The total is right. The allocation is not
Attendance is one of the most reliable records on a project. People come through a gate, somebody counts them, and the monthly total reconciles.
Which is precisely why the problem underneath it goes unnoticed for so long.
Productivity is not built on the total. It is built on hours against an activity, and that allocation is made by a supervisor filling in a sheet at the end of a shift, from memory, for a gang that moved. A man who spent half the morning helping elsewhere has eight hours against one activity and none against the other. The total is correct. Both productivity figures are not.
What bad allocation actually breaks
Two things, and the second is the expensive one.
Productivity per activity becomes noise. It moves week to week for reasons that have nothing to do with the work, and after a while nobody trusts it, which is the correct response to a number that behaves randomly.
Then it becomes evidence. Productivity figures end up in claims, in forecasts, in the argument about whether a disruption occurred. A figure that was never reliable at activity level is now carrying weight it can't hold, and the other side only has to ask how the hours were allocated.
Plant has the same shape
Equipment records show availability — the machine was on site and working — far more reliably than they show what it was working on.
Utilisation is the useful figure and the harder one: hours running against hours available, and idle time separated from breakdown. A crane that was available all month and used for a fifth of it
is a different problem from one that broke down, and both appear the same in a record that only shows presence.
What can actually be improved
Not much, and being honest about that is more useful than pretending otherwise.
Allocation will always be approximate, because the person recording it is running a crew rather than keeping records. What can change is the number of choices they have. A sheet with forty activities produces bad allocation. A sheet with the six that the gang could plausibly have worked on produces better allocation for no extra effort.
The other thing that helps is aggregating upward before drawing conclusions. Allocation error mostly cancels within an area
and mostly doesn't cancel across a project, so productivity by area is usually usable while productivity by activity is usually not. Reporting the first and resisting the second is a defensible position.
When the sheet can't be changed
Often the timesheet is not yours. It belongs to HR, or to a payroll system, or to a subcontractor who has used the same format for a decade.
In that case the useful move is not to fight for a new sheet. It is to collect the allocation separately, at a coarser level, from the supervisor who already knows it — a weekly split of a gang across two or three areas is enough to make productivity by area usable, and it takes a minute rather than a form.
What it costs is that two records now exist for the same hours, which means somebody has to reconcile the totals monthly. That is a real cost and it is smaller than the alternative, which is a productivity series nobody quotes.
Deciding it, or finding out what was decided
If the sheet is yours, keep the allocation list short and tie it to the area coding, so the choices on the sheet match the work in front of the person filling it in.
Inherited: don't start by redesigning the timesheet. Start by finding out at what level the figures hold together. Compare a month of allocated hours against attendance by area — if they agree at area level and disagree below it, you have found the level at which your productivity numbers are worth quoting, and you can stop quoting the ones below it.
System design
Nothing here needs new collection. What it needs is a shorter list of choices at the point of entry, and a level at which the output is quoted.
| Record | Produced by | Required quality | Verified against | Feeds |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Attendance | HR or security | By area and day | Gate record | Headcount, cost |
| Hours allocated | Supervisor | From a short list of plausible activities | Attendance by area | Productivity |
| Plant availability | Equipment department | On site and serviceable | Equipment log | Resourcing |
| Plant utilisation | Site | Running hours, with idle separated from breakdown | Operator record | Method decisions |
Keep the allocation list tied to the area coding, so the choices on the sheet match the work in front of the person filling it in. Then quote productivity at the level where allocated hours reconcile with attendance.
Practical insight
Take one week and one area. Add the allocated hours for every activity in it, and compare that with the attendance for the same area and week.
They won't match exactly. What matters is by how much. A few percent is normal. A large gap means hours are being allocated to activities in one area from people who were somewhere else, and every productivity figure in that area is built on it.
Key takeaways
- Attendance totals are reliable. Allocation to activities is not, and productivity is built on the second.
- Bad allocation produces productivity that moves for reasons unrelated to the work.
- Those figures end up in claims and forecasts, carrying weight they can't hold.
- Plant records show availability well and utilisation badly. Idle and broken down are different problems.
- Shorten the list of activities on the sheet. Fewer plausible choices produces better allocation for no extra effort.
- Allocation error cancels within an area and not across a project. Report at the level where the numbers hold.
Records born here. Timesheet · allocation sheet · plant log with idle time separated from breakdown.
What is coming next
Everything so far adds. The next source subtracts, and it subtracts work that has already been reported as done.
Next week: quality — non-conformances, rework, and progress that goes backwards.
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