Interview with Erez Dror: Pt. 4 - Is time waste really a big deal?

Chere Lucett:

It seems like time waste can be overlooked a little bit because it's not as big in front of people as some of the other things on a project are, or am I wrong?

Erez Dror:

I absolutely agree. And I think to add to that, one of the challenging things about that is it's hard to quantify until today. You couldn't tell. So you know your workers are using the [inaudible 00:00:29] and it's not efficient and they're wasting time. But what could you do? The thing is that until you quantify the amount of time wasted and you sum it up, exactly as you said, for one worker, it would be nickel and dimes. But if you look at the overall project performance, that's probably the biggest cost.

Erez Dror:

Because again, workers are 40% of the budget and they do productive things less than 40% of their time. So if you take 60% out of 40% of your project budget, that sums up to a lot of money. And it's not that you can get them 100% productive, but if you can save a fraction of that, that's a lot of money. And that's money that, it's there. You just need to grab it. And as a company, part of what we do is to help our customers understand how can they improve their execution. First of all, it's to highlight how big the problem is and then, okay, how can I improve? And that's the best part. That's the part I like the most.