Category Archives: 1.4-The Process

Maintaining the schedule

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Don’t be afraid to change the plan

As mentioned in a previous entry, a schedule is simply a plan for the future and until it happens, it can change. Those of you with experience in planning will know that as soon as you communicate the schedule to someone, some event will happen to make that schedule invalid and force changes.

 

Any one of these events will cause a schedule to change and force the planner to redo one or more of the previous steps:

  1. A change in workload (big customer takes priority with a last minute request, last minute sale causes customer traffic increase, etc)
  2. A change in employee information (an employee forgot to give the planner unavailability, employee has just quit, HR just told you about a new employee starting, etc)
  3. A change of context (machine just broke down, snow storm is coming tomorrow, etc)
  4. Etc

 

There are hundreds if not thousands of examples where a new piece of information causes a planner to redo the schedule on an on-going basis basically making it a full time job.

 

The problem here is that once the schedule is posted and communicated, the planner can’t change the whole schedule. Employees now have shifts on which they base their own decisions about their lives. A planner can’t just come in and start from scratch. That published schedule now becomes a constraint and must endure as little changes as possible while answering the change of business.

 

It is in this step that most last minute decisions cause additional costs. A planner with no tool or no guidelines will make the decision that will make the immediate problem go away with little regards to the final cost.

Distributing Shifts

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You’ve got shifts and now you need to assign them.

 

Different measures may influence the way you place shifts:

  1. Fairness: do you distribute weekend or night shifts fairly
  2. Shift count: do all weekdays have the same amount of shifts
  3. Constraints: do you have complex constraints to look at

 

The first thing to do is to identify the days with the most shifts to assign. The planner will need to start with these days since they are the days where most people are needed (and the days that in theory, the planner kept the most capacity).

 

While placing these shifts, the planner will start with the shifts that will be measured for fairness and that need to be distributed fairly. Usually, counters are kept on fairness to determine who’s next to get the bad shift (or the good shift depending on what you measure).

 

The constraints are looked at when you get to assign the other days (usually the ones surrounding the busiest days and working outwards). You would then complete your schedule finishing with the day that has the lowest number of shifts to assign.

 

To make this step easy, the planner must be prepared with measures and counters. The more prepared the planner and the better the previous three steps are accomplished, the easier this step will be.

 

Planning the non-work

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Non-work is one of the most essential pieces of the puzzle

 

Each position represents a pre-determined capacity of work. Once that position is filled with an employee, that capacity is reduced by the constraints they have (vacation, breaks, etc).

 

Therefore, a planner must schedule the non-work first and remove the work capacity first before trying to assign the work. Although this seems to be in reverse order of what someone should do, it is essential to start with this step. Training, vacation, holidays, meetings and all other types of events that do not contribute to the core workload need to be scheduled first.

 

While placing this reduction of capacity, the planner can keep an eye on just that: the remaining capacity. On every day of every week, there is a potential of work assignments that remain and that are not removed. If the planner can keep daily and weekly capacity totals above the required workload, then the planner may have an easier job when distributing the actual work afterwards (I did say may since the individual constraints could prevent some shift assignments).

 

It is in this step that you must involve the employees as often and as transparently as possible. You need to gather the information about time off early and often. You need to establish deadlines (reasonable ones) for the employees to make their requests. You need to remind them often of the upcoming deadlines. Etc.

 

If you don’t involve your employees or don’t ask, they will only ask once they see the schedule and see that you scheduled them on a day they wanted off. Then the planner won’t be able to give them the day off. Then the employee will be pissed because they never ask for anything and never miss work and that’s how they are treated. Then when that day comes, that employee will call in sick. Then the planner will have to make a hasty decision and call someone on overtime. All this because you didn’t ask early enough…

 

The point in this step is that non-work is one of the most essential pieces of the puzzle because everyone is concerned about unproductive time (management because of the cost, employees because it’s their time off, etc). Keeping an eye on capacity early and often is key.

 

Calculating Positions

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In our case, a position refers to the hiring of one employee with specific constraints. For example, someone is hired to be cashier on a full time basis. Therefore, a schedule will be built using multiple positions (each with the same or different constraints). Positions are also referred to as a line or a row in a schedule. Each position will accept one or more shifts on different days in order for that position to be handed off to an employee.

 

That position also has a maximum capacity of work each day and each week. That position is also entitled to time off and sickness which reduces the capacity of the position. Absenteeism and rest can make an employee work only 75% of the time (depending on the number of vacation days, culture, break times, training, etc).

 

This means that even though you would have 40 hours of shifts to give every week, one employee is not sufficient. The number of positions you need are based on many factors:

  1. The number of shifts and their total durations: calculate the number of positions on the sum of shifts and not the workload
  2. The daily variation of shifts: There may be a different number of shifts required on each day for different positions
  3. The seasonal variation of workload: vacation resorts are exposed to seasonal demand where the number of positions will vary greatly during the year
  4. The demographics around your place of business: The people that surround you place of business make the pool of potential employees. If you are surrounded by students, don’t open full time Monday to Friday jobs or at least minimize them.

 

Calculating positions is sometimes seen as a chicken or egg story[1]: should you create a schedule first and adjust the positions based on the schedule results, or should you estimate your positions and use them as a constraint on your schedule?

 

There are ways to calculate the positions you would require best to match your workload but they do ignore what you already have as employees. The important point in this step is that you must use the shifts that were built in step one and not use the sum of the workload as approximate numbers. The workload profile may come back to haunt you later down the road.

 


[1] Author’s irrelevant note: the chicken or egg story has been sorted out by Professor John Brookfield from the University of Nottingham who discovered that any animal’s DNA does not change during its lifetime which means that the egg had to come first with the DNA of the chicken.

 

Breaking down the work

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Once the workload is established and quantified, a planner will break it down into shifts that have start and end times. These start and end times are based on the constraints also identified earlier.

The constraints will force the planner to do some math gymnastics to get to shifts that make sense for the employees and that cover the workload appropriately. The important item to remember in this step is that even though the planner is trying to match the number of hours of work with the sum of shift durations, they most probably won’t match.

 

Depending on the profile of the workload, it may not be possible to service a peak of customers just for two hours. If the planner has to deal with a constraint of a minimum shift of 4 hours in duration, then the total number of hours in the shifts will exceed the workload to cover this peak.

 

Therefore, the next steps should be planned using the hours in the shifts and not necessarily the hours in the workload only.

 

It is also important to remember all the different skills that are required to run a business. A planner will typically have to create a set of shifts for each of these skills (unless they can be combined to be worked by the same person). This also adds more hours to the total that is used for deciding what to hire.