Scheduling is not only for math wizards.
Workforce Scheduling is one of the areas that is often hidden and forgotten in a business. It is usually performed by the first line supervisors with teams of up to 20 people on a piece of paper or in a spreadsheet with little or no support from their organization.
Often left to facts of life or to the ‘way it’s been done for years’, the schedule is sometimes seen as a beast that nobody wants to tackle and no one takes the time to analyze and examine the procedures that surround the life of a schedule.
Once you understand the basic concepts and can break down a schedule into approachable pieces, you’ll be able to tame it in no time. In the end, everybody is doing the same thing: trying to put the right person at the right place at the right time doing the right thing. That is true no matter what industry you’re in.
Therefore, this many-part series on the blog will start off at a very high level. It’s meant to give you an understanding on different aspects of scheduling and also to step out of the usual vocabulary and give some structure to the way we think about scheduling.
You should feel free to pick any text and read only that one. If you think one of the texts applies to your business more than another, feel free to jump to it.