[johnbellone]

6 person team * 30 minutes = 180 minutes / 60 = 3 hours

All of this helps if he would have used the common term man hours because 3 hours literally wasn't lost. In my experience the people that make these kinds of claims are the people usually confused about project management, at least for software development, in general.

Unfortunately at larger corporations everything comes down to how many man days a project can fit in a quarter without taking into account the fact that most phases in projects can't fire at the same time due to dependencies.

I actually think Gannt charts model this quite nicely for the higher ups.