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man-hours Vs person-years

 
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What is the difference between man-hours & person-years ?
 
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Is that a trick question?

Seriously, why do you ask?
 
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I've always preferred the term "work month" or "work hour" instead of "person hour" or "man hour".

- Scott
 
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The metric person-years wouldn't likely be comparable across jobs or companies. In simplistic terms, a 40-hour week and two week vacation gives you a nice easy number of 2000 hours per employee per year, which gives a tolerable quick-and-dirty way of estimating things like staff resource costs in a medium or large-sized organization for budget purposes, but doesn't have great merit beyond that. So many things impact how many real hours of productivity you get per employee or contractor per year (including whether or not you work a 40-hour week) that the conversion is definitely pointless to apply to any one person or job role or project budget. It is a nice catch-phrase for stating generalities, but can be massively misleading for dealing with specific situations.
[ February 04, 2006: Message edited by: Reid M. Pinchback ]
 
Scott Ambler
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The important thing to remember is that it's quick and dirty.

Studies have shown that the most productive developers are 25x more effective than the least productive ones. So, it really depends on whose hour(s) you're talking about.

- Scott
 
Reid M. Pinchback
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Absolutely. Depends not only on the individual, but also on the environment the individual works in (team, boss, etc.). There was a pretty detailed Harvard BR-published study on it several years ago. I've also noticed some pretty extreme perceptual differences in how people in different organizations view productivity.
[ February 05, 2006: Message edited by: Reid M. Pinchback ]
 
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