Re: Question about time accounting at your work
- From: Stephen Booth <stephenbooth.uk@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: ChrisDavid.Taylor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 19 Sep 2009 16:27:18 +0100
On 18/09/2009, Taylor, Chris David <ChrisDavid.Taylor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
>
> Ok fellow full-time employee DBAs I have a question. (Not for contractors
> :)
>
> How many of you use project accounting at your place of work. Where every
> hour has to be accounted for against projects, or maintenance or some other
> code?
>
>
Most of the places I've worked do this. I think it largely depends ont he
size and form of the company. For a small to medium sized company with only
one line of business you probably won't find it but as soon as the company
gets bigger or has multiple lines of business or departments (in particular
where each has their own budget for which the head is responsible) it
becomes important. It's all down to cost.
The ballpark cost of employing a technical, non-contractor, front line
employee is around 3 times their salary (this includes salary, HR support,
benefits, training &c right down to the cost of your desk and the rent for
the floor space it sits on). so if you're on $70k pa your boss has to charge
you out at $210k pa to break even. If your company has 21 lines of business
and projects you may work on the logical approach may seem to be to just
charge each one $10k each or divide it on the basis of number of databases
or transactions per day &c. This is often called Top Slicing and I know of
companies that use it for things like desktop support (a per desktop charge)
or HR support (a flat charge per employee, this may or may not include
things like support with recruitment or employee relations events) where
there is a reasonable expectation that use (on average over a period of
time) will be the same for everyone. If I manage one of those projects (and
am therefore responsible for the project budget) then there's a good chance
I'm going to go to your boss and (assuming we're going with the $10k flat
rate charge) say "Just a minute, I'm not using $10k worth of Chris's time on
Project A, nowhere near. I'm using maybe $3k. Project B is using way more
of his time, probably $15k worth. Yeah, they're using at least 5 times as
much of his time as my project." You're manager would probably try to argue
back but if you're not logging your time against projects and lines of
business they have no basis to support their argument. For all they know
maybe my project is using closer to $3k of your time than the $10k I'm
paying for and project B is freeloading off of my project and others.
If you do log your time against projects and lines of business your manager
can charge more realistically (either an annual charge based on average
usage over the preceding year and planned usage over the coming year or a
monthly bill based on actual usage over the past month) and can defend their
charges when challenged (so when the project manager of Project B claims
they don't use $15k of your time your manager can show that they do). Even
time when you're not working on projects and lines of business (training,
breaks, leave &c) can be charged this way by amortizing it over the time you
do spend on projects and line of business work in proportion to that time.
Stephen
--
It's better to ask a silly question than to make a silly assumption.
http://stephensorablog.blogspot.com/ |
http://www.linkedin.com/in/stephenboothuk | Skype: stephenbooth_uk
Apparently I'm a "Eierlegende Woll-Milch-Sau", I think it was meant as a
compliment.
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