Posted by Leadent Solutions on December 17, 2015
Well, it seems we’re scheduling Christmas again, and, of course, a Happy Christmas to you all. At Leadent we wish you all the best for the season and for the New Year. And whilst it’s a time for family, it’s also, for many of our clients, another working day as their field staff work to keep the lights on, keep the water flowing, monitor flood levels and undertake a host of often invisible work essential to us in this day and age.
There’s also one very special mobile workforce out there, doing a very important job, especially for those of you with children. Unusually, by our standards, he’s a mobile workforce of just one, although he still has an unbelievable number of tasks to schedule. (You can see how good he is at his job using the In Day Performance Management Dashboard provided by NORAD (http://www.noradsanta.org/). Not much white space on his Gantt, I suspect.
No rest for the wicked, either. So my mind (and a confession is due here – I was raised as a mathematician, and my mind will make some strange connections) played with the idea of scheduling Santa, in the sense of how well can you schedule workforces when you get some extreme scenarios (several of which are actually pertinent for a current client).
Examples might include:
When I speak with clients, the war stories that emerge with regards to the more extreme scheduling events can often assume a life of their own, and absorb disproportionate organisational bandwidth. Especially when these situations are poorly planned for. Sure, these events are difficult to schedule, especially if they’re scheduled on the fly. But could they be better handled? Could your exception handlers be better prepared? I’d suggest they could, simply by putting a little more thought in up front. Planning is key to understanding what could happen, how likely and impactful it is, and in developing processes and plans to cope. So, some questions to ponder over your mulled wine this Christmas:
Although there’s still plenty to think about from a scheduling perspective, its ultimately about planning. Coming back to our one man workforce, Santa spends all year planning, working with the elves to make sure all the bases are covered, to set him up for a successful delivery schedule (whatever the physics says about relativistic travel). He can’t afford to have his schedule go awry, even with last minute changes to the good and naughty lists.
So it’s important to think about the extreme scenarios, but also to keep them in proportion, and to have contingency plans (but always kept in the context of the risk and probability of the event).
Have you thought about your extreme scenarios? Does Santa have a Plan B? Maybe the Elves at Leadent can help.
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