“How do you measure the size of the job?” Eduardo whispered, talking to himself, but making sure I knew he was thinking.
“We have to make a judgment call here,” I said. “We have to decide if Ron is big enough for the job. But to do that, we have to decide how big the job is.”
Eduardo had never thought about work this way. Measuring the size of a job was a little off-the-wall for him, but I could see in his face that it made sense.
“I am thinking, and your question seems logical, but I don’t have a clue how to really measure something like the size of a job.” Eduardo was still with me, but he was out of ideas.
“Think about when Ron was successful, when he was supervising the work to be done. What was the longest task that he had to accomplish, in terms of time?”
Eduardo was thinking. “Do you mean, that he had to hit his daily production targets?”
“In a sense, but I am guessing, if he was supervising, he was working toward a goal with a longer Time Span than daily production.”
“Well, yeah, I mean Ron was in charge of daily production, but some days were up and some days were off and some days, we shut down production for preventive maintenance. We looked at production on a monthly basis.”
“So every month, he had to hit the same number?”
“Well, no. Some months were up and some months were down. Ron had to work to the sales forecast. There was some seasonality to it, and some of the production orders took more than a month to cycle through. We really looked at things on a quarterly basis.”
“So, the Time Span for Ron’s role as a Supervisor was around three months?”
A light bulb went off in Eduardo’s head. “Time Span? Is Time Span the measure of how big the job is?”
Outbound Air – Levels of Work in Organizational Structure now available on Amazon.
