Drivers Standard High intensity Standard High intensity Client-facing time incl. leave 85% 80% 85% 80% Client-facing time excl. leave 95% 90% 95% 90% The NDIA does not define what it regards as ‘client-facing’. However, a reasonable assumption would be that it is trying to distinguish between time spent delivering services and time spent undertaking other duties. In this the term ‘client-facing time’ is used more narrowly to describe the time spent literally face-to-face with the client, so this guide’s equivalent term for ‘client-facing time’ as described by the NDIA is ‘productive time’: all the available time spent delivering services (therefore, the sum of ‘client-facing time’ and ‘associated service time’). As noted earlier, the NDIA assumption is that productive time is entirely billable. Note that the NDIA data presented in 4 comes in two variants, with the difference being whether the denominator ‘Total direct wage time to deliver the unit of measure’ includes or excludes leave. The ‘incl. leave’ variant corresponds to this guide’s ‘paid time’ while the ‘excl. leave’ variant corresponds to this guide’s ‘available time’. Following the mapping of terms just described, the equivalent in this guide to the NDIA ‘client facing time ratio’ is the ‘productivity’ ratio. This guide does not provide a prescription for what the productivity ratio could or should be—that will differ from service to service and from organisation to organisation. However, as stated above, you should consider the NDIA assumptions when making your productivity settings and developing a service price that will be compared to the Reasonable Cost Model. This will allow you to identify key differences between your costs and the NDIA’s expectations of cost so that your organisation can strategise with respect to closing the gap. For example, in the example calculation given above, the FTE billable time comes to 1,264 hours or 64 per cent of paid time, which is much lower than the NDIA assumption of 85 per cent. Strategies to address this could include reducing some of the non-billable costs identified during the estimation process, or reducing other costs (e.g. overheads) to below the NDIA’s assumptions to compensate. Supervision The supervisor span of control ratio is defined by the NDIA as:
The summary results for Options 1 to 4 are presented in 6. In the case of Option 4 we decided to reduce associated service time per appointment to 24 minutes and time as required to allow for an extra appointment per day, but numerous combinations for reducing non-productive and associated time are possible. In any case Options 2 and 3 represent the extremes of the range of results that could be expected. Table 6: Summary results of analysing scenario options 1 to 4 Data Current service delivery model Option 1: Add an appointm’t per day by reducing time Option 2: Add an appointm’t per day by reducing associated service time Option 3: Add an appointm’t 2nd day by reducing time Option 4: Add an appointm’t per day by reducing non- productive and associated service time Day 1 Number of 1-hour appointments 4 5 5 4 5 Associated service time per appointm’t 0.50 0.50 0.37 0.50 0.40 Day 2 Number of 1-hour appointments 4 5 5 5 5 Associated service time per appointm’t 0.50 0.50 0.37 0.50 0.40 Available time* 76 76 76 76 76 Client-facing service time* 40.00 45.00 45.00 40.50 45 Associated service time* 20.00 22.50 16.60 20.25 18 Non-productive time* 16.00 8.50 14.40 15.25 12.96 Billable time* 50.00 56.25 53.30 50.63 54.04