In answering a question posted to a listserv I began to think about the true cost of a workaround. Normally I would budget the overall cost of the extra effort, but something I never thought to do was to double that cost.
Why double? Because not only is it time and effort to perform the workaround, but it’s also time and effort that you still need to spend doing what it was you originally planned to do. In my working history, more times than not the workaround was planned for but the impact to the overall project was not, which resulted in extreme overtime toward the end of a project or the target date getting pushed out toward the end of the project (which snowballed into the next project, then the next, and so on).
Sometimes workarounds are inevitable and must be done, but other times they tend to be used as a path of least resistance. For example, if you need tools A, B, and C to do your job and you have A, B, and D, sometimes the path of least resistance is to “bend” your work to fit A, B and D instead of just asking for and procuring product C. This is often due to cost, yet more times than not the workaround is more costly than just buying the needed tools.
Let’s say your time is worth a very modest $25/hr (for easy math purposes). You have a project to complete, but lack one of the tools you need to do your job. This tool costs $1,000. You could work around the lack of the tool, but it might take you close to a week to get it working right. In conversation a week of time seems more reasonable than a $1,000 expense, especially in these lean times, so you go for the workaround, postpone your “real work” for a week, and carry on.
Let’s look at those costs. Spending 40 hours on your workaround at your pay rate puts the cost of the workaround itself at $1,000. Well, it was a wash, right? Not quite. Yes, the workaround cost you $1,000 worth of time and effort, but now you are also $1,000 worth of time and effort behind in your project. The cost of your least-resistance workaround is now $2,000! And that’s just your cost!
I think it’s safe to assume that most of us do not work in a vacuum, so what we do usually impacts someone else along the way. More times than not it’s our project team, who may be relying on us to deliver a piece on time. In the case of writers, it could be an editor who has budgeted time based on your original schedule to edit your work for you, or it could be a build engineer who is awaiting your end-product (draft or final) to include in a software build. So what happens when they need to wait? The cost keeps rolling! I like to call this “churn”, though I’ve heard it referred to as the “corporate butterfly effect” as well. The impact of one can affect many, in which case the cost of one workaround can now grow exponentially.
Back to the example, there is no way to easily regain that lost week. If all you need to worry about is a final deliverable, you might be able to get by with working a few extra hours a week until the lost week is regained. But, if you have milestones to meet, you could be in for some very late nights immediately following your workaround period, else you risk a negative impact to others’ schedules. This means they need to change their plans, which comes with its own costs. If you are taking the full load of the workaround on your own shoulders, you sacrifice your own free time to overtime. What’s the value of your free time? And if in a long-term relationship, what’s the cost of your sanity and happiness at home?
Yes, sometimes workarounds are inevitable and the cost must be eaten. More times than not, though, the substantial cost of a workaround can be easily avoided with a lower one-time cost up front. Consider that the next time you are looking to save the company a few bucks by rolling up your sleeves. The savings could be much more than fiscal in nature.
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