new formula, (long)

[Wimblees@aol.com]

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My Dear Colleagues. 

I have been doing some thinking about the workload formula. With all due 
respect to those that have spent hundreds of hours trying to come up with a 
formula that closely as possible represents how many technicians are needed 
in a given situation, I think the details with which we are working is not 
going to impress anyone except ourselves. 

In our discussion in Rochester, we asked ourselves for whom the reports are? 
We decided that the report is supposed to try to influence an administrator 
to hire the right number of technicians. Unfortunately, the school that 
already has a technician is probably not the ones who need convincing of the 
need. Perhaps the formula can show there is a need for more technicians, but 
I am sure that that has already been mentioned by the technician. But if we 
are going to try to persuade schools to hire the right number of technicians, 
we need to put together a formula that is more "administrator friendly." We 
need a formula that an administrator can easily work out, which more 
accurately reflects the conditions at his/her music department or school. 

I think I might have come up with such a formula. I tried it in my situation, 
and it worked. It is a formula that an administrator can do relatively 
easily. All the administrator needs to know is how many times the piano gets 
tuned, and what kind of "setting" the piano is in. He/she will not need to 
know out how old a piano is, what kind of overall condition it is in, how 
much it is used, the climate conditions of the school, or even if it is a 
grand or upright. For the most part, an administrator is not interested in 
those details. All he/she wants to know is how many hours per week is a 
technician is going to work.  And with my formula, that is what he/she will 
be able to figure out.

Here is what I came up with. I took the list of pianos in my department and 
put down how many times per school year I tune each piano. At Alabama there 
are 36 weeks of school. (The department virtually shuts down during the 
summer.) Concert Hall pianos get tuned an average of twice a week, so that is 
72 times. Piano faculty pianos are tuned once a week, so that is 36 times. 
Class room pianos are tuned once a month. Applied studio pianos get tuned 4 
times a year.  And so forth.  

Then I gave each piano a "setting" number as follows. 

Setting:  5 = concert/recital hall,  4 = piano faculty/choir room/class room, 
3 = grand practice rooms/voice/string studios, 2 = other applied studios, 1 = 
other pianos. 
        
These numbers represents how much care the piano require. The number is _not_ 
the number of hours of care each require. It is just a multiplier based on 
how much care the piano needs. In my situation, applied studio pianos, for 
the most part, do not need much care. The grands in the practice room need 
quite a bit of care, and, of course, the concert hall and recital hall pianos 
need a lot of care. 

To complete my formula, I added together the number of times all pianos get 
tuned and divided that number by the number of pianos. (1055/71 = 14.9) I 
added all the "setting" numbers, and divided that by the number of pianos. 
170/71 = 2.5) I then multiplied those two numbers together, and came up with 
37.5. That number represents the number of hours per week a technician needs 
to work to take care of the pianos, which is also exactly the number of hours 
I am required to work. (Don't get too technical on me, because I realize that 
is for 52 weeks out of the year, when in actuality I only work 48 hours a 
year. But it is still very close). 

An administrator can understand that number. Not only will he/she understand 
that someone working 37.5 per week is full time, but he came up with that 
number all by him/her self. And that, I think, is much more important that 
just telling him/her you need a .5 technician to help you. 

I would like some feedback on this. Did some of you come up with numbers that 
closely represent your situation?

Wim Blees RPT
U of Alabama


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