On Jan 21, 2006, at 04:27, Pat Kelly wrote:
>> The latter isn't an obvious nor necessary benefit. You don't have
>> any more or fewer total work assignments (volunteers aside) with the
>> work groups divided up differently.
> actually, there are more jobs to be assigned these days, including the
> waiver sign-ups at the gate, kid kart manager, novice instructor or
> advisor,
> yadda yadda.
That's absolutely true, but I was trying to point out something
different to Don - a couple of responses have given me the impression
I didn't do very well, so I'll try again.
If you have 220 entrants, you have 220 man-positions to work with
without asking for assistance (volunteers). That number doesn't
change whether you're running eight groups, six groups, or two groups
- it is dependent on the number of entries, not the run groups.
What Don was saying is that, with more run groups, y'all were finding
instances where some task was going unfilled in a sparsely populated
group - so the chosen remedy was to make fewer groups, which
hopefully would a) help average out the attendance in each group, and
b) leave more workers on hand for each group so a sparse group would
still be able to handle the course. You still have 220 man-positions
to deal with, you've just made the tasks fewer but longer.
That's fine as a practical matter, but understand that the base
assumption is invalid - the "solution" only pertains because work
groups are artificially tied to run groups in the first place. There
is no necessary reason to do this beyond convention.
Now, Pat, to get back to your point: yes, you have to have all the
positions covered, and that may force you to fewer/longer work
assignments anyway. As a rough estimate, you need 4 people in the
trailer per run group, and about 12 other non-course assignments
(gate, tech, sound, reg, etc.). Course worker stations is usually
determined by number of radios, 6-8 typically, with ideally three
people at each. So, at 40 man-positions per run group, you certainly
would be overtaxed for eight run groups, and would have to either
change the run group count or decouple the work assignments from the
run groups. OTOH, if you can get by with six stations with two
workers, you're down to 28 man-positions per run group and eight
groups becomes more feasible again.
KeS
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