Man-hour
A person-hour, short- hp, formerly man-hour, called MS, ( English one - hour, person - hour) is the amount of work that creates an average of one person in one hour. It uses this term to calculate estimates for the total amount of work for the completion of a task. For example, you might require twenty man-hours to write an essay, or ten man-hours to prepare for a big family dinner.
Applications
Person-hours do not include time for breaks, they stand for the pure working. If you want to calculate the total time for a task, additional breaks must be taken into account. The above essay is not finished in twenty consecutive hours, but is interrupted by other tasks, meals, sleep and other distractions.
One use of person-hours calculation is the estimation of team size and total duration of a project. But it must not simply the number of person-hours are divided by the number of team members.
There are just for software systems many formulas that take into account a certain minimum duration of projects and the different levels of difficulty.
An error in the pure calculation of person-hours produced for example by the fact that the organization, training and coordination of additional workers can take more time than save the additional forces. It must also be taken into account when estimating the end time of the project, that often can not work the whole provided the team is 100 % in the project, either because other projects of higher priority and are pending or because a part of the team in the meantime with maintenance and service tasks is charged.
Person-hours are a characteristic of scientific management in Taylorism, which was founded by Frederick Winslow Taylor, Henry Gantt, Frank Bunker Gilbreth and others.
Other units
Other common units are the man-day, the people of the week as well as man-month.
- The man-day (short- PT, also called " Bearbeitertag ", BT, " man-day ", MT) is computed in Europe than 8 man-hours.
- The people week (short- PW, "Man Week", MW ) is calculated as a five person-days.
- The man-month (short- PM, "Man Month ", MM ) is calculated as 20 person-days.
Only implicitly personal effort designations are time - works, ie Day's work (TW), work week ( WW), etc.
Person-years
A similar concept, person-years (PJ, also "Agent year," BJ or " man-year " ), is used for very large projects. It is the amount of work the average working person during a year.
This of course depends on the normal working week duration, and the number of vacation days that vary greatly from country to country: the OECD has one person-year of 1432 hours measured in 2008 for Germany. This is only underscored by the Netherlands with 1389 hours. The maximum in the 24 countries studied is 2120 hours in Greece ( for the year 2007, there are also data on South Korea: 2316 hours ). Standard values are called as 2000 or 2087 person-hours for the United States.
Depending on the hourly wage equivalent to one person-year to a Wertäqivalent of less than U.S. $ 1,000 ( developing country ) to more than $ 100,000 ( in the G8 ).