Administration: noun the act of making productive people unproductive.

Here we go - another end of month. Reconciliations, audits, statistics, accruals, justifications, commiserations, late nights, early mornings, and fitting your normal duties around compiling a report to meet head office's deadlines. Perish the thought that someone may actually read, understand, and perhaps get some value out the 10 to 100+ pages of text, graphs, statistics, spreadsheets collated across the range of departments in your business.

Have you ever considered the cost of the administrative burden of compiling this information? How many departments do you have? Five, six, ten?? Safety, production, maintenance, engineering, commercial, marketing, human resources, exploration, business development. You may have more, less or a different mix. It doesn't matter.



I'm not here to tell you that all Administration is bad. It's not! Administration is necessary - there are people in organisations whose soul purpose is to administrate: Accountants, Document Controllers, Secretaries and so on. But when you take productive, frontline personnel away from their main purpose and get them to administrate AND you don't get a return on that investment, is where businesses need to focus.

When you consider that you may have to deploy up to a quarter of your office-based staff towards running reports, compiling statistics, updating graphs, writing justifications for under or over performance and generally pulling together a summary of departmental activities over the past month to generate a departmental report. You end up devoting significant hours of what could have been productive time to compilation of page upon page of paperwork, that is not too dissimilar from last month's report. It is not uncommon to find that the exercise rapidly descends into a cut-and-paste exercise where quality suffers.

If your department consists of 20 people, and 5 of them end up devoting an average of 8 hours each to compiling your departmental report. Consider then, that at say $100/hr, your department has devoted $4,000 towards production of the monthly report. 

Now, I want to suggest something a little radical... Take a step back and look at that departmental report. Would you pay a consultant $4,000 to produce that report for you? Probably not, and neither would I. You end up with a series of 6 departmental reports - at a cost of $24,000 each month ($288,000 annually).

What next? Then, you get your 6 department heads, the business unit heads, plus a few other hangers-on together and discuss the reports for a few hours. Say 10 people at an average hourly cost of $200/hr for 4 hours leads to a further $8,000 invested. Could your administrative time and expense be better devoted towards making your organisation operate more effectively? To be continued...

** I trust you enjoyed my article. Please Follow, Like, Share, and add your Comments. And most of all, stay tuned for the next instalment!

James Marshall is a passionate resources industry consultant with experience across technical, operational, commercial, and management functions in Australia, Indonesia, and New Zealand. James can be reached through LinkedIn, Facebook, and at www.marshallmining.com