An example of misappropriated resources in an educational system

To make the issue of opportunity cost more clear, it would be helpful to imagine a hypothetical case from education.

Let us consider a school system that has observed the success of the social networking experiment in Saugus. However, that district does not have the information technology resources to develop the required infrastructure. Officials in the top echelon, in accordance with the Peter principle, decide to proceed. The social networking platform offers important benefits.

Since the compensation of teaching professionals is already a budgeted item, removing three teachers from their classrooms would represent a "soft" cost. No additional expenditures would be incurred. Full time reassignment would clearly not be a solution, so early childhood educators would be working on the project during student nap time. Teaching assistants could be deployed, subject to budgetary restraints, to facilitate continuity for the students.

Does this idea seem reasonable?

Without question, the district will benefit from the new tool. However, as per Parkinson's Law, the only implementation schedule that could be appropriate in this scenario would be a long term outlook. For example, even as long as three weeks of classroom absence for completion would seem optimistic, despite the fact that the framework had already been developed elsewhere. Perhaps I should defer here to another purveyor of dismal science, John Maynard Keynes, who has noted that we are all dead in the long run.

Returning to the domain within which I am developing learning tools, business managers can disrupt work processes by reallocating capital, human or otherwise. Adaptability is an important asset, but staff must be allowed to perform their assigned functions. The spreadsheet model will be used to help managers, who are the learners in this case, reflect upon potential consequences of actions being considered.