“So, it helps to understand Julie’s job,” I observed. Eduardo and I had been talking about how attaching Time Span to each task in a job, helped to understand the scope of the job.

An epiphany was occurring inside Eduardo’s head. “Yeah, think about freight,” he started. “Hector is our freight supervisor, and his area is a mess.”

“How so?”

“Well, he usually gets all the day’s shipments out. It’s a big job, because we have to carefully crate everything. That’s part of the problem, often our crates don’t hold up and our product gets damaged in transit. We have close to ten freight claims going at any one time.

“Hector thinks he is responsible for one day’s work each day, when the Time Span required is much longer. He should also be responsible for investigating and resolving all of these freight claims, figuring out which of our crate components failed, and making changes to the process to reduce transit damage. He needs to work with our vendors to buy different crate components that do a better job. All of that seems to get lost in the shuffle, but it is really Hector’s responsibility. Instead of a one-day Time Span, his job is more like a one-month Time Span. He has some serious follow-up to do.

“It is only when I describe the job’s Time Span as one month that I begin to see the true scope of the job.”