And here we are at the final part. I was saying at the end of the second part, that in this piece we will talk about the Intraday management and about improvement. So let’s cut the intro and get right in the business.
- Intraday management
How to define Intraday management? From a WFM point of view, the Intraday team is taking care that the agents are respecting their schedules, they make necessary modifications of the agent’s schedule. They also they a look on how the calls are coming and take necessary steps so that the callers are taken care off. Basically, the Intraday team is the Watcher that is keeping the chaos at the gates.
But how do you apply that in your day to day life? Unless you are willing to hire someone to keep watch on your schedule and to take care that you respect the said schedule, you have to do that yourself.
In the past two weeks or so, I’ve experienced this hurdle myself. How do I police my own schedule? First of all, you need to have a schedule that you would need to respect. If you read part two, I was saying that you make your schedule based on a forecast. But the forecast isn’t 100% all the time. Actually, you know that you might have more or less on your hands. That is a fact. The forecast is never 100%.
And this is when the Intraday enters into play. You have to adapt, to make decisions, to make changes in your schedule based on your current situation. Maybe you will need to cut short some things in your agenda, or you will have to postpone others.
Let’s say you have to finish a weekly report until Friday, and you usually do on Wednesday to save some time and not rush things on Friday. On Wednesday, you are working on your report, but something happens and you need to make a decision. You solve the issue that appeared or you finish your report. What will you do? The answer depends on the situation. You will have to make your decision based on your experience with your own workflow.
I was saying in the previous articles of this series, that historical data matter a lot. And the same is with the Intraday management of your daily schedule. With experience you will be able to make swift decisions based on how things develop day by day.
- Continuous improvement
The day and the week are done. You finished your work. What’s the next step?
The next step is going back to the drawing board. You go back to the first step. You analyze and see what went wrong, what went well. You analyze the historical data, that I wrote about so much in the first part.
When the day is finished, the work doesn’t stop, the work continues. The work never stops. There is always something that could be done better. There are always things that could be improved. We just need to find them.
And then, when the next week starts, it’s all over again. Analyze, forecast, schedule, intra-day, analyze, improve.
That’s it.
As you can see I work in a pretty interesting working field. I always say that there are things to learn from everything, even from a leaf that is falling. This is why I’m so glad that there are so many things that I could learn from my work. Soon there will be 2 years since I’ve joined the WFM world, and every day I still learn new things about it.
I hope you liked these short series about WFM, and some small practices could improve our day to day life, either at work or outside of the office. In the future, I will return with advices written from a WFM point of view that could help us improve our day to day work.
Don’t forget to share the love with everyone else, if you think this information might be helpful to them.
In what work field do you work? What did you learn there that you applied to your day to day life?