Who is holding the bill?#
SLOP2710 · Week 4
A passport office#
800 applications a day
90 minutes average wait
Both numbers obtained from outside the building, last week, with a stopwatch.
1,200 hours a day#
300,000 hours a year#
At $40 an hour#
$12 million a year#
Twice the office’s entire operating budget.
It appears in no line of that budget.
Not in any forecast, performance report or efficiency review.
- W
- —
- L
- —
- person-hours a day
- —
- the queue pays
- —
- the office pays
- —
An organisation#
optimises what it can see#
So the rational move is always the same#
- run at 97% utilisation
- close a window
- add a check that costs you 30 seconds and the queue 40 minutes
Each is correct, given what the manager is scored on.
Your hour is already priced#
Transport appraisal publishes values of travel time savings — per person, per journey purpose — and builds motorways on them.
Business travel near the employer’s cost. Commuting and leisure lower, from what people actually pay for speed.
Published. Argued about. On the page.
At what rate, though?#
What they’d pay to avoid it → a barrister’s hour is worth forty pensioners’.
All hours equal → a moral commitment wearing a spreadsheet.
Zero → what the office is doing right now.
Which one is neutral?#
And it is not only hours#
- unoccupied feels longer than occupied
- before the process feels longer than during it
- uncertain feels longer than known
- unexplained feels longer than explained
- unfair feels longest of all
Who is in the room at 10am on a Tuesday?#
Not a random sample.
Learning cost · compliance cost · psychological cost
All three fall hardest on the people the service was designed for.
The uncomfortable extension#
An ordeal mechanism: make the benefit costly in time, so only the needy bother.
Assumes the poor are time-rich.
End of Act I#
Name the rule · look at the spread · state the box · find who pays