Let me tell you about Johnny, Johnny is not his real name, but it is the name he asked me to use when I said I’d write this up. Johnny is someone I don’t know but met by happenchance and ended up having one of those conversations you can only have with strangers. Johnny had gotten a BA in English Language and Literature when he was 21 and then at 30 had done an MA in Philosophy and Literature. This might seem quite a progression, but it is even more than it seems. His thesis for his BA was on American political poetry and Bob Dylan and his MA on Bergson, Einstein and time. After graduating Johnny spent a year looking for a job he ‘didn’t have to care about’ and then, after 3/4s of the year of frustration, had two interviews for the NHS. He then received a phone call saying that he didn’t get the job but, instead, the AD had created a brand-new apprenticeship for him. So, at 32, Johnny became an apprentice, not in anything linked to his degrees, in business analysis. It might seem that with his analytical mind, as shown from his degrees, that he would be well suited to it but still it does seem rather odd. Johnny told me that upon arriving, on his first day, he was to he had to be the ‘saviour’ for the small team of BAs. They were constantly overworked (capacitated) and couldn’t work out why. Johnny told me that upon an initial inspection he noted that they had three system designed to track their work but that none of the systems worked or could ever work. Thinking about this, Johnny said, he devised ‘a new concept’ in thinking about the time for projects. That is Direct and Indirect time. Johnny said that, for example, he saw that his boss had 60 hours of work scheduled for the next two months and, working full time, his boss would have 300 hours to do 60 hours of work, and yet was still over worked. How could this be? Johnny thought about it and checked the means of tracking the work and realised that they did not work because the data that was being inputted was incorrect. When raising this with his boss, she replied ‘you have to see the big picture’ to which Johnny replied that all big pictures were created by meticulous detail to each individual brush stroke.
Later, when thinking about it, Johnny said that he had realised what had been the problem. The time spent on the project, consultations, meetings, paperwork, presentations, charts etc equated to the 60 hours but how much time was being spent on the project that was not being accounted for, that is indirectly. What did he mean by this? Well, knocking on a door to say, ‘have you heard back?’ can take between 5-15 minutes depending how far away the office is and how long you chit chat and if the person is busy when you arrive. Say this happens four times in a day, you have already spent up to another hour working on the project, not on a set stage but rather indirectly in preparing the next stage. Add this up over a month and the 60 direct estimated hours could find themselves accompanied by another 20-100 hours (very rough estimate) of time spent indirectly working on the project. Factor in the daily functions and soon your 300 hours to do 60 hours work starts to look very short. Add a couple more projects, holiday and illness and you will be way over your allocated hours/time.
I asked Johnny how this could be solved and he just smiled and said, ‘if you write it down in a column in a notebook (heading indirect time: 5 mins) then you can get a clear picture of how the time is spent and the data you input will be more accurate giving better results and thus solving the problem or, at least, making it clear’. He said he had taken this to his boss, as they had devised the systems, but as they didn’t want to note down what they actually did they were unwilling to humour his suggestion. Johnny had asked her, as this was what she had to do for other people- analyse their business and show them how to make it better- why, if it was what others should do, why did she feel exempt from it? He said that she had been evasive in the answer and then continued as before. Johnny said that as he had left work that day (full disclosure: we met at a bus stop waiting for a late bus) his boss had been digging out an old model she had had to calculate time which, she had said, didn’t work so she was going to use it again. With that the bus arrived and the social awkwardness which had brought about the conversation ended as we made sure we sat as far apart as possible on the bus.
‘till next time
thegreaterfool2016 