Charge Numbers

While taking the online ethics training a few weeks ago, I came across a section titled "Using Proper Charge Codes". It reminded me what an absurd business environment we work in, where each employee has to allocate each hour worked to a specific "charge code". For those of you that do not know what "charge codes" are, allow me to give you a little background.

When a defense contractor wins a contract from the government, it receives a pool of money to perform that statement of work – i.e. "the budget". In an effort to keep better track of costs, management breaks down this budget into a series of smaller budgets, each having an allocated amount of money and "charge code" assigned to it. It's how management keeps track of their micro-budgets, monitoring how much employees are charging to each charge code until the money runs out.

Charge numbers can be very useful, but too much of anything can also be very bad. On larger programs, management has created so many charge codes (hundreds, if not thousands) that they've completely lost sight of the big picture. They spend most of their day trying to make sense of all these charge numbers – only to end up creating even more charge numbers because they can't understand the current ones. It's a cycle of charge codes that are arbitrarily derived, too narrowly defined, and overlapping in scope with other existing charge numbers.

As a result, tracking costs has essentially become meaningless and there's always confusion as to what employees should charge to.Everyone is affected by it, not just management. There are so may charge codes that it can sometimes take you 30 minutes to fill out your timecard. I'm surprised they don't have a charge number for going to the restroom. The question remains: what do I charge the half-hour to for filling out my timecard?
Because I should have a charge number for filling out my timecard, I throw rocks.