Measuring or planning?

Or it can record what actually happened: the hours worked, the dollars spent, the orders shipped. Ursa Major is built for the first. It is a plan of record, not a system of record. This part explains the difference, why it matters, what directional figures are good for, and how to count capacity honestly when nobody is busy with mapped work every hour of the day.

Two kinds of record

A plan of record says: this is how we expect the work to go. Quotes take about two hours. Four people attend the Monday meeting. The finishing step takes a day and the material costs roughly this much. It is a statement of intent and of expectation, written by the people who know the work.

A system of record says: this is what happened. The accounting package says what was paid. The time sheet says who worked how long. The order system says which orders shipped. These are the sources that others rely on, sometimes by law, sometimes by contract. They have to be right to the cent, and they are kept by tools designed for that.

The two are not rivals. They answer different questions:

• A plan answers: what do we think is going on, and what would change if we changed something?
• A record answers: what did go on?

Trouble starts when one is asked to do the other's job. A plan treated as a record gives false comfort, because the plan says forty hours and the week did not. A record treated as a plan gives no help with the future, because last quarter's numbers cannot tell you what a new step would do. Keeping the two honest means keeping them apart, and then putting them next to each other.

Directional cost, not accounting

The figures on a map are estimates entered by a person. They are not read from a ledger. That is on purpose.

An estimate of "about two hours" or "roughly a few hundred dollars" is enough to show where the weight in a process sits. It would not survive an audit, and it is not meant to. Writing "$212.47" for a number you actually know to within a hundred dollars is false precision: it looks confident and carries no more information.

So a map's costs are best read as directions and orders of magnitude:

• Which steps cost more than the others, roughly?
• Does the weekly meeting cost more or less than the delivery run?
• If this step took half the time, would the total change a little or a lot?

These are questions about shape. They survive imprecise inputs. They do not survive being treated as books.

Two further points keep the figures honest.

Money has a currency. A cost in Ursa Major is an amount of money in a stated three-letter currency, with a basis. Totals add only costs of the same cost class (fixed or variable), the same currency and the same basis. Fixed and variable are totalled separately, and costs you have not classified stay apart from both. Nothing is converted between currencies. If what you want to compare is not money, such as trays, days or kilograms, a custom metric can carry its own unit and period.

Say what is stated. A figure you have not entered is not a figure, and the map tries to make that visible. How it shows this depends on the kind of figure. A blank Duration or Delay counts as zero in the totals and is listed as counted as 0. Several missing cost inputs are counted as zero and listed the same way. A value that is invalid or cannot be combined with the others leaves the result unknown. A capacity comparison needs an amount on each assignment, so where one is missing that comparison is unknown. Where a total is shown with items counted as zero, read it as "at least what has been entered".

Honest capacity math

Capacity is the most tempting place to do arithmetic badly.

A person works a forty-hour week. A mapped process takes thirty hours of that person's week. It is natural to say they have ten hours spare. That is almost never true, and the reasons are the interesting part.

• Not everyone is fully allocated to mapped work. People spend time on things nobody drew: phone calls, small favours, looking for something, catching up. We might call this unstructured time. It is real and usually bigger than expected, and it is not a flaw. It is how a small business absorbs the unplanned.
• Some time is set aside on purpose. Training, planning, maintenance, rest. If it is reserved, it is not available for mapped work. Counting it as available means the numbers do not match the week.
• Some events are possible but not scheduled. A machine fails, a key customer rings with a rush job, someone is ill. Such unplanned events displace planned work some fraction of the time. A reasonable plan treats them as a rough expected load, not as an exception.

The point is not that people are overworked or underworked. The map makes no such judgement and should not. The point is that "hours in the week" and "hours available for mapped work" are different numbers, and a plan that treats them as the same will look more comfortable on paper than it is in practice.

A good habit is to state, for each person or resource, what capacity you believe is genuinely available for the work shown, and to state what is left outside. Where demand on the map goes beyond stated capacity, that is simply a figure to review: the map shows it, and you decide what it means. It may mean the capacity figure is too low, the estimate too high, or the plan too ambitious. It may even mean that the extra is absorbed by evenings that nobody counted. The map cannot tell. You can.

For unplanned events, a single point estimate is enough. "Roughly one rush job a month, about half a day each" is useful. Pretending to model every scenario would add precision the inputs cannot support.

Measuring is still worth doing, elsewhere

None of this is an argument against measuring. It is an argument for measuring in the right place.

If you want to know what happened, the tools already exist and are better at it: your accounting software, your payroll, your time tracking, your calendar, your order system, your analytics. These are your systems of record. They hold actuals.

What a plan gives you is something to hold actuals up against. If the map says quotes take two hours and your time records say five, that gap is a prompt for a conversation, not a conclusion. The plan might be stale. The records might include other work. A particular job might have been unusual. Reading the gap is your job, and it is a good one to have.

A few questions help when deciding what to measure outside the map:

• What decision would this figure change? If the answer is "none", it may not be worth tracking.
• Is there already a record? Often the answer is yes, and it is in a tool you already use.
• How much precision do you really need? A weekly count may serve better than a minute-by-minute log.
• Who would see it, and how? A figure shown to a team means something different from the same figure in a private review.

Ursa Major does not collect actuals, does not connect to those systems, and does not promise to be the record for compliance or audit. It is a place for the plan, and for thinking about it.

A worked example

Northline Fabrication is invented, for illustration only: a small shop making custom steel gates and brackets.

Sam does the welding at Northline. On the map he is the person assigned to the welding step, and the map says welding takes about thirty hours of his week. His week is forty hours.

Marta, who owns the shop and is drawing the map, first reads this as "ten hours spare". Then she writes down what else Sam does:

• About five hours a week in the Monday planning huddle and the Friday check of what is ready to ship. Both are on the map.
• About four hours of interruptions: a question from the cutting bench, a drawing that needs checking, a hunt for the right clamps. These are not on the map.
• A rush job about once every five weeks, taking most of a day, which displaces planned work. That averages to a little under two hours a week.
• Two hours a month of tool maintenance, which Marta sets aside. That is half an hour a week.

Written this way, the picture is different. Nothing is wrong with Sam; the map is simply being honest. Thirty hours of welding plus five of meetings leaves five hours. The interruptions, rush jobs and maintenance together come to roughly six. The demand on his stated capacity is slightly above what the week holds.

Marta reads this as a figure to review, not as a statement about Sam. She might wonder whether the thirty-hour estimate is high, whether the interruptions come from parts being cut without clear labels, or whether the rush jobs are worth what they push aside. She can ask these questions because the numbers are now in the open.

A month later she compares the map with the time sheets. Actual welding time was closer to twenty-six hours. The plan was cautious, so she adjusts the estimate. The time sheets and the accounting package stay where they are; they are the record. The map is still a plan, now a better one.

Reflection questions

1. If you compared one number on your map with its counterpart in your accounting or time records, which would you expect to differ most? Why?
2. How many hours of your week would you say are genuinely available for the work you have drawn? What is in the rest?
3. Where in your business is a rough, directional figure enough, and where do you need the exact one?