Category Archives: 1-Introduction

What is workforce scheduling?

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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:

  1.          I.      The workload or work to be done (This point will be seen in detail in a future text)
  2.         II.      The employees or resources that do the work (ditto)
  3.       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.

Change is the only constant

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Time is the only dimension that mankind has not yet mastered. Technology can put us anywhere on the planet (even off the planet) at increasingly fast speeds. But, no matter what happens, what you are trying to do, where you are trying to go, time is the only thing that will not bend on this earth. These seconds will tick away at the same pace no matter what happens.

 

There are three categories of time: the past, the present, and the future. There’s nothing you can do about the past except learn from it and plan with this new knowledge in mind. The present is always moving. The moment you are reading this line, the present has just moved to the past. The present therefore never exists: it is a frontier between the past and the future.

 

That leaves us with the future. Believe it or not, you can predict the future: you simply need to plan. If you plan a meeting, chances are that this meeting will occur. The future is simply a constantly changing plan. The plan keeps changing because the past is giving us knowledge and information that provoke decisions that change the plan and therefore alters the future.

 

You can therefore change the future at any time. A plan is only a plan until it happened. It only becomes reality once it has past that present frontier. This means that you have control of the plan all the way up until the last moment before it becomes part of the past.

 

In order to illustrate this new bit of power you didn’t know you had, let me make an analogy. It’s like driving a car on the highway; you look on the side and the scenery is moving fast. You see that exit coming up (the future) and stare at it until you’re upon it and it zooms by and all of the sudden it’s behind you. Since you’re in the driver’s seat, you can change directions, take that exit and change highways at any time BEFORE it zooms by. Once you’ve past the exit, you won’t back up on the highway. That exit is now in the past and if your plan was to take the exit, it’s too late. You need to change plans, take another exit and change routes. You’re now changing your future by reacting to the past.

 

All right, so maybe this is a little too philosophical but my point is that a schedule or a plan can be changed all the way up to the time that it’s executed. Imagine thousands of individuals constantly changing plans every day. That’s a lot of changes for those of you who are allergic to change. In order to make you feel better, tell yourself this quote from the Greek philosopher Heraclitus: ‘The only constant is change’.

 

Everybody Schedules

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We all do scheduling on an individual scale at home, at work, mixing our schedules with our colleagues for meetings, with our friends for shows or dinners, with the kids’ practices, etc. Managing our own schedule can easily become a nightmare; imagine trying to mix schedules for dozens of people.

 

The only way a person can feel that they have maximized their time is to be prepared and to plan. We even do it for a simple vacation; what are we going to see? What time does the ride go at? You pick the important thing you want to do or see and plan other activities around it. Without knowing it, you’ve just done some scheduling while on vacation.

Introduction

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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.