How many points for a soldier?
I just don’t seem to learn, do I?
You’re in the army now
After my studies I had to perform a compulsory military service. What does a soldier do all day in peace time? Apart from the “job” you’re supposed to do (in my case, working at the data processing center), you’re mostly performing boring, menial tasks like cleaning the barracks, pealing spuds, washing dishes, guarding the base.
Now there are lots of soldiers and lots of tasks. How do you allocate who does what, when? This was the job of the CSM (Company Sergeant-Major). Each division’s CSM had to make a monthly plan to allocate the tasks to their division’s soldiers. Combine all the division’s plans and you’ve got the work plan for the whole base.
Apart from the usual constraints (one can’t do two tasks at the same time), there were constraints on the number of tasks you could be assigned each week. There were two types of tasks: “work duty” and “guard duty”. After being on guard for 24h, you got the next day off to get some sleep. Which introduces another constraint. And you want the allocation of work to be reasonable fair. Not so easy…
A good plan is hard to find
How did that work? It didn’t.
Nobody thought the system was fair; it was always easy to find other soldiers who had considerably fewer tasks than you had. The plan changed daily as constraint violations were fixed, people complained, tasks got switched. You never knew if you were going to be assigned to perform some task the next day or not. There were always several different versions of the plan; nobody really knew which one was the “correct” one.
The result: total chaos, tasks not being performed, bad morale, poor discipline. And lots of stress for the CSMs who had to manage this chaos. And what’s the standard CSM way of solving problems? Shouting. Very loudly. It doesn’t help, but at least they feel as if they’ve done everything they could…
A simple plan
Most of us in the army data processing center were engineers or computer scientists. How could we solve the scheduling problem? With scheduling software? No, in our experience software only made things worse. We needed a simple solution™! We made our CSM an offer he couldn’t refuse: we would fill in the work assignments for him.
We started by giving each task a number of points. The more we disliked doing that task, the more points. This depended on the type of the task and the day. E.g. a task on a weekday cost less than one in the weekend. The easiest task got 2 points; the hardest task got 7 points. From then on, it was easy: we played the “Duty Game” each month.
The Duty Game, round 1
Each month we received a duty roster to fill in. The soldier with the best maths skills assigned the points to each task and added them up. Now we knew “how many task points we had to do” this month. Our math wizard then divided this number of points by the number of soldiers in our division. Now we knew how many task points each of us had to do this month.
Then, each of us played the first round of the game, with the following rules:
- you have to put your name on as many tasks as needed to equal or exceed the required number of points.
- you may not violate a scheduling constraint
Everyone got to choose in turn. Old-timers first, rookies last. With people rotating in and out, you’d get closer to the head of the queue each month.
The Duty Game, round 2
Of course, the guys who had to choose last had a very limited choice. They might be forced to violate a constraint or pick an inconvenient date. To solve this problem, we had a second iteration. In this round, you could swap tasks with another soldier, with the following rules:
- you could only swap tasks if their number of points was (approximately) equal, irrespective of the number of tasks. E.g. I could swap a 5 point task for a 3 point task + a 2 point task.
- you may not introduce schedule constraint violations
This second round quickly and easily solved any problems in the schedule. We didn’t have a backup plan in case we couldn’t solve issues, but we never needed one. We were always able to solve the problems to everyone’s satisfaction.
Did it work?
We always filled in the plan quickly, within the time limits set by the CSM. The schedule was fair and took into account each soldier’s preferences and personal constraints. We produced a conflict-free schedule with a minimum of effort. Our monthly schedules stayed mostly constant, we (almost) never needed to change them. If we needed to change something, we would swap tasks (with the same rules as in the second round), so that only the two people involved in the swap were affected.
And what have we learned from this?
After a year, I was released back into the “real world”. I started to work as a programmer. How did I know what to work on? Well, there were project managers who would make plans for groups of developers. Lots of programmers, lots of work, lots of planning constraints to satisfy. The plans changed constantly, there were several versions of “the plan” and nobody knew which one was the “definitive one”, you had no idea what you were going to work on the next day…
And things were back to normal: chaos, work not being performed, bad morale, poor discipline. And lots of stress for the project managers who had to manage this chaos… That’s how it’s supposed to be, isn’t it?
