much per day; even if I stay later, only so much can get done.
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>Has anyone ever experienced this? Does anyone have any idea what I can say back to him as far as the Key Performance Indicators?

Sounds like you've got a few different things happening here:

- new GM (do you report directly to him?)
- increased workload
- on top of this increased workload, a new requirement to provide KPI

I suspect that, by "KPI", your GM actually wants periodic (daily, weekly etc.) reports on what you're doing e.g.

- number of new trouble tickets received
- number of trouble tickets cleared
- work performed on ongoing projects

If you're extremely busy fighting fires, gathering this sort of information may be a significant chore. But, in your circumstance it may actually be your best friend. If you have detailed time sheets this provides hard evidence you're swamped and can't accept more work.

One very important concept that all managers should know is how to balance responsibility and authority. Any good manager knows that if you give someone responsibility to do something, you also have to give them sufficient authority to get the job done. One common way to give more authority is to increase a budget, so the subordinate can hire an assistant, outside consultants etc. as required.

It sounds as though there is lots of work to be done but, to be honest, you may be a bit of a bottleneck because you're only one person and there aren't enough hours in the day. If you have timesheets, KPIs or other hard evidence you can take this as an opportunity and ask your GM to hire you an assistant; you get to increase your skill set, maybe your salary too and more work gets done - everyone is happy. However, you may need to overcome any tendency to be a relatively unfettered "lone guru" to be able to grow into this.

Over the years I've seen wildly varying figures for ratios of support staff to computer users, but as a very general rule of thumb you can estimate 1 full time support person per 15 to 30 computer users. Of course, if you're also implementing new Fox or other projects in addition to support your FTE may be only partly support. Maybe this can give you some idea of how loaded you are compared to industry in general.