Solving Business Problems with Analytics: Workload Evaluation (1.3)
By: Mark Styx
Tags: Communication, Business, Analytics Life Cycle, Workload Management, Data Science

Recap (You can skip this section to the next heading if it’s still fresh)

We determined that to solve all these problems, we must first start with the information we have available to us. We know that we have some employees, and we know that we have some volume of work to accomplish. Okay, easy enough so far. The most important thing we need to do is to determine how to measure the total work volume that is required of us. Each of these problems is dependent on the solution to this one; This must be our starting place.

How do we measure the total work volume? Well, this is going to require that you research the potential variables in the real world. Every manager you talk to will probably have a different answer to this, so collect all the features you can for this evaluation. For our example, we came up with some general ones to use: purchases, invoices issued, and purchase dollar value. We need to evaluate and make a determination of the best of these measurement for each scenario. Then, we will have to normalize these measurements and add them together to get the total work volume. Since we are trying to measure work, the best measurement will have the most linear relationship to the effort of accomplishing the unit of volume. While effort is a really hard thing to measure, we can infer this value by looking at its cost; The cost of effort is time in an organization. Therefore, to evaluate the best potential measurement of work volume we will evaluate the correlation coefficient for each volume measurement, and the highest value will be our choice.

ρx,y = co-variance(x,y)/(σₓ*σᵧ)

Where x = effort, and y = volume

effort = 1+((x-μ)/σ)

volume = sum(units)



volume_category = {category|max{ρ(effort,vol_measure):∀vol_measure}} normalized_units = ∑{units/max(units)|volume_category}

_________________ relative_volume = effort * normalized_units

So now that we have our total work volume measurement, everything else falls into place naturally. The next hurdle is to determine how much work to expect from a single contributor.

To evaluate this we take the average total work volume divided by the average time required to accomplish that work to give us a measurement of work efficiency. To determine how much to expect from the average contributor, we’ll take the average of our efficiency measurement and return the average volume contribution where the efficiency is within a standard deviation of the population mean.

avg_volume = avg(relative_volume)/employee

avg_efficiency = avg_volume/avg(time)

_________________ exp_vol_contribution = avg_volume <--- avg_efficiency - σ < avg_volume < efficiency + σ

Now that we know how to measure total work volume and the expected contribution of an employee, we can answer the rest of our questions pretty easily.

To evaluate the employees required, we just take our total work volume and divide it by the expected contribution. To evaluate our current workload capacity, we take our current employees and multiply it by the expected contribution.

req_contributors = relative_volume/exp_vol_contribution

capacity = exp_vol_contribution * count(employees)

We can now answer each of the questions we’ve been presented with. Now to see this solution in practice we will first have to generate some test data.