Monday Question: Where Did the Hours Go?
If something you deployed this year is genuinely saving time, this Monday's question is the one that decides whether that time became value:
What are people doing with the hours we recovered?
This is the sharpest question in the measurement conversation and the least reported one. Hours saved is a potential number. Where those hours went is an actual one.
The strong answers name a person and a change:
- The coordinator now handles vendor escalations that used to wait three days.
- The analyst who spent Fridays assembling reports now maintains the intake process.
- The team that lost four hours a week to status meetings ships one more project a quarter.
When you can say a sentence like that, the ROI conversation ends, because nobody argues with reassigned work they can watch happening.
The weak answer is also worth knowing: "nowhere in particular." Recovered hours have a way of dissolving quietly back into the workday, absorbed by whatever was already crowding it. That's not a technology failure. It's a management decision that never got made, and it's fixable, but only by someone who noticed.
There's a harder version of this question for anything that's been running a while: if we can't say where the hours went, did we actually recover any? Sometimes the honest answer is that the tool changed how a task felt without changing how long it took, which is a real finding and worth acting on.
I've written about what a pilot really costs when nobody can say whether it worked and why the before-number has to be captured while the old way still exists. This question is the one that comes after both.
Budget season starts sooner than it feels like it does. Worth having the answer ready.
If your numbers need building before someone asks for them, that's a working session.
Rosemarie Withee has spent thirteen years helping operations teams get real work out of their software, first Microsoft 365, now AI. She’s written six books for Wiley and builds AI products at Portal Integrators.