Apogee Productivity Stats

Monday, 01 January 2018 00:00 Nick Sanders
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We’ve recently expended a lot of umbrage pointing the finger at DCAA and tsk tsking about audit quality and lack of productivity. How about we turn that magnifying glass on ourselves?

It’s only fair, after all. If we’re going to complain about the inefficiencies of government auditors, we should at least have the courage to put our own metrics out there, perhaps for others to tsk tsk about our inefficiencies. We don’t perform audits but we do consulting projects and we publish blog articles from time to time. So how did we do in 2017?

Records show that we served seven different clients in 2017. One or two of those clients were tiny efforts, hardly worth mentioning. But a couple of those clients represent larger engagements. We made three separate trips to the Pacific Northwest to help one client with a project to develop an adequate cost accounting system suitable for cost-reimbursement contracts. We supported another client throughout the year, as it attempted to resolve multiple disputes with its prime contractor. (We expect to continue to support that client well into 2018.) Is seven a lot? No. Not by any means. But it kept us busy throughout the year.

Perhaps a more important metric is the number of blog articles written and published. This article marks the 101st article published in 2017. That’s nearly two per week. Is that a lot? Well, yes—especially for a year in which the FAR and DFARS revisions essentially stopped dead because of the new Administration’s insistence that rules be removed rather than added.

Let’s compare 2017 to 2016. During 2016 we published 89 articles. Thus, the 2017 output was 13 percent higher than the 2016 output.

What about 2015? In 2015 we published 111 articles – so both 2016 and 2017 were somewhat lower than 2015 in terms of productivity. In fact, we should say that productivity has generally fallen over the years. For example, in 2010 we published 210 articles, meaning that in 2017 we are only half as productive as we were seven years ago.

In our defense, many of the earlier articles were much shorter than they are today. Some of the early articles were little more than a caption and a link, or perhaps just a nice picture we liked. It’s quite likely that the total output is comparable between 2010 and 2017, if one is counting published words rather than the number of articles. (Don’t worry: we’re not going to actually do that comparison.)

At this point, we believe we are averaging 1,000 words per article, or even more. Almost no article is less than 500 words in length, and many are well in excess of 1,000 words long. 2,000 words or more per week may not sound like much, but we invite you to try it.

In fact, we’ve been waiting for an article from our technologist, one discussing the number of website hits and the sources. We noticed some anomalies on certain articles this year, and we asked him to see if we were being hit by bots or something. (The answer, according to him, is “no.”) Anyway, he agreed to write an article on the topic around Thanksgiving. More than a month later, we’re still waiting.

Which is basically why nearly every single article on this website was written by one person.

There is only one person who has the—what shall we call it?—gumption to type article after article after article. We have more than one consultant but only one blog author.

So there you go. Productivity may be down but we’re still here, eight years in, still typing and publishing blog articles about topics we find to be of interest.

We trust you find the articles to be of interest as well.

Happy New Year.

(Editorial Note: This article was slated for publication on Friday December 29, but publication was delayed by the webmaster for nefarious reasons of his own. Doesn't matter; we're still counting it as a 2017 article.)