**3.5 Human resources required for CI**

In terms of the materialization of CI, ideally the efforts for improvement are part of the normal day-to-day work at all levels of the organization. All people in the organization routinely devote a portion of their daily time to CI tasks. Not spending any time on improvement tasks is bad but spending all the time on improvement tasks is also bad because it is necessary that the work is done for the products to be delivered and the services are provided. Many are the ones who say they do not have time for continuous improvement. On this argument, there is an interesting metaphor:

*"A lumberjack was cutting down trees uninterrupted with his axe and you could see he was very focused on it. His goal was to cut down as many trees as he could in the time he had. There is however evidence that needs to be met, is that the more cut the less effective the axe to cut. Another man watching approached him and suggested that he should sharpen the axe. The lumberjack replied that he could not sharpen the axe because he did not have time for it."*

This well-known story is referred to by Stephen Covey in his famous book "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" [17] In this book, the seventh habit, proposed by the author and which is called "fine tuning the instrument", is directly related to the lumberjack metaphor and also aligned with the principle of continuous improvement.

Returning to the question of what should be the ideal time spent on CI operations, or time spent sharpening the ax, there is a famous metaphor attributed to Abraham Lincoln:

*"If I had six hours to cut down a tree, I'd spend the first four sharpening the axe"*

In this sentence it is suggested to spend more time on CI tasks than on the tasks of the work itself to add value to products and services. This is not really the practice in organizations. The percentage of time spent on CI is much lower. Although publications that advance with an indicative value are very rare, Mark Hamel & Michael O'Connor argue [18] a value of 3% as a reference for the percentage of human resources that in a company should be dedicated to CI tasks. Interesting value as a reference. However, 3% of the human resources dedicated to CI should be more expensive than 3% of the time of all human resources simply because by assumption the human resources dedicated exclusively to CI, with knowledge of CI and able to promote CI have higher salaries than the average employee.

Considering a round number of 460 minutes that each employee dedicates per day in his work, then 13.8 minutes (3% of 460 minutes) should be used on average for CI tasks. The daily meetings of 5 minutes of the operational teams have a very common practice in companies with organized continuous improvement systems. If we add these 5 minutes daily of all employees with some possible weekly meetings that have longer duration, if we also add the time spent in occasional continuous improvement events and the management and support time in the improvement continues then easily reaches the value of 3% referred.
