Developer Productivity Measured
I often talk about the effects of lost productivity to my team and co-workers. I recently stumbled across this article (Programmer Interrupted) that was posted by a friend (Ward Pond) on his Facebook page. It is clear the impact that a single interruption can have. When you multiply that by 5 or 10 times a day on a team of 8 developers it starts to add up fast.
The first job I had was at MCI in Richardson, TX. The team I worked on was responsible for improving the efficiency of the 180 field engineers that were creating MCI’s world-wide fiber network. After a clear understanding of the problem based primarily on observation of the physical work habits of the engineers, the majority of lost productivity was identified in two areas.
- The time engineers spent walking down the long halls to get drawings off shared printers, sometimes waiting for their print to come of the queue (engineer not happy)
- The time they spent going to get coffee (engineer happy)
The average lost time per day was 75 minutes per engineer. Does not sound like a lot, but when you multiply that by 180 engineers by 2000 work days per year, it really adds up.
180 Engineers x 75 minutes lost productivity x $1.00 per minute = $13,500.00 per day lost productivity * 265 work days = $3,577,500.00 per year.
The solution at MCI was to remove the two enablers of the “Engineer Interrupted”. Each engineer was given their own large format printer and a Flavia single serve coffee maker at an annual cost of $2,800.00 per engineer (included printer coffee supplies as well as electrical work needed to be done to increased requirements of power). As a result, lost productivity per engineer per day was reduced to just 15 minutes and the measured gain in productivity was 60 minutes per engineer per day.
180 Engineers x 15 minutes lost productivity x $1.00 per minute = $2,700.00 per day lost productivity * 265 work days = $715,500.00 per year + $504,000.00 Printer & Coffee expenses = $1,219,500.00 per year.
That ended with a net gain of:
$3,577,500.00
-$1,219,500.00
$2,358,000.00 per year!
Wish it was always this simple…