Activity 14 (operating systems) represents a fairly high priority activity that we assumed would take perhaps 3 to 5 percent of the operators' time. When the study made it clear that the time devoted to this was almost negligible, we had to move in a new direction. Upper-level management was persuaded that four operators should be released from their normal work assignments for four weeks in order to dedicate full time to this activity. For persuading upper level management, nothing is more effective than having numeric data in hand.