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In an effort to meet the educational needs of the Southwestern United States, The University of Texas at Austin has evolved a multidisciplinary Energy Systems Engineering Program. While many of the basis elements of the traditional power program were retained, several new elements were also added to make the program more responsive to the needs of the electric power industry and other energy-related industries. The guidelines for this new program were developed jointly by representatives from both industry and academia. One of the primary goals of the program is to produce an end product who has a better understanding of both the electrical and mechanical concepts of energy engineering. As a direct result, faculty members from the Electrical, Mechanical and Civil Engineering Departments actively participate in the formal classroom portion of the program. The industry is kept actively involved through regularly scheduled seminars and research projects. Research is the second multidisciplinary component of this program. A wide variety of research projects are currently underway with regional representatives of the energy industry. The objectives of these research efforts vary from basic engineering research to applied engineering. In addition to the actual research efforts, their results are incorporated into the formal classroom portion of the program whereever possible.

This paper reports an experimental investigation of the “efficiency” of an engineering department by means of an internal audit. The audit employed a questionnaire circulated to all department members. While no quantitative measures of departmental efficiency were obtained by this technique, the qualitative results proved highly useful to the department manager. The methodology used has advantages which recommend it to other organizations.