There are many definitions on workforce scheduling
These definitions mostly depend on the person looking at it.
If you are an employee, the perspective is your own schedule that your employer will give you each week. As an employee, this schedule drives your life and you’ll plan around it or you’ll ask the planner for changes because someone important is getting married and you need to work another day.
If you are a planner in charge of doing the schedule, it’s your daily nightmare. This schedule changes all the time because not everybody told you what they wanted at the time you were creating it. Also, that schedule will change as soon as you pass it out. As a planner, this is your never-ending loop of plan-post-redo.
If you are the boss or the boss of finance, this schedule is a cost. You will look at measuring the schedule in many ways to reduce that cost so you can increase productivity and profit. You’ll also educate these planners on what KPI (Key Performance Indicators) you look at so they know when to expect praise or blame.
As you can see, there could be many perspectives on the schedule and its impact. Simply put, a workforce schedule is the match between people and work. There are three major components to a schedule:
- I. The workload or work to be done (This point will be seen in detail in a future text)
- II. The employees or resources that do the work (ditto)
- III. The constraints that impose the way to schedule (ditto)
An important note here: you will notice throughout this series that I categorize and over categorize. This is to keep things within a list of no more than 7 items. If I ever get a list of more than 7 items, this means I need another category. Humans can only remember so many things[1] and therefore by categorizing everything, it‘s easier to remember and it forces you to organize the information.
[1] Psychology experts say that memory is designed to remember 7 things (plus or minus 2) of the same list.