The work to be accomplished represents the cornerstone of scheduling.
This work represents the business of any organization and it is crucial to translate that business into actionable work with the appropriate duration.
All businesses have a product and/or service that they provide their customers. Products take time to build and services take time to provide. If you are a car manufacturer, you don’t simply schedule people and tell each of them to build a car. That car is broken down into thousands of processes and assembly line tasks. Each task takes a certain amount of time and these tasks are synchronized so that cars get assembled at a certain pace or cadence.
The same thing goes for a retail store. A certain amount of customers is expected and people are required to service these customers. There will be a direct relationship between the amount of sales or customers and the employees that will support these sales.
The workload is the result of the translation of the business products into manageable, measurable, and assignable activities and tasks. Future text will detail how to translate your business into a workload that makes sense.
One thing to remember about the workload is that it evolves and changes just as your business grows. Therefore, even though you did a great job of quantifying your workload last year, you probably need to do it again this year. A mistake done at the quantifying stage of the workload has a domino and an amplifying effect on your operations costs later down the road.