Utilization and Process

If you had to be 80-90% billable could you do it? (BTDT)

I always find it fascinating to tap into prior experience, even if that prior experience was not necessarily the best. What is fascinating is mixing experiences and thinking about them. It is nice to have hindsight and perspective.

Take for instance the time it costs to write and/or respond to an e-mail. When I was tracking time, yes I counted e-mails and I counted them at 5 minutes a piece (reading, thinking, responding, review and send). When you consider that a similar question not sent via e-mail is most likely a minimum of a 15 minute conversation (well the time adds up) and that doesn't even include the interruption factor.

So is e-mail more cost effective or is the 15 minute face to face? As much as it is tempting to pick the 5 minute item it depends!

As with anything, professional judgement is a factor. If you really have 15 minutes of material that needs some great back and forth then a face to face might be much more efficient than 10 e-mails. Look at the math.

10 emails at 2 people at 5 minutes a piece = 1 Hour 40 Minutes

vs

1 face to face meeting between 2 people = 30 minutes (plus perhaps 5 for travel and 10 for coordination)

In this example the face to face wins.

On the other hand if every question tends to be face to face then you are significantly increasing interruption, breaking individual blocks of concentration time and burning up a lot of productivty cost. So there must be a balance.

Here is another interesting comparison. The time to actually do a timesheet. I cut my 20 year old teeth having to fill in a timesheet and kept one for the next 25 years. There were times when I was inefficient and ended up doing the timesheet at the end of the week and other years when I managed to enter time as it was used.

When doing technical support, it was easy to be on the phone, fill in the timesheet entry and save before hanging up and the analytics were extremely accurate. When I was multi-tasking and doing three things at once, keeping the timesheet current was a much bigger deal. It required carving out time to not only get those three tasks entered, remember the details of each and to actually enter them. I certainly spent more than one Sunday afternoon getting a timesheet completed.   

Ron Baker would argue that the model of the billable timesheet is torked, and he is correct. The value of any one persons time can very significantly. Take for instance the time the person took to become that expert or how fast they actually work.

On the other hand there is value in understanding where time is going and how to make better use of time used to meet business goals. This is not just about an individual's productivity, it is much more about process. Inefficient processes (or no process) creates rework, miscommunication, role confusion and more.