IT firms ape Toyota: Do more work with less people

Saw this in ET, thought about sharing it...

Since August 2007, employees of LogicaCMG India have been maintaining hourly logs of their activities at work. This includes the nature of work, the status of the work, tasks completed, meetings attended; indeed, just about everything, including the time spent at the cafeteria. We guess that on January 31, three employees of the company filled in that they spent 9am to 11am talking to this correspondent.

What all of this eventually does is to enable somebody like Manish Verma, director for applications development at LogicaCMG, to pull out a daily shift report through the company's intranet on his laptop. The report could relate to something as specific as a group working on a Microsoft technology on a particular day.

It tells Verma how many were on the rolls of the group, how many were on full day or half day leave on that day. From that it calculates how many hours of work were available.

It then shows how many hours were spent on each production activity including support , testing, development, project management, review and rework ; on preventive activities like process improvements and self-development ; on organization support activities like interviews , training, meetings and customer visits; and finally on idle time like waiting-for-work or personal time.

The report adds up all that to give the productive hours utilized. It thensubtracts that from the previously calculated "available hours", and Verma gets the unutilized time. In the one instance we were shown, the unutilized time stood at 1.5 hours out of a total of 656 available staff hours, or 0.23%.

"I can check such things project-wise, location-wise , competency-wise . I can check the changes over time. I can exactly identify who was responsible for a delay in a project. In fact, we have broken things down in a way that everything can be quantified," says Verma.

Source: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Infotech/ITeS/IT_firms_ape_Toyota_Do_more_work_with_less_people/articleshow/3236436.cms

what i am is wondering are BPOs too trying to follow the trend. More work, Less people ?