Modeling a manager’s work as a service activity

Abstract

Planning of manager’s workload is an elusive and challenging issue that has no exact quantitative tools. This paper develops for the first time (to the best of our knowledge) an analytical model that shows how a manager’s activity and its associated workload can be analyzed as a provision of various services. The model is essentially a queuing model of tasks with arrivals, waiting time, and services (with a single server). The model is first analyzed in the most general way, finding the mean values of waiting times and queue length. While the proposed model is for one manager, it is based on very general assumptions and would fit most practical environments. Then, a simpler model for determining the optimal span of control for a manager is developed and illustrated using a numerical example.