I am in the middle of updating a set of business tools used within the company I work for. The particular code I’m working on deals with post codes, it makes an attempt to correct invalid postcodes and points out one which seem suspect. A couple of things struck me about the time I will spend developing this code.
- If I spend 3 hours working on the code and it saves 10 mins for each person that uses it, I only need 18 people to use it and that time is fully recouped. Further, if I get paid £10 an hour it’s cost 30 pounds. If my boss gets paid £15 an hour, the time he saves will pay back the cost of development in 1.5 development life cycles – savings to business occurs in half of the development time.
- Timeliness and befit to business. If my code runs in 10 seconds, that’s a 98% ([10/[10×60]]x100 = 1.6) time saving. This offers a huge benefit in the lead time of solution development for the end user.
What benefits does your work offer to your company? How do you quantify and justify your time?
On Monday a co-worker had a Finace Excel wizard try to help her set up a monthly file for her use (which will now be a monthly requirement). This Finance person was remarkably fast with key board (much faster than me), and she took ten minutes to do the most of the work - but it would have taken her another two hours to get the co-worker to learn how to do it, but not nearly as fast; and there would have been more to do after that. I watched this, and told the co-worker to send my the original file. Within an hour I had written four snippets of code and combined them into a super macro, that did everything requested. Total time for me - 45 minutes. I had her try it, then put a button on her toolbar. The co-worker tried it - it takes 1 second. I haven’t compared the math, but the code will save this co-worker a minimum of 14 minutes and 59 seconds every month. So in three months the cost is recovered. But even more important, the errors in the manual way would slow the process for her (to get for errors), so realistically the time spent getting the code will be made up in two cycles (this month and next).
Arrrr!
Errors! , I missed that out out, but it’s a key justification for automation, as i guess employee motivation is too! Thanks Rich.