Schedonomy® Science

Establishing what you’re doing

How do you get to that list of things to do? The first thing you need to do at a high level is to establish the business you do. What is your business and what do you provide your customer? Let’s walk through a simplified example of a grocery store[1].

Say I’m the new proud owner of a grocery store with four cash registers. Now as the new proud owner, I need to determine my hours of operations: when am I open for business? Ideally, you already know when you have the best traffic of customers in your store and you know the weekly patterns of your customer’s habits. These patterns will be greatly influenced by the area you are in: if you are in an area where a lot of retired folks reside, you are more likely to get traffic during the day time. If you are in an area where young families live, you’ll get high peaks just before meals when parents realize they have no clue what to cook for dinner and they’re stopping to get something after work just before getting home. So knowing your area will be important if you want to provide good service and help you decide on your opening hours. In order to keep our example simple, we’ll make our opening hours 9am to 9pm every day of the week.

Next step is to list what employees have to do when the store is open and when it is closed. In order to list what everyone needs to do, it is always easier to categorize and keep things as simple as possible. I mentioned the importance of categories in the introduction and you’ll see the effect it has here.

The first thing to do is to walk through the customer’s experience and identify what he does.

1. Customer Experience
   1. Customer walks in

2. Customer picks up a cart
3. Customer walks through the aisles and picks from their grocery list
4. Customer stops at the butcher’s to ask for some sliced ham
5. Customer goes to the cash register and pays
6. Customer takes bags and leaves

You also know that there are tasks that are around specific events in a day or in a week that are not related directly related to a customer’s experience. You need to add these as well.

1. Other Events

1. Open/Close store
2. Perform inventory
3. Receive delivery trucks
4. Stock shelves

Now what? From each of these steps, you can identify tasks and activities that are related to the steps you just outlined.

1. Customer Experience
   1. Customer walks in
      1.                                                                i.      Clean entrance
   2. Customer picks up a cart
      1.                                                                i.      Gather carts from parking lot
   3. Customer walks through the aisles and picks from their grocery list
      1.                                                                i.      Stock shelves
      2.                                                               ii.      Service customer on item locations
   4. Customer stops at the butcher’s to ask for some sliced ham
      1.                                                                i.      Service customer at butcher
      2.                                                               ii.      Clean slicer and other bench tools
   5. Customer goes to the cash register and pays
      1.                                                                i.      Service customer at register
      2.                                                               ii.      Bag the items
   6. Customer takes bags and leaves
      1.                                                                i.      Pick up carts around the exit

1. Other Events
   1. Open/Close store
      1.                                                                i.      Open and close register
      2.                                                               ii.      Prepare/store meat
   2. Perform inventory
      1.                                                                i.      Go through meat inventory
      2.                                                               ii.      Go through shelves inventory
   3. Receive delivery trucks
      1.                                                                i.      Empty truck
      2.                                                               ii.      Store goods in storage room
   4. Stock shelves
      1.                                                                i.      Stock shelves

You’ve just identified some work to do. It‘s not yet your workload.  You can now take that list and categorize it according to words you would use when telling an employee what to do. In our example, if we tell an employee « you’ll be cashier today », the word ‘cashier’ represents work that both the planner and the employee can relate to. Usually, you can use the same words as a job or a position or a type of employee that will have the skills to perform this work. But it’s important to remember that even though you use the same words for simplicity, they represent two different things: one is the workload, the other is the employee’s job title.