Question

Give an example of a project where work sampling would be an appropriate productivity measuring technique.

Answer 1

• Work sampling is the statistical technique where observation about the works in progress being carried out by the group of workers or possibly the machines are collected at various intervals or randomly. Construction companies are mainly dependent upon the labours where companies are always in search to increase the labour productivity.

• Let's consider a construction project of a large hospital to be constructed in Eastern Egypt.

In a CEO's meeting with Project Manager, CEO wanted to understand the working procedure of RCC labours as company’s profit was largerly dependent on them. He wanted to know the efficiency of the working procedure of RCC labours so that he could establish a standardize working procedure, if present procedure found in-efficient. So site engineer was asked to present the work sampling of RCC labours.

i. Labours were catogerized as Working & Idle.

ii. Observation was done for 1 week of 6 working days of 8hr = Total 8x6= 48 hrs per week.

iii. Total 400 randam observations were made out of which 320 (80%) observation were recorded as Working and 80 (20%) observations as Idle.

iii. So according to the observation

• Workings are 38.4 hrs/ week, i.e. 6.4 hrs / day
• Idle are 9.6 hrs/ week, i.e. 1.6 hrs / day

iv. The objective of this study was to develop a standardized working procedure but when compared it was found out efficiency of RCC labours is relatively high.

Summary- Work sampling is the statistical technique where observation about the works in progress being carried out by the group of workers or possibly the machines are collected at various intervals or randomly.