If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

I had my first taste of management when I worked at Argonaut (long time ago) and because Jez San (the owner) believed in promoting from within the company he felt that it would be a good idea to get in a management trainer to help us with the basics. His name was Patrick (no idea what his surname was) and he was an absolute treasure trove of interesting management tips.The one tip which I will always remember and now call ‘Manager Mathematics’ is something blindingly obvious yet strangely completely ignored in most work places.

What is Manager Mathematics? Well to explain I will give you an example.

At Argonaut we were using a 3D rendering package called 3D Studio (no idea what version it was back then) this allowed you to create 3d worlds in wireframe and then render them later. One particular aspect for any 3d designer back then was being able to preview what their design looked like fully rendered. Back then this could take between 30 seconds and 10 minutes depending on the complexity of the scene and a typical designer wanted to preview as often as possible.

That 30 sec - 10 minutes could be greatly reduced by faster hardware and the artists constantly complained that they would waste less time if they could render quicker and also produce better results because they could preview more often.

This is where Manager Mathematics comes in.

The following equation calculates how much money is wasted per day.

DAILY COST = ((AVG TASK COUNT * AVG TASK LENGTH) / 60) * HOURLY RATE

• AVG TASK COUNT - The average number of times this task is performed each day.
• AVG TASK LENGTH - The average length of the task.
• HOURLY RATE - This should include not only the base hourly calculated rate but also the company overhead for each employee hour (sometimes calculated as simply as 2x base salary)

For my little example we have the following.
((10 * 5) / 6) * £20x2 (for overhead) = £33 wasted per day.

This was then used to show upgrading the CPU on each artist could save a serious amount of time and therefore money. The actual end result was that the overall wasted time across a team of 10 artists showed that buying a whole rendering farm was easily justifiable and this is in fact what happened.

What I hope this demonstrates is that some of the most common programming/design tasks (such as compiling/rendering) which can take perhaps 1-2 minutes but are performed 50 times a day can mean a serious waste of time and therefore money. And by using simple Manager Mathematics you can calculate how much is being wasted and use it to justify buying hardware/software which will reduce that time.

For managers you should be asking your development teams what slows them down and getting them to calculate how much time they could save. For programmers / artists / designers / etc you can use this show your manager that you need a Dell XPS (grin).

What tasks do you do every day that could be improved by better hardware/software? And how much time do you think you waste?