Team Leader Guide to Weekly Planning - Workware Login · PDF fileTeam Leader Guide to Weekly...

Team Leader Guide to Weekly Planning

Global Leaders in Operations Performance Management

©2009 ActiveOps Limited. activeops.com

2Guide to Weekly Planning 2

1 Introduction ............................................................................................................3

2 Your involvement ..................................................................................................4

2.1 The benefits of weekly planning .............................................................................4

2.1.1 Addressing common objections to planning ......................................6

2.2 The weekly provisional plan .....................................................................................7

2.2.1 The principles of provisional planning ...................................................7

2.2.2 Putting together a realistic plan ...............................................................9

2.3 The weekly loading meeting ................................................................................. 15

2.4 Committing the plan ................................................................................................ 16

2.4.1 Why balance the committed plan? ....................................................... 16

2.4.2 The weekly commitment meeting ....................................................... 17

3 Alternative planning approaches .................................................................19

4 Outcomes ..............................................................................................................20

Contents


1 Introduction

Having completed the ‘data capture and reporting’ phase of the implementation, you are ready to start ‘short-term planning and control’. This document describes how you will establish a cycle of short-term—typically weekly—planning.

Short-term planning is at the heart of Active Operations Management. It involves building up a picture of the work your team has to do and comparing it to the resources available. You will then meet with the other team leaders in your department to compare plans and agree how they should be adjusted to achieve the best outcome for the department as a whole. You will communicate your updated plan to your team so that they will know what is expected of them in the week ahead.

MobilisationData

capture and reporting

Short-term planning

and control

Medium- range

planning

Long-range planning


2 Your involvement The steps you will carry out in a weekly planning cycle are:

• Create a weekly provisional plan.

• Prepare for and attend a weekly loading meeting of team leaders and the department manager.

• Produce a balanced, committed plan as a result of a successful loading meeting.

• Hold a weekly commitment meeting.

You will manage your team actively using this planning cycle every week from now onwards.

The following sections will explain in detail how you will carry out the steps but firstly, let’s look at how planning can benefit you and your team and address some commonly held objections.

2.1 The benefits of weekly planning

Planning ahead is the key to making a successful shift from reactive or bureaucratic management to active management. Without effective planning it is not possible to manage your team so that you are in control of events rather than having events control you.

The four key benefits of planning are as follows:

1. Making best use of time available

‘Use it or lose it’ is one of AOM’s foundation principles. There is no point in looking back at the end of a week and saying “We could have done some training this week”. Planning gives you the chance to identify and make use of available time so that there is time to react to events. If you only react whenever surplus time becomes available, there is a risk that you will do too little, too late.

2. Improving communications

Without a standard planning process, communication problems can arise. For example, one team leader may say “I’m short staffed at the moment so it’s going to be a tough week”, while another may be thinking “Their staff were sitting around last week while mine were working extra hard to meet our SLAs”. These statements show that the team leaders are making informal plans. They suggest some forecasting of future workload and comparison of this with the expected staffing level. The problem with this informal planning is that different people don’t necessarily share the same standards or basic assumptions. So the response of your colleagues might not be as you expect. An improved planning process, in which all teams follow the same basic disciplines and assumptions, greatly increases communication and cooperation between teams.


3. Improving motivation

Plans provide two things that support motivation, both for individuals and teams.

• Plans provide targets against which you can measure your performance.

• Plans provide a sense of what is possible.

Consider first, the way plans provide goals against which you can measure your performance. Imagine any game without any goals or targets by which you can measure your performance. It might be enjoyable to mess around or practice for a while, but sooner or later you are going to want to have a game - and keep score. People need feedback, and keeping score provides the feedback that is a key element of motivation. Your team members need to know how well they are doing and they need some sense of achievement. Planning provides the goals, i.e. the basis for keeping ‘score’.

Plans also motivate because they provide a sense of what is possible, and break daunting targets down into more manageable steps. It will be very hard for you and your staff to stay positive if you feel snowed under with work and feel that the backlogs are out of control. Your customers will be unhappy and it could seem like there is no hope of improvement. Good planning helps your team to focus on what can be done - giving them the motivation to try to achieve it.

4. Reducing stress

A major cause of stress in the working environment is the sense of not being in control. A plan is a way to regain control of the uncertain world around you. Having a plan doesn’t make the world less unpredictable, or less changeable, but it does give you an anchor - a point of reference that allows you to measure the extent of the issue if things start to go wrong. Planning helps reduce stress, not from changing our uncertain world, but from changing the way we respond to that uncertainty. It encourages us to identify when work is not going according to plan, assess the impact of whatever event is causing the deviation and take corrective actions in good time.


2.1.1 Addressing common objections to planning

Three common objections to planning are:

1. “Planning stifles creativity”

For some people, the idea of planning and being ‘in control’ seems very boring – where is the sense of danger, the energy and the spark of creativity? However, anybody that has spent months labouring with too few staff, trying to achieve too much in too little time, will understand that the problems caused by a lack of planning sap your energy and leave no room or appetite for creativity. Planning creates certainty and stability where it is needed – which releases time for spontaneity and creativity where it is possible.

2. “Our work is too unpredictable”

Life might not be certain, but is it really unpredictable? Here are some examples of experiences from teams within one organisation that recently adopted AOM:

One team that said life was “totally unpredictable” went on to say that “Mondays are always our busiest day”.

A team whose workloads did indeed fluctuate a lot (+/- 100% of the average) had an SLA of 5 days. They felt driven by the pressures of the incoming work, but in fact spent most of their time working on cases that had been in the office for several days.

3. “We need to be responsive to our customers”

It’s important to remember that the plan is a guide, not a constraint. We occasionally hear people joking that if they have planned for 100 phone calls today they should tell the 101st caller “I’m terribly sorry, you’re not on the plan”. You should always meet the customer requirements, delivering the service that the business has defined. The idea is to plan what can be planned so that you can give more time to cope with the unpredictable. There are typically some aspects of your business where you have to be totally responsive. The skill is to continue to try to keep a view of the plan and to stay in control. If not, you risk falling so far out of control that you do not respond as well as you could.


2.2 The weekly provisional plan

2.2.1 The principles of provisional planning

The purpose of the weekly plan is to make best use of resources in the short term.

You can think of your plan as being like the following balance sheet:

Work ResourcesCore Work Base Time

Staff Complement (hours) 42

Annual Leave (hours) -7Core Task 1 5

Core Task 2 7

Core Task 3 12

Annual Leave (hours) 7

Flexitime (hours)

3-)sruoh( evaeL kciS

Sub Total Available Resources 32Total Nominal Core Work (hours)

%28ytivitcudorP

Total Actual Core Work (hours) 38

Sub Total Available Resources 32

Surplus/Shortfall: Resource - Work -13

Balancing Actions

Diverted Work)sruoh( emiTksaT

M ti 1 5

6)sruoh( emitrevO

Loan (hours)

Borrow (hours) 7Meetings 1.5

Training and Development 3

2kroW tcejorP

( )

Temporary Staff (hours)

Total Balancing Action (hours) 13

Total Diverted Work (Hours) 6.5

TOTAL WORK (hours) 45TOTAL RESOURCES (hours) 45Final Surplus / Shortfall 0

136 680

124 868

27 324

NominalCore Work

(mins)

31

Volume(items)

Std Time(mins)Task

On the left hand side we have all the work that needs to be done, and on the right hand side we have the resources available to do the work. The purpose of your provisional plan is to identify any mismatch between the work you ideally want to do and the resources that are available to do it.

You might notice that we put diverted tasks such as training or meetings on the ‘work’ side – rather than subtracting them from the ‘resources’ side. Whilst this makes little practical difference, it is an important point of principle: We don’t think that value-adding activities such as training should be treated in the same way as sick leave.


The basic approach to planning is to carry out the following stages in this order:

1. Plan the core work

This involves working out how much work your team has to do for each core task – which in turn is based on how much work you predict will come in and whether or not you have any Work In Progress (WIP). If you do have WIP, you must decide whether you want to reduce it, keep the current level or let it rise.

2. Plan the diverted tasks

In the first instance you should plan the diverted tasks that you would like to get done, even if you think that you might be short of resource. If you think that you may have a surplus of resource, do not plan in additional unnecessary diverted tasks.

3. Plan your resources

We deliberately come to this last so that you don’t ‘work backwards’, basing your plan on staff availability. Once you have planned the work, then you should plan the resources. Think about the likely productivity of your particular team and where time might be lost (e.g. holiday) or gained (e.g. overtime). We do not recommend planning a contingency for unknown sickness.

4. Review the daily balance

Look at the day-by-day balances in your weekly plan and see if there is anything you can do to move work or resources around within the week to cover your own surplus or shortfall periods. Once you have done the best you can to shuffle your own work and staff, you should leave the plan unbalanced until you have discussed it with your fellow team leaders.


2.2.2 Putting together a realistic plan

When planning your team’s work over the next week, you need to consider the work received, the work that you want your team to carry out and their expected productivity in the period.

Forecasting work received

You will get better and better at estimating the likely volumes of work you will receive as you get more data on which to base your plans. Often using the last couple of week’s data, from your Workware reports, is your best guide to next week.

As time goes by, you may find that there are ‘seasonal’ trends that mean that the volume of work in certain weeks of the month or year follow a predictable pattern. (If this is the case, then you will be able to re-use old Workware™ plans to save you recreating them.)

Planning the work to be done

We now need to introduce the important concept of the policy stock. This only applies to tasks that can have a volume of Work In Progress – and where any Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for the tasks (i.e. what turn-around time you can accept) are for more than 24 hours.

Think of work as flowing into and out of a reservoir – or bucket:

NewWork

Arriving

WorkCompleted

Reservoir(work to be done)

AdditionalWork

Initial Levelof WIP


Planning the work to be done involves forecasting how much of each particular task you will receive (Work In) and deciding what changes you want to make to the level of Work In Progress (WIP).

• If you expect to receive 100 items and also want to reduce your WIP by 50 then you must plan to do 150 items of work.

• If you expect to receive 500 items but are happy to let the WIP go up by 100 items then you must plan to do 400 items of work.

But how do you decide what is an acceptable level of WIP? The answer depends on two factors: your SLA and the unpredictability of the work:

• Service Level Agreements. Theoretically if you expect to receive an average of 100 items a day and you have a 5 day turn around target, then you could hold up to 500 items of Work In Progress. (After 5 days you would need to be clearing items at a rate of 100 a day to stay within standard.) But of course carrying exactly 500 items would be somewhat risky, since any increase in work received would cause you to miss your SLA. This is where the second factor comes into play.

• Unpredictability of the work. The more unpredictable the incoming work is, the less WIP you should carry. So if the work in our example is fairly steady and predictable around the 100 a day average, then you could carry close to the 500 limit. On the other hand, if the variability is very high, then you need to keep a lower stock of work to avoid the risk of missing your SLA.

Deciding on exactly how much WIP is acceptable – the policy stock – is largely a matter of judgement. You will get it right after a few weeks.

But why not always err on the side of caution and always carry the lowest possible WIP? Well, there are two very good reasons:

• If you carry a very low level of WIP and workloads drop off, you might have insufficient work to keep staff busy and may not be able to respond quickly enough to avoid productivity falling.

• If you put all your efforts into keeping your WIP lower than necessary to meet the SLA, you might be depriving another team of much needed resource required to get back within standard.


Planning productivity

So you’ve now done the following:

• Forecast the work you are likely to receive based on the recent past and/or on seasonal trends.

• Decided how much work needs to be cleared based on your forecast of work received and any changes to the levels of WIP to bring you back in line with policy stock.

Workware converts all the planned work into standard time. It does this by multiplying the number of items for each core task by the standard time for that task. Then the standard time for all the categories of core work can be added together to determine the total nominal core work.

The nominal core work is the amount of time required if everyone worked at the standard rate.

Now there is one last element in the planning to be considered: Productivity. Productivity is a measure of the amount of work produced compared with the time available for doing it.

It is important that you think through what you want your team’s productivity to be so that you can plan it and therefore make it happen. Workware uses the productivity that you have planned to convert the nominal core work into the actual time you will need to budget for the work.

You should set productivity to be challenging yet realistic by bearing in mind the following:

• The skills of your team members

Imagine you had recently lost a couple of experienced staff and were bringing on a couple of new trainees. There would be no point in planning for the team to produce ‘at standard’ as the trainee’s productivity might only be 20%. By factoring this into your productivity planning, you can fine tune your plan to make it realistic.

Similarly, if you have a team of high fliers that can always beat the planning standards, you might choose to plan at a productivity of, say 120%. Again this fine tunes the plan to the characteristics of your team as they are right now.

• Motivating your team

Set the productivity target low enough to be achievable but high enough to give the team a sense of accomplishment when they achieve it.

• Fulfilling the long-term strategy for productivity improvement

Where a long-term forecast exists, the short-term action plans should form part of the longer-term strategy.

• Ensuring productivity doesn’t fall

Very, very rarely would you plan for productivity to fall.


So how do you decide the specific level of productivity to plan for?

Assuming you’re building your weekly plan on a Wednesday afternoon / Thursday morning, you’ll have 2 or 3 days’ worth of data in the current week, as well as the whole of the previous week, as your recent history for planning purposes. Imagine your team’s productivities for these 8 days were:

96% 78% 89% 105% 68% 95% 75% 98%

The average across the entire period is 91%. You could say that 91% is a reasonable expectation for the team and plan that level of productivity. In other words, you’re planning for the team to continue with its recent level of performance. However, this is not a very ambitious level of productivity to plan for, as your team have exceeded 91% several times. You should plan for the highest level of productivity that is realistic. If the days when your team achieved 95% and 96% represented fairly normal days, you could plan for productivity of 96%. Generally when looking at past levels of productivity, try to identify the level that represents a challenging but achievable target.

Another method for deciding the productivity to plan for is to use the ‘85th percentile’. This method is appropriate only once you have a number of weeks of data. Using Workware you can calculate the 85th percentile of your productivities over a period. Your AOM coach can assist you with this. The 85th percentile is a useful measure because it equates to, more or less, the fourth highest daily productivity over a calendar month. In other words, we’re not aiming for the absolute highest - which might be unsustainable and cause burnout - but we are asking our staff to do what they’ve proven they can do, whilst raising the overall average for the period.


The planning process and naming conventions

We suggest that when planning you adopt a naming convention for what you call all of your plans. This is not compulsory and you can call plans anything you like, but experience has shown that the following approach generally works well.

The first thing to note is that plans are automatically dated – so you don’t need to bother adding a date yourself. Also when plans are viewed at a departmental level (for aggregating by the department manager) they will automatically have your team’s abbreviated name attached for ease of identification.

So what to name your plans? We suggest the following sequence:

• Base Plan. Start by doing as we suggest above and produce your ideal plan based on getting all WIP to policy stock levels, doing all necessary training and other diverted work and accepting all known holiday and downtime. Save this plan as BASE. The idea here is that you might work on all kinds of scenarios from this starting point, but you can always go ‘back to base’ and start again if you want.

• Target Plan. As a result of trying various scenarios, moving work between days, rescheduling meetings and so on, you should end up with a plan of what you would like to achieve next week. This is the plan you will take to the loading meeting (which we will discuss later). It is probably not balanced, but represents the target you would like to achieve. Save this plan as TARGET.

• Contract Plan. After the loading meeting, you will have to produce a final plan that you are prepared to commit to. You may be loaning/borrowing some resource or using overtime/temps in order to balance your plan. In producing this final plan you will have to take into account any movements of work or resource agreed in the loading meeting and then make any other adjustments necessary to balance the plan. Save this final plan as CONTRACT.


One of the key features of Workware is that it provides clear reporting of performance versus plan, but to do so it obviously needs to know which plan to report against. Whilst you can ask Workware to report against any plan you wish, the most convenient way to assign a single plan as being the one you mean to use, is to label it as ‘committed’ when you save it. You can only have one committed plan – all others will be provisional – and by default, Workware will always report against the committed plan. We call this the ‘committed’ plan because you have committed to making the plan happen – you are responsible for putting it into practice.

So in the above naming convention, TARGET would be provisional, and CONTRACT would be committed.


2.3 The weekly loading meeting

Planning is helpful in isolation (the first plan you produce during the implementation will not go through the loading process), but it really comes into its own when you share your plans with other team leaders.

The weekly loading meeting is a process whereby you and your colleagues can collectively make decisions as to what is the best use of your staff’s time in line with departmental priorities. In doing so, you will not only help your organisation to achieve more and meet more of its targets more often, you will also create better development opportunities for staff, reduce stress levels and increase the sense of team work within your operation.

The loading meeting typically takes place on a Thursday or Friday. It is attended by:

• Team leaders.

• The department manager in charge of a number of teams.

• A note taker whose job it is to record decisions made at the meeting. These include changes to team plans to support departmental and organisational priorities, how departmental work is to be handled and the agreed actions to balance each team’s plan. A note taker may not be required if you have access to Workware at the loading meeting.

Before the loading meeting you should have prepared your provisional, unbalanced plan and saved it as ‘Base’ (or ‘Target’). You should ensure that your department manager has time to review your plan before the meeting. Print out the Summary and Detail Plan and ensure that you are ready to discuss how you arrived at those figures.

The department manager chairs the loading meeting. The aim is to agree work and resource plans focussing on departmental, rather than purely team, priorities. It sets expectations and enables strategic actions to be planned, particularly ones with longer preparation times. The surpluses and shortfalls for each team (for each day and the week in total) are displayed, either written on a whiteboard or projected from the Workware screen.

By the end of the meeting you should be clear as to the actions you should take to make your team plan balance i.e. to make the amount of work equal the amount of resources. These actions may include borrowing staff, lending staff, overtime, temporary staff, increasing/decreasing WIP or increasing/decreasing diverted activity.

The department manager can balance an aggregate plan, comprising the provisional plans submitted by each team leader, at the loading meeting. By ensuring that each team’s plan is balanced, there should be no surplus or shortfall of resource for the department as a whole. Alternatively, following on from the loading meeting, the notes should be circulated to team leaders. Each team leader then makes a balanced and committed plan for the work their team will carry out in the next week.

During the early stages of the implementation, balancing plans may seem a bit difficult. The idea of loaning resource from one team to another might be fine in theory but seem impossible in practice because of differing skill levels. If this is the case, surpluses identified early on in an implementation could be used for cross training, to help make loaning/borrowing more feasible in future. It is also important to remember that loaning/borrowing is not the only way of balancing resource. Other methods, such as flexitime, overtime and temps, can also be used.


The agenda for the loading meeting typically includes:

• Discuss provisional plans for each team

• Outline department priorities and issues for next week

• Discuss/agree top down, strategic plans and department priorities

• Apportion department tasks

• Make decisions at department level to enable team leaders to balance and commit to their plans

2.4 Committing the plan

As a team leader, it may be that you are going to be loaning or borrowing some staff, changing the amount of work you are going to do, or perhaps planning in additional training. Whatever it is, the plan that you produce at or after the loading meeting – the one you are going to work with next week – must be balanced.

Once you balance your plan, save it as CONTRACT (or whatever your internal naming convention suggests) and change its status to Committed. You then need to communicate your plan to your staff.

2.4.1 Why balance the committed plan?

So why should your final plan be balanced?

The answer is that it is up to you to deal with a surplus or a shortfall of resources – don’t leave it to chance, or to the team members to work it out for themselves.

Leaving a shortfall of resource implies that you actually expect the staff to have higher productivity, i.e. work harder, than you planned (but if they could then surely you would have already planned this in.)

Leaving a surplus of resource means that there are some hours in the week that you are choosing to ignore. If nothing else happens, then the staff will have to slow down and deliver a lower productivity.

When Workware reports plan against actual it recalculates the planned productivity taking into account any surplus or shortfall in order to remind you of what you really planned.


2.4.2 The weekly commitment meeting

The last stage of the planning process should be to communicate next week’s plan to your team. The weekly commitment meeting typically takes place on a Friday morning and covers a brief review of progress so far this week and the plans for next week. The idea is that team members will go off for the weekend happy in the knowledge that next week is thought through, they know in broad terms what they will be doing and they have had some time on Friday to prepare if necessary.

Obviously you’ll run the weekly commitment meeting in your own style, but we suggest that it should be brief, informal and up-beat with a focus on getting everyone to agree that the plan is a good one and can be achieved.

One of the best ways to communicate the plan to staff is to set up a whiteboard with all the key numbers displayed on it.

You should include a summary of the planned work for the week that lists all core tasks, diverted tasks, resource categories and balancing actions. You can present the data however you like. You could just hand round the summary to staff, but it generally works better if the information is presented to the team as a whole – hence the suggestion to use a whiteboard. Be creative about what else you put on the board by way of news, congratulations, progress updates etc.


The following example whiteboard shows how a plan can be displayed and how actuals can be added as the week progresses:

In the meeting you will be able to talk with your team members about next week’s priorities, who will be doing what training and whether you will be loaning or borrowing any resource. We feel this is a good way to get team commitment and to keep the team involved in the whole management process. If they have any observations or concerns about the plan, they can raise these at the meeting and everyone can go away agreeing that they have a realistic plan for the next week.

The agenda for the commitment meeting typically includes:

• Review of last week’s performance• Lessons learned – and applied

• This week’s challenges• Work volumes• Important diverted work• How we are going to achieve a balanced outcome

• Team input• Problems and opportunities• Suggestions

Plan figures

Actual work done

Cumula�ve differences between plan and actual work

Produc�vity figures

Now required figures

Plan figures

Actual work done




Plan figures

Actual work done




Plan figures

Actual work done




Plan figures

Actual work done





3 Alternative planning approachesThe planning approach described in this document is suitable for the majority of service operations. There may, however, be some circumstances when the approach needs to be adapted. These are described in the table below. The planning approach to be used in each of these circumstances is described in a separate document “Approaches to planning”, which can be provided by your AOM coach.

Circumstance Issues

Scarce skills We refer here specifically to where there are scarce skills within a team. Where there are scarce skills inside a team, there is a greater risk of producing a plan that looks balanced but might be impossible to achieve.

Shared task This scenario is a simple variation of the standard situation in which one task (or a small minority of tasks) is shared between teams.

Multi-team The variation here is that a number of teams share most or all of their tasks and the work is routed to the team that has the capacity to do the work.

Multi-shift planning What should a department manager do if they have teams that make up a 24/7 service? How do you loan or borrow across time?

Contact Centre This is a very specialist area of planning and requires a good interaction between the short interval Work Force Management (WFM) planning and the higher-level planning of the spare capacity that WFM will leave unplanned.

Highly mobile teams Some teams may have specific deadlines during the day and may therefore be able to lend out all members after a certain time.


4 OutcomesYou have established the first steps of the short-term planning and control cycle:

• You are producing a provisional plan for your team, every week.

• You attend the weekly loading meeting. The meeting concludes with a positive agreement of how each surplus or shortfall will be handled, such that each team’s plan can be balanced.

• You enter the balancing actions agreed at each loading meeting and commit your plan.

• You are firmly convinced that the plan you commit each week is realistic and achievable. It reflects what you will aim to make happen the next week.

• You are holding weekly commitment meetings with your team members, in which you give feedback on the previous week and ensure everyone understands the plan for the next week.

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