Anna & Daniel
Process - Utilization
When workload is imbalanced or the number of people is wrong, then we need to focus on improving the utilization of the process

Improving Process Utilization

Pressure to reduce Full Time Equivilant employees (FTEs) and hiring freezes have become a way of life in the Government, so questions and challenges around utilization for those FTEs are very common. 

To solve FTE problems you need to know how much and what types of current and future work needs to be done, with what resources, and then understand how your own capacity allows the work in question to be done.   This describes a standard "staffing model" used by many organizations.

We think it is critically important to go beyond the basic model and conduct process analysis concurrently, otherwise you will almost certainly draw the wrong conclusions about what actions to take.  You can read more about why below.

“It is not enough to be busy… The question is: what are we busy about?” - Henry David Thoreau

For a standard-sized office, we can usually deliver a useful model with a two week targeted Sprint.
Contact us to  discuss the scope of the operation and we will develop a roadmap for your modeling efffort.


Targeted Sprint
Why it is Imperative to Look Beyond what  People Currently Do

While I have no firsthand knowledge of this particular issue, the current shortage of Immigration court judges is a good  theoretical example of why the process needs to be evaluated concurrently with modeling the capacity.  It is not very difficult to identify the current and estimated future volume of immigration cases, the number of judges, and the average length of time it takes for a judge to process a case.  IF you stop there however, you would draw dramatically false conclusions about how many judges are actually required.  If you analyze the process before calculating how many judges are required, you would likely come up with a wildly different answer on how many judges are required.

 We have about 400 judges that are required to process 700 cases per year - a theoretical capacity of 28,000 cases per year: simple math.  But if those 400 judges are like any other workers, they likely spend a very large portion of their time performing tasks that could be automated or completed by others and even more time complying with inefficient requirements that could be updated.  What stops them from doing 30 cases per day?  Then it wouldn't be 28,000 per year- if they worked 100 days a year * 30 per day it would be 3000 per judge and 120,000 cases per year.

As stated up front, I have no firsthand knowledge of this issue.  I'm sure there are many legitimate reasons why an immigration judge can't process 30 cases per day.  I'm also equally sure that, just like any other job function, they could substantially increase their current output by some amount if the process was improved.  The point is that when you don't look at fixing the process first, you are left the old GIGO model...."Garbage In Garbage Out" and it can lead you to dramatically inaccurate conclusions.
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