Slackers 'R Us

 

If we think of a person working 40 hours per week as a standard week--but they actually work only 30 hours on projects--then there must be 10 hours of “slack” in the system that can be allocated to other planned tasks, right?

Maybe, and maybe not.

Before we either contemplate removing slack or allowing it, we need to understand what may transpire between tasks in the project plan.

What is Slack?

For the purpose of this article, we can think of “slack” as roughly equating to available capacity in the form of time (Many definitions for slack exist. Typically, the word is used to describe non-value added activities, the interval between planned work, or available capacity. It all depends on the group doing the definition).

In the opening example, we had a person with 10 hours slack. This example is very simplistic, but all too often, this is how management looks at time. They do not question what takes place, or needs to take place, between currently planned tasks. They don’t stop to wonder if the project plan encompasses all of the activities the project team needs to perform either for the client, the team, the team’s company, etc.

Another way of looking at slack that we are very familiar with--for those of us who have been in consulting--is utilization, the ratio of billable time to total time. We can potentially consider the formula of (1 – utilization) to…

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