Optimizing Your Workforce | A Guide to Precision Staffing Through Process Analysis

In previous articles, I discussed setting a baseline before beginning your transformation.? One of the elements of a baseline is the Steps, or individual tasks, that are combined in defining Processes.? In one of those articles, I mention that one of the advantages to baselining is the ability to predict how many employees are needed to execute a process and how this information is imperative for organizations that need to 'right size' their staffing or are expecting to scale.

Recently, a couple of people have asked how determining employee needs is executed in more detail.? In this article, I'll explain how this works and provide the necessary math for the calculations.

As you might recall, a Step has several properties,?however, for this discussion I'm going to focus on just four.

• Role - This is the name of the Role within your organization that is responsible for executing the step.? Never use a proper name for this as people come and go, but roles rarely change.
• Effort (hours) - This is an estimate of how many hours a single person will need to execute the step one time.? It is important, even for rapidly executed steps that this only be for a single instance for one person.? This will be paramount for the analysis and tracking you will do later.
• Duration (days) - This is an estimate of how many days a single person will need to execute the Step one time.? This differs from Effort as a Step may take one person one hour to complete, you may allow them to have three days to do it in.
• Metrics - This is a subset of properties that will be used in monitoring Step health, calculating capacity, and identifying constraints.? More about this later.

These four properties are key to understanding how increasing or decreasing Process throughput will affect staffing and velocity.

Defining Your Step:

I'm not going into details here for defining every property of a Step.? If you are interested please take a look at my earlier article.? For this discussion, we will use the following Step definition.

In this example, we see that it will take a Build Engineer using the System Platform 60 minutes to Build one Widget.? However, we've given them .125 days to complete the work.

Metric | Throughput

We will also define our "Throughput" metric as the 'Number of Widgets Per Day'.? This metric indicates that our company reports throughput as the number of Widgets per day that we expect to produce.

Note: In this particular case we haven't provided any additional time for the step to be completed as .125 days is exactly 60 minutes.

Doing the Math:

Now that our step is defined, it's easy to anticipate how changes in throughput will affect both our employee and scheduling needs.

Here are the conceptual formula definitions:

• Throughput / Effort = Number of Employees Needed
• Throughput / Duration = Amount of Time Needed for Scheduling

Using the example above we already know that, if we need to produce six Widgets per day, we will only need one person to execute this step.

Here is the detailed calculation:

In this example, we are anticipating the need to build six Widgets per day.?

1. We first need to calculate the total time needed for generating six widgets.?
2. We then subtract that number from the total time available for a single person.
3. Next, divide the Time Delta by the time available for a single person.
4. Finally, we subtract the % Employee Unused from a single person to arrive at the Number of Employees Needed.

Our results indicate that we need 0.9 people to keep up with our expected demand.?

Note that this particular number is less than one.? As a result, you could have one person doing this work with extra time that could be allocated elsewhere.

Here is another calculation example:

In this example, we are anticipating the need to build 18 Widgets per day.? Our results indicate that we will need 2.6 people to keep up with demand.

Working with Processes

Defining Steps in this way is key to determining your resource needs based on anticipated demand.? However, a single Step doesn't provide the true picture.? To truly understand, you need to look at entire processes.

Continuing with our Widget building example.? Let's assume the workflow below represents the entire process of Widget delivery to the customer.

Using our 18 Widgets per day example, calculating the employee needs for each Step it looks like this.

The question we are trying to answer is "If I need to deliver 18 Widgets per day, how many people will I need?"? At this point, the answer is as simple as listing all of the associated roles and summing the 'Employees Needed' for each.

Here are the results:

• Sales Support Specialists = 1.9
• Build Engineers = 2.6
• Deployment Engineers = 3.9
• Dispatchers = 0.9
• Total Employees Needed = 9.2

With this information, you can start making informed decisions around resource levels for each process.? For example, you may decide to train Dispatchers to help with Sales Support or you could settle on two Sales Support Specialist if you anticipate higher throughput in the near future.

Of course, I'm simplifying the decision process.? For example, only after all of the Steps that are executed by a Dispatcher, across all processes, have been defined will you know if they have any bandwidth to assist in other areas.? I'll go deeper into how that works later.

Streamlining the Process | Identifying Constraints

There are two reasons for streamlining a process.? The first is to reduce the time it takes for the process to be executed.? The second is an overall reduction of headcount.

Speed of Execution

Speeding process execution doesn't necessarily lead to lowering headcount. However, that is oftentimes the result.

When focusing on speed of execution, it only makes sense to focus on the Step that requires the most effort.? In our example above, reducing the effort on the 'Build Widget' and 'Implement Widget' (customer-hosted) Steps is the only way to speed up the overall process of delivering Widgets to your customers.? Focusing on any other steps would not increase speed.? You can learn more about this principle by studying 'The Theory of Constraints'.

Reduction in Headcount

Reduction in headcount works much the same way as speeding the process.? In this case, you will group the Steps by Role.? Again focusing on the steps that require the most effort is a great way to start as they have the possibility of providing the greatest amount of reduction.

Conclusion

The mathematics I provided above will not tell you how to streamline your processes. However, it will show you where your resources should be focused to achieve real results. Organizations without a baseline are doing nothing more than throwing darts at a map and hoping they land on something that will streamline their operation.