Jody runs a volunteer portion of a larger organization. She needs six weekly volunteers for about an hour while the larger organization meets.
She has asked people to help with her portion, and a teenage Billy volunteered. She assigned each volunteer a week to avoid overworking anyone.
Billy accepted his assignment.
Did Billy commit to show up? Can anyone commit to anything?
If Billy committed to show, did he ensure he would not be in a car accident on the way? Did he ensure no act of God would intervene? Does he know his parents will be at the meeting that week?
In the software world, we have the concept of Service Level Agreements.
We don’t say that a service will be up 100% of the time. We agree with a customer that it will be up at least X% of the time.
Imagine Billy could calculate how likely he was to show.
For Jody, knowing that Billy will show 90% of his assigned weeks helps, but it is insufficient.
She needs six volunteers every week. If all her volunteers showed up 90% of the time, half of the weeks, someone would be missing.
Sometimes, two would be missing.
In software, we have what’s called a hot spare. Jody could schedule a seventh person and have an eighth on call.
This statistical math can also deal with Bistromathics. You get each person to tell you how likely they are to show up. With that, you can calculate the likelihood for various numbers of people to show and reserve a table for a number you’re pretty sure will show.
But
Billy does not have enough experience to guess how often he will show.
People can’t honestly calculate how likely they are to show up to something. Even if they could, it would be placing a lot of work on volunteers or dinner guests to give you a confidence percentage they will show.
Jody can look at aggregate numbers and calculate that teenagers show up 90% of the time.
Jody deals with a mere six people 52 times per year. She doesn’t have sufficient data to calculate that 90% confidently.
We need more data. I imagine Jody’s scheduling software company has more data. But it doesn’t likely know when people showed. If it started to collect that, maybe by offering to reschedule people with ease, it could calculate the likelihood that Billy would need to reschedule.