One way to do this is to take a snapshot of your staff’s commitment of time to the
production of various services. The precursor to this is that the services must have
been defined first, perhaps coming down to a list similar to that in Chapter 3. Then
give each of the staff a table to complete (see example at Figure 3.1). On the
vertical axis is the list of services. The horizontal axis depicts the working day
broken down into fifteen-minute chunks. Then for a week or so, have your people
put ticks in the cells, thus showing how much time they spent delivering each
service at what time of the day. Gather the sheets in and calculate the total number
of fifteen-minute chunks per service and then divide the totals by the number of
such chunks in a working day. The result will tell you the amount of logical (as
opposed to actual) headcount you have committed to each service. Comparing
that with the output will give you an index of how much manpower you are currently
consuming to produce your current output – and that can be a basis for calculating
headcount against growth in demand for each service. I call this a ‘resource usage
table’. It’s also a good indicator of what might happen to one service if you moved
resources from it to shore up performance in another service.
But keeping the services separate is not just an aid to assessing resource
commitment internally. It is also a key factor in bringing to the user’s attention just
how broad (and appropriate to the business) is your range of services. Your clients
need to appreciate that you are more than just a group of people they call on for
help – that you are a factory with a range of distinct products that they consume.