Tag Archives: Schedule

Breaking down the work

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Once the workload is established and quantified, a planner will break it down into shifts that have start and end times. These start and end times are based on the constraints also identified earlier.

The constraints will force the planner to do some math gymnastics to get to shifts that make sense for the employees and that cover the workload appropriately. The important item to remember in this step is that even though the planner is trying to match the number of hours of work with the sum of shift durations, they most probably won’t match.

 

Depending on the profile of the workload, it may not be possible to service a peak of customers just for two hours. If the planner has to deal with a constraint of a minimum shift of 4 hours in duration, then the total number of hours in the shifts will exceed the workload to cover this peak.

 

Therefore, the next steps should be planned using the hours in the shifts and not necessarily the hours in the workload only.

 

It is also important to remember all the different skills that are required to run a business. A planner will typically have to create a set of shifts for each of these skills (unless they can be combined to be worked by the same person). This also adds more hours to the total that is used for deciding what to hire.

 

 

The Constraints

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By definition, a schedule is laid out through time because of constraints.

 

Most constraints are time-based. Things take time to do and as we all know, time moves on no matter what. Time imposes constraints on the duration work requires, on the moment that work should be done, and finally on the person that will do the work since that person needs to be there and be available in order for the work to be done.

 

There are constraints related to the sequence of the work to be done. Sometimes, things need to be done in a certain order. I mentioned earlier that you can change a plan at any time until it’s actually happened. Well of course, there are different obstacles to changing a plan at the last minute. You can’t open the door on the highway and say « OK, I’m getting off » if you’re still at full speed. You’ll have to announce yourself, so that the steps for you to get off can be taken in the right order (like pulling over…).

 

The most widely known constraints are the ones concerning employees. An employee can only work so many hours in a day or in a week; an employee needs to rest; needs breaks; needs vacation; etc. These constraints are usually explained in an employee handbook or in a union agreement. The problem usually lies in the interpretation of these constraints as they are written with the perspective of human resources. They are not formulated for a planner in charge of applying them.

 

A strategic constraint negotiated at the company level may be difficult to apply at the schedule level. For example, if the company adopts a car pooling policy to reduce tardiness on the job, that’s great at an executive level and seems like it works for all employees. But if you have a department where employees share different shift start times, this policy imposes additional constraints to the planner. That planner now needs to schedule the same shifts to people who live close together so they can take advantage of car pooling as the policy now says. You can imagine the additional headaches for that planner to accommodate everyone while making sure the business operates efficiently. Some of my future entries will detail the constraints planners have to deal with and how to best express them.

 

The Employee

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The single most difficult element of a schedule is the employee.

 

Why? An employee is a human being with his own life, his own goals, and his own projects. That employee has plans for their life and they are changing.

 

For an employee, that schedule you create is their life. That person will have to plan all their personal activities and family obligations around it and that person will try to get the best schedule possible for their own benefit. As people grow older, the benefits will change over the years. What was a good thing for that employee last year (lots of overtime) may not be good this year because that person just entered parenthood. This means that just like the workload changes, your employee preferences will also evolve.

 

Employees want to be treated fairly. Folks who get hired into a job that has varying schedules know what to expect, but they also want to make sure the bad schedules (the weekend night shift for example) doesn’t always fall on them.

 

The schedule is known to be one of the key elements that cause turnover. Anyone in Human Resources would tell you what the cost of turnover is and the importance it has. I won’t make that point here, but I will state that for employees who are scheduled, they will change jobs in a heartbeat for a better schedule simply because it means a better life.

 

You need to establish expectations for the workforce. The clearer they are, the easier your life will be. Don’t put reality on a positive spin or a negative spin: tell the story as clearly as you can to your employees. Otherwise, any gray area will be made up by people. Nature does not like holes and fills them up quickly. Therefore, any hole you leave in your story will be left for people to fill with whatever is good for them (an optimistic person will fill it with happy thoughts and the pessimistic will see a plot to squeeze all the employees and abuse their good will to the bone).

 

Any HR specialist has a whole bunch of directives to give planners and management and what to say and what not to say to employees. In the end, it’s all about humans and future entries will examine more aspects around the employees and the points to look at when scheduling is concerned.

The Workload

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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.

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.

Preface

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I learned the trick of scheduling by meeting hundreds of people.

 

My job was to build software that would help them out in their daily tasks. By designing four different software tools targeted at different industries and working with top operational research specialists over 15 years, I was able to wrap my head around the whole problem and develop deep knowledge in scheduling.

 

The problem with this approach is that knowledge is all in my head. One of my employees told me at some point: ‘I can’t do anything about my lack of knowledge; there is no book and no diploma out there about scheduling’. I thought: ‘Really? This can’t be…’. There had to be a better way to learn about scheduling than meeting customers at hyper speed.

 

When trying to find books about scheduling, I was always steered to project management books or to high-end operational research articles that lost me after two sentences. I found no book that would explain the principles and concepts of workforce scheduling in practical terms that are understandable to the non-scientific.

 

So here I am, a few years later, with the project to write a book about scheduling a workforce and making it simple, clear and concise. I send my sincere thanks to all of these wonderful planners who took the time to explain their own way of doing their schedule in their part of the world.

 

But, things don’t always go as you planned. So this is why that instead of publishing a book, I’ve decided to release every part as an independent text on this blog. So, if you stay tuned, you will have every chapter and sub-chapter available on this website.

 

This series is therefore targeted to those who want to understand why is scheduling so key and important to a business and also, why is it so difficult to achieve. I hope you will find it enjoyable, but mostly, educating and understandable.