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April 13, 2005
Quantifying Work
I received an interesting email last week that prompted a much more detailed response than was probably anticipated. It is a complex question asked, though, and I will share it and my response with you (obfuscating certain details, of course).
To: Noel
Subject: questionI am working on the overhead calculations for the firm and need to know the amount of your time that you spend working for the other offices. For some of the other IT staff, we use 75% Magrethea, 15% Orion and 10% Betelgeuse. Would you all say this is accurate for yourself? If not, let me know how you would break out your time. Thanks!
Trillian
To: Trillian
Subject: Re: questionMy main job is writing software for the firm as a whole, so I'm not sure I could quantify my time quite like you are asking. I make logical distinctions in the software (extra features for secretaries or attorneys, an application for Accounting, etc) that affect how much work I do, but I don't really do anything that is specific for an physical office. I suppose we could quantify the effect of writing software for more than one location (by the additional location and size complexities that multiple locations bring), but in that sense the offices are just a design specification along with everything else. What I write can potentially be used firm-wide, or just in one office location--the usage has little effect on my time.
My minor focus is giving occasional support to people for their software applications, and again, since everyone in the firm uses certain software for certain jobs, there's not really an easy quantification to make for splitting how that support time is spent by me.
I haven't answered your question yet.
Splitting equally between offices would seem the right way to interpret my work, so I'll say 33.3% each for Orion, Magrathea, and Betelgeuse. Another way to quantify would be to say that I spend an equal amount of time on every person in the firm, and since the distribution of people among the three offices is 24% Betelgeuse, 42% Magrathea, 24% Orion, and 0.42% Other, that is how to divide my work up as well. Another way to put it would be that I spend time in proportion to how much overhead is generated by each office. But then we have an infinite loop!
If you have a better way to quantify, go ahead and use that. I'd be interested to know if you do. Let me know too if you need me to explain my answer some more.-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
Noel
Application Developer
x42
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