Contents: Introduction | Definition and context | Our ambitious goals | Organizational readiness | Key scheduling features | Innovation through integration examples | In closing | More information
Welcome to our third article in our 'innovation through integration' series
In this article we discuss our solution for creating and managing staff schedules (including remote flexible workforces) and our solution for the highly automated end-to-end scheduling and management of dispute resolution sessions (including booking algorithms that address different staff skill levels and urgencies and extensive business intelligence information to guide complex scheduling decisions).
Bringing automation and control to dispute resolution scheduling is a very complex subject but I can see how this might not be obvious when you think of 'scheduling'.
You are probably familiar with self-serve online bookings for movies, hotels, and haircuts. Solutions like this are great as they bring 24/7 online convenience and automation to scheduling. Personally, I love these online bookings and their confirmations, automated instructions, defined online cancellation processes, and automated reminders. It's understandable that resolution organizations might think that they should buy or build something similar.
That said, before we ‘jump to solutions’ (a destructive common practice I explained in a previous article) and start shopping for an out-of-the-box generic scheduling system - or copying these system designs for our own custom projects - is there a process we can use to validate if scheduling a haircut is similar to scheduling dispute resolution services? Is there complexity unique to dispute resolution scheduling we need to consider?
I assume you've played the games where you try to spot as many differences between two pictures as you can (aha! there's a feather in the hat). I'll use a similar approach to evaluate if booking haircuts is similar to scheduling dispute resolution services.
I'll put 30 minutes on a timer and play the differences game with scheduling haircuts vs. scheduling dispute resolution services. Maybe you can come up with a few differences that I missed?
Scheduling a Haircut | Scheduling Dispute Resolution |
Simple booking form | Complex application processes with screening |
Service selected by user | Service determined by application information |
Hairdresser selected by user | Staff assigned based on necessary skills and experience |
One client, one service provider, one process | Many clients, one service provider, multiple processes |
One location with a waiting area if start times are missed | Specific meeting information (i.e. zoom, teleconference, address) and a fixed start time |
All haircuts are equally important | Resolution events are treated differently based on their matters and urgency |
Can be booked tomorrow | Must be booked with adequate time to serve notice to responding parties and gather necessary testimony and evidence |
Can use waitlists and walk-ins to fill late cancellations | Scheduling requires lead time to serve notice which means late cancellations will go unused (permanently lost organizational productivity) |
Simple instructions that apply to all users | Specific instructions based on dispute characteristics |
Can be rescheduled easily | The specific date/time is included in dispute notices (distributed documents) that are served to opposing parties. If rescheduled, a new notice document must be generated and served |
No user actions required prior to the haircut (just show up with your wallet) | Specific actions are required prior to resolution with some missed actions resulting in cancellation or rescheduling |
Haircuts are completed in one session | Resolution events often run out of time and need to be adjourned to another session |
Rescheduling only impacts the user and the hairdresser | Rescheduling impacts all parties on the dispute file and adds delays for new notices to be served |
Minimal personal loss for missing a haircut (some bad hair days?) | Significant losses (e.g. increased costs) for parties being harmed by the matters in the dispute |
No minimum wait time targets at hair salons | Resolution organizations have wait time targets for service delivery based on different urgencies |
Being overbooked / difficulty getting a haircut makes the organization more desirable | Being overbooked / difficulty getting resolution services is viewed as an organizational failure (often a very negative and highly public failure) |
(Ding!)
Ok, my 30 minutes is up and I found a lot of very significant differences. Reviewing these differences, what are some of the key things we learned from the short exercise?
First, booking a haircut (actually pretty simple) is nothing like booking a resolution service (very complex). This means:
Evaluating scheduling solutions for haircuts (or other simple booking solutions) won’t provide many good ideas when designing systems for scheduling resolution services (outside of some general ideas for interface items and language).
You won't be able to use very much (if anything) from an out-of-the-box haircut scheduling system for dispute resolution. You would throw most of the out-of-box features away and be forced to customize it heavily (which is often more costly and ends up with a worse result than building from scratch).
Second, booking resolution services has significant process, workflow and management overhead that must be addressed for a complete and effective solution.
And lastly, the costs of rescheduling a resolution service, cancelling a resolution service, or delaying a resolution service are extremely high to everyone involved and avoiding these costs should be a primary focus of the solution (I think it's even safe to consider these critical success factors).
From this exercise I hope you now understand why we designed a "ground-up" scheduling system in our open-source DMS solution. In this article, I'll describe our solutions for taming complex scheduling and managing the remote flexible workforces of the future.
This is an extremely complex subject that could easily warrant a book or series of full-day lectures. To keep this article reasonable, I'll stick to our solution approach, the key features we developed, and some role-based examples of the final integrated solution in action.
Let's dive in.
What do we mean by complex scheduling?
When we are referring complex scheduling in this article, we really mean two sets of extensive scheduling capabilities; workforce schedule management (managing staff working times), and resolution session schedule management (managing the booking of resolution services).
Workforce schedule management is:
Storing the type (employee/contractor) employment level (full time/part time), and the specific skills and experience levels of staff.
Managing requests for time off or specific working time and adding them to the working schedule.
Automatically populating general schedules for working staff around business hours (excluding time off and vacations)
Displaying working time and non-working time in a highly visible way during scheduling processes.
Providing living displays of the working schedule, including staff allocations, coverage resources, available contracted resources, etc.
Gathering and providing extensive data, information and reporting associated to the working schedule that supports decision making, automation and business intelligence.
Resolution session schedule management is:
Automatically generating future resolution session events based on the availability, skills and experience of staff members.
Automatically booking resolution sessions that are suitable to each dispute file with full control over scheduled resources (e.g. staff, physical locations, support resources, teleconference bridges, online meetings, etc.).
Automatically generating dispute notices with the scheduled event while protecting the session information included in notices from changes that would effect the notice.
Allowing dispute files to be combined into the same scheduled event.
Automated actions like withdrawals, rescheduling, cancellations, or adjournments.
Automated reminders, communications and notifications associated to scheduling to parties in the dispute file.
Displaying all scheduling information on sites that parties access
Providing intuitive living displays of the organizational and individual staff schedules (yearly, monthly, daily all-staff, personal)
Gathering and providing extensive data, information and reporting associated to the scheduled events that supports decision making, automation and business intelligence (e.g. comparative resolution session times of staff, comparative staff workloads, balancing wait times, etc.)
Significant innovations require ambitious goals, these were ours:
To bring full visibility and control to staff working schedules and resolution session schedules (scheduled events) in a cohesive, intuitive and comprehensive set of end-toe-end features that cover the full domain of scheduling actions.
To eliminate the use of external systems and manual processes commonly associated to scheduling (e.g. excel tools, email/phone/text time off requests, separate outlook calendars, manually generated schedule reports, the manual assignment of hearings).
To maximize automation and reduce human errors associated to the booking of resolution sessions and the management of staff schedules.
To minimize wait times by maximizing the utilization of resolution sessions and resources (and avoid the lost productivity of resolution sessions that go unused).
To maximize the flexibility of staff working schedules and working locations (i.e. remote work), while minimizing the costs and risks associated to flexible workers (e.g. loss of visibility into work and lost performance)
To provide extensive information and reporting so that scheduling issues can be identified and addressed early, targeted scheduling improvements can be identified and implemented with measured results, and true business intelligence can be applied to scheduling decisions (e.g. early identification of trends, actively managing wait times, actively managing comparative staff performance, just-in-time schedule generation, making improvements to systems and processes with quantitative analysis)
What were the organizational readiness requirements and how did we achieve them?
Optimized scheduling standards: A critical area of work was the extensive review the current resolution schedule and staff working times in order to define optimized scheduling standards. These standards were shaped by the goals of maximizing scheduling simplicity, improving consistency, maintaining adequate coverage, and enabling automation. Before we built the technical systems, we implemented these scheduling standards into the organization to establish and prove the defined schedule. We then made necessary adjustments until the standards were mature and it was safe to build our automated technology systems around them.
Defined staff characteristics: In order to automate the generation of staff schedules and the booking of their sessions, we needed to identify the staff characteristics used for scheduling. We worked through scheduling use cases and edge cases to define categories for staff skills, experience and abilities and to define the assignment rules for dispute files that the staff receive. We also defined role and allocation characteristics of staff (i.e. full-time/part-time, employee/contractor) and the differences in how they are engaged and managed. With these characteristics defined and validated, we implemented core systems into DMS user management and all areas of the system where users are displayed in targeted system releases. We then then made necessary adjustments and improvements until the staff characteristics and the associated systems and processes that leverage these characteristics were mature and ready for integration.
Defined dispute file characteristics: In order to automate the booking of the appropriate resolution session to the appropriate staff member, we needed to identify the dispute file characteristics used for assignments and the algorithms that would allow them to be automatically set by the DMS system. Characteristics like dispute file urgency, complexity, associated resolution process, necessary staff skills, special handling, and scheduling edge cases needed to be mapped to data and algorithms that can automatically determine them. When we had the data and algorithms defined, we implemented them into the DMS online application systems so that these characteristics are automatically set on each dispute file (with staff ability to override these automated settings). These dispute file characteristics were then used to guide manual and semi-automated scheduling decisions to prove them until these manual processes were mature and could be systemized and automated.
Defined scheduling actions: As the final piece of the puzzle, we needed to define all of the specific scheduling actions and uses cases used in the end-to-end organizational scheduling processes. This list identified actions like; assignments, re-assignments, rescheduling, adjournments, pre-hearings, review hearings, withdrawals, dismissals and abandonments. With all of the scheduling actions defined, we took each of these actions and evaluated the staff characteristics, scheduling processes and dispute file characteristics related to each scheduling action (i.e. initial booking with generating dispute notices and automated notice delivery for each service and dispute file type). With all of the scheduling actions defined, we implemented these actions as features and processes in the DMS systems and made necessary adjustments and improvements until they were mature.
What are the core DMS scheduling features we created and what are their benefits?
There are a number of powerful core scheduling features that we built into DMS. Before I provide an example of their even more powerful integration (in the role-based examples later in this article), I'll take a few minutes to explain each of these core features to help you understand what we built and why. Hopefully, through the final examples, I'll be able to demonstrate how these features, when integrated, become much more than just a sum of the parts .
DMS feature: Staff schedule requests: This feature provides the ability for resolution staff (employees and contractors) to make requests for general working time, writing time, vacation, other time off to management. It also ensures that all unprocessed requests are always highly visible to approvers for quick approvals. Requests can approved, declined, or returned for clarification where there is missing information or conflicts with the request and the organizational schedule.
Benefits:
Provides both staff and managers with real-time visibility into the status of schedule requests and ensures requests are processed quickly / not forgotten.
Provides a status driven workflow that include pre-approvals and clarification requests - with every request including a complete history of actions.
Allows requests (like vacation time) to be automatically added to the working schedule in DMS if there are no conflicts (i.e. one approval click on a a vacation automatically inserts the vacation time and marks the request as approved).
Automatically detects conflicts between staff requests for time off and existing scheduled work to inform approval decisions and associated rescheduling.
Provides the ability to set deadlines for annual submissions of standard vacations and other time off with automatic reminders.
DMS feature: Organizational and staff working schedules: This feature provides the ability to see the daily working schedules for all staff in a single living view (as two week periods). It includes intuitive color coded blocks and extensive allocation information to inform real-time scheduling and capacity decisions. This view includes powerful intuitive editing tools that let you draw directly on the schedule with mouse drags and to modify schedule items with simple clicks - all with built in rules and alerts that ensure human errors are not introduced with changes and edits.
Benefits:
Allows visual identification of all staff resources working on a specific dates/times, and for real-time staffing levels to be understood at a glance.
Allows daily, weekly, and monthly capacity to be considered when making booking and assignment decisions - to achieve complex goals like maximizing allocations while maintaining fairness of work assignments (balanced workloads).
Stores working time and time off directly in the DMS system, so that working time can be used for resource planning (i.e. number of part-time contractors available) and to measure performance (i.e. worker performance as units of work completed per hour worked).
DMS feature: Automated working time generation: This feature provides the ability to populate standard staff working days around booked time off and holidays. It allows full control over part-time or and full-time working schedules and includes full control over staff roles (employees/contractors) allocations.
Allows granular control of the process of populating staff working times or adding as-needed overflow resourcing to the schedule (e.g. adding contractors during periods of higher dispute volumes).
Allows vacation and time off that is known in advance to be entered and as far into the future as the organization needs, while keeping actual working time generation closer to the actual assignments of work - which avoids the instability and uncertainty issues common to allocating working times too far out in the future.
Allows for special staff allocations (i.e. writing time, special work assignments) to be reflected and tracked as part of working time.
Allows schedule coverage to be fairly allocated using available staff information and schedule rotation algorithms.
Establishes approved working times are filled automated resolution event generation (as described in the next core feature).
DMS feature: Automated resolution services schedule generation: This feature allows the working schedule (staff working times) to be automatically filled with bookable resolution events. This process combines specific dates/times with available staff and scheduled resources (i.e. locations, conference bridges, zoom links) to create complex schedules from user-set parameters. User settable parameters include; the sessions date/times and durations, the specific days of the week, urgency patterns, rotation patterns, and staff skills and abilities. In support of flexible workforces schedules can be automatically generated for specific staff, for employees or contractors, and only for full-time or part-time resources - bringing full control and just-in-time creation of resolution sessions to the organization.
Benefits:
Uses system entered staff working times, resources and staff characteristics to intelligently generate specific working schedules based on general parameters.
Automates the complex process of generating resolution schedules, greatly increasing the efficiency of the process while reducing common human errors.
Through simplification and automation, it allows the organizations resolution schedule to be generated on an as-needed basis (just-in-time schedule generation) helping to avoid the issues and costs associated with creating a schedule too far out in the future when resourcing is naturally less stable (a common practice with complex and highly manual schedule creation).
Allows core staff schedules to be generated first and for contracted and part time staff to be generated separately or as-needed, bringing flexibility and control to organizational scheduling.
Provides extensive contextual information to guide scheduling decisions and to ensure you get the exact schedule that is needed (i.e. aligning the schedule with wait time targets, fairly distributing scheduled work across staff, fairly allocating rotating schedules).
DMS feature: Resolution services scheduling: This is the heart of the resolution scheduling system and includes; automated booking, automated scheduling actions, living organizational schedule views, living staff schedule views, and extensive data and business intelligence. From initial bookings to adjournments and review hearings, these features ensures that the organization can maximize the efficiency and control of their complex resolution service schedules.
Benefits:
Allows applicants to select an initial service date/time, perform self-service bookings, and instantly receive an generated notice package and instructions.
Allows staff booking resolution services to automatically locate available sessions based on the characteristics of the dispute file, process and staff skills and abilities - and then automatically generate and send an associated notice package and instructions with a single click.
Allows party submission channels (i.e. recording notice service, providing testimony and evidence) to be enabled and disabled automatically by the system based on rules and resolution service timeframes. This includes email notices and reminders for deadlines - with deadlines also highly visible on all DMS sites.
Allows future hearings to be put on hold for adjournments or review hearings where a specific resource is required as part of the booking and the actual booking will be completed in the future.
Allows disputes to be joined to the same resolution session for improved efficiency (i.e. where they share parties and/or dispute matters)
Allows short-term staff availability changes to be dealt with instantly (e.g. illness, urgent time off, quitting) through assignment to another staff member without materially changing the booking or requiring any party communications.
Automates common schedule modification actions like cancellations, rescheduling, adjournments, and re-assignments.
Allows all staff and parties to complete bookings and change the schedule at the same time - eliminating the common need to centralize scheduling or the risks of double-bookings common to distributed high volume schedule changes.
Allows everyone in the organization to to access living views of all scheduled events, their associated resolution staff, their urgency, and their dispute file(s) - including daily views, personal views and manager views.
Allows everyone to access a living dashboard of the monthly and annual schedule for the organization including real-time booking and utilization statistics with visual color-coded representations that make the statistics easy to understand.
Allows all changes to the schedule to be viewed by any attribute (i.e. by staff member that made the change, by session, by dispute file, by resolution staff member responsible for the session).
DMS feature: Schedule reporting and Business Intelligence: These are the extensive reporting and business intelligence capabilities that combine rich scheduling information with comprehensive dispute file information to enable full visibility, traceability, transparency, automation and control over the schedule and organizational performance. This rich data also supports quantitative analysis, historical trending, future prediction, causal and correlative analysis, business intelligence and artificial intelligence.
Benefits:
Informs decision-making that maximizes utilization of staff and resources.
Allows staff working time to be evaluated by staff member, role type, skills and experience - as an input to staffing and workforce decisions.
Allows working time to be used as a denominator for performance evaluation (i.e. to calculate disputes resolved per hour worked, decisions written per hour worked, comparative performance/velocity across staff with different working hours)
Allows dispute files and their associated information to be evaluated for the dispute characteristics that effect preparation time, resolution session time, and writing times - and to be used to measure the outcomes of improvement initiatives.
Allows automated rotations in work assignments (i.e. the handling of special requests like substituted service or requests for review) that address both fairness and availability.
Allows resolution session utilization and dispute volumes to be used as quantitative inputs into staffing and future schedule decisions.
Allows working time and scheduling data to be used for causal or correlative analysis - this enables
Statistical evaluation of the organization for potential areas of improvement (i.e. quantitative time in motion analysis)
Root cause analysis of performance or service delivery outliers.
The identification of new KPI's (key business indicators) that can be added to suite of business intelligence metrics and reports.
Provides an extensive, clearly defined and taggable data model for complex automation and Artificial Intelligence (A.I.).
What are examples of the innovation from integrating the above core features?
Although the individual features above are powerful on their own, the full innovation we were seeking was only possible through integration (including non-scheduling features in DMS). After thinking about different ways to describe the power of the integrated solution, I found the best way to communicate it was through role-based examples. Although specific roles will vary in different organizations, I will try to keep these generic enough to be applicable to most organizations with moderate-to-high volume scheduling.
Example one: Citizen disputant (applicant party)
A citizen with a dispute (disputant) finds the link to apply for dispute resolution services online.
From their phone, they connect to the online application, create an account, log in, and file a new application for dispute resolution.
Prior to submitting their application, the system detects the urgency, complexity, process and service associated to their application and displays a calculated current wait time. The disputant agrees to this approximated wait time and continues.
The disputant is provided with a proposed date/time for their resolution session that is put on a 5 minute hold by the DMS system and can only be booked by the disputant.
The disputant accepts the date/time before the 5 minute countdown ends, and immediately receive a dispute notice package with instructions for serving the documents. The package includes guides for the applicant and respondent, and unique access codes for each party to make their submissions without having to create a login. The disputant learns that these access codes can also be used by others supporting them or for making in-person submissions through regional offices (through front desks).
The disputant clicks on the link in their application receipt to add the date/time of their session to their phone calendar so they don't forget it.
The disputant checks their email and sees that a copy of the dispute notice and instructions was also sent to them by the system.
The disputant follows the provided instructions and serves the respondent with the notice documents and associated evidence.
The disputant receives an automated email reminder to add their notice service information to their dispute file in DMS.
The disputant clicks on the link in the reminder to connect to the online systems and submits their service and disclosure information.
While waiting for the resolution session, the disputant is contacted by the respondent on the dispute file with settlement options, and realizes they are able to resolve their dispute file without external resolution services.
The disputant logs into the online systems and sees the option to withdraw their dispute. During the withdrawal confirmation process, the system recommends the disputant obtains a signed settlement agreement in writing. They download the settlement agreement template and withdraw their dispute.
The DMS system automatically removes this dispute file from its resolution session, immediately freeing up the session for another dispute file.
The DMS system automatically disables all of the submission channels for all parties.
The DMS system sends withdrawal notifications by email to the applicant and respondent and displays the dispute file status as withdrawn on all public facing sites so that they do not need to be contacted by the organization.
Example two: Resolution services staff member
The staff member starts their Monday shift in their home (remote) office by logging into DMS where they are immediately presented with their personal dashboard
The staff member checks their; open assigned disputes, incomplete and newly assigned tasks, and their resolution schedule for the month where todays scheduled resolution sessions are displayed prominently at the top.
The staff member sees they have a 9:30AM resolution session in 45 minutes with two linked dispute files. They click on the session which opens the fully digital dispute files with intuitive layouts of the dispute information including; the parties and participants, the individual issues with their defined testimony and evidence, notice and evidence disclosure information, etc.
When the staff member views the dispute files, DMS automatically moves the dispute file from 'open for submissions' status to a 'resolution pending' status and assigns the file to the staff member - with this status being visible publicly on all sites so that the disputants can see the dispute file is now in the hands of the resolution staff.
The staff member reviews both dispute files and defines their notes and approach plan to prepare for the resolution session.
The DMS system detects that the hearing is starting and sets the status to "resolution in progress" which automatically blocks all party submissions during the session (with the ability for the staff member to override this setting as needed for additional submissions).
The staff member connects to the virtual session using the connection information at the top of his daily schedule and validates the parties in attendance - they click on for the participant records in DMS to record the participation using the records DMS automatically created for the scheduled session.
The staff member completes the resolution work for both dispute files, adds their decisions and their delivery information that was confirmed with the parties in the session, and DMS automatically delivers the documents.
The staff member checks their schedule for the next session. They see that their 11:00AM session has been withdrawn by the applicant - they know they don't have to do anything about the withdrawal because DMS automatically removed the dispute file from the schedule and already notified the participants that the hearing was cancelled by email. The cancelled status is also displayed online.
The staff member uses the extra time to catch up on their outstanding work and tasks.
The staff member gets a text message from family about an upcoming holiday they have been planning to remind them to request the time off.
The staff member checks their organizational schedule and sees that only two resolution events are booked for them during the period, and that there is coverage staff available for those times.
The staff member submits a schedule request to their manager for the time off, and includes a note about the coverage staff that they have confirmed are available.
Later that day, the staff member sees that schedule request was approved, their two scheduled sessions have been reassigned, and they let their family know the time off was granted.
Everyone in the organization can now see that this staff member is not available during their vacation when assigning work or resolution sessions during this period.
Example three: Resolution services manager with 10 staff
The manager logs in to review their staff work allocations, staff schedules and team performance against organizational targets and trends.
While reviewing this information, the manager sees an alert of a staff schedule request, they click on the alert to view the request and see its for 21 days of vacation in a few months.
The manager checks the working schedule and sees there are no other staff on vacation at the requested time. The staff member has only two booked resolution sessions and there is coverage for both.
The manager runs a vacation report and see the staff member has 18 days of holidays remaining not the 21 being requested.
The manager adds a comment to the request that the time is available but the staff member only has 18 days of holidays remaining and sets the request status to returned for clarification so it will appear in the staff members dashboard.
The staff member is notified that their schedule request has been returned - they read the manager note, modify the request to 18 days, and resubmit it.
The manager receives the updated request and uses the schedule editing tools to quickly reassign the two booked sessions to coverage staff to clear the staff members schedule.
The manager approves the vacation request and DMS - a process that automatically adds the vacation time to working schedule where it is immediately visible to everyone viewing the schedule as time off.
The manager receives a notification from the organizational scheduler that the next month of the resolution schedule needs to be generated for the organization.
The manager confirms their staff working times and times off are correct for the month and approves the automated schedule generation (see example 3) so that the future schedule can be generated.
The manager gets an urgent message from a staff member that they are sick and won't be able to work tomorrow.
The manager uses the schedule editing tools to move the sick staffs scheduled sessions to coverage staff (which DMS does without effecting any information for the parties or requiring any communications) and then sets the staff working time to sick time so that everyone can see they are off, and the sick time is tracked.
The manager reviews the living work allocation dashboards for their team and see that one team member is struggling with current workloads (has many open files, has overdue decisions). The manager checks the comparative performance and sees that this staff member is has substantially longer resolution sessions and decision writing time that staff completing similar work. The manager also sees that this team member is fully booked in the immediate schedule while other staff have availability.
The manager uses the schedule editing tools to quickly move a two scheduled resolution sessions to other staff members that have lighter allocations to balance workloads and provide time for the struggling staff to get caught up. The manager sets the newly available time to writing time to the working schedule to track the additional time provided and to block the staff member from being scheduled with new work until their workload is caught up.
The manager books a performance discussion with the staff member that is underperforming - with comparative organizational data to support the discussion - so that they can work together to define ways to better allocate work and improve the performance of the staff member.
Example four: Organizational schedule manager (schedule manager)
As part of a regular weekly process, the schedule manager views reports from the DMS system and the data warehouse to evaluate;
The wait times for different dispute urgencies and the target service levels.
The wait times for different resolution services and the target service levels.
The schedule manager sees that the wait times for some services and urgencies is too long and others are too short and in general wait times are getting longer due to increases in volumes.
The schedule manager views a balancing report for open (not booked) future sessions and sees recommended changes to the schedule to bring wait times as close as possible to the organizational targets while maintaining urgent file timelines.
The schedule manager uses DMS views and tools to rebalance the open (not booked) sessions based on the recommendations in the balancing report.
The schedule manager views the updated wait time reports and sees that the wait times are now balanced.
The schedule manager then evaluates the utilization of the previous months schedule (unused sessions) and sees that there was an above average number of unused sessions for coverage staff, which indicates that the amount of allocated coverage staff was unnecessarily high.
The schedule manager contacts the operational managers and lets them know that coverage could likely be reduced and that this would open more sessions for resolution services to improve costs per resolution and staff utilization.
The schedule manager then views a report of the current application volumes trends and and historical volumes for this time of year and sees that application volumes are up 4% and that dispute resolution is getting more complex and taking slightly more time per session.
The schedule manager contacts the managers about using contractors in the next two months of schedule to deal with the increased volumes and complexity.
With the operational managements approval, the schedule manager uses automated session generation tools to add the contractor staff into the schedule.
The newly generated sessions are immediately visible to the contracted staff and the organization wait times are now back in line with service targets.
The schedule manager views the future schedule and sees that bookings are now within 2 weeks of the resolutions sessions and the next month of resolution sessions need to be created.
The schedule manager uses automated session generation tools and business intelligence information to add a new month of resolution sessions.
The newly generated future sessions are immediately available for booking and are visible in all schedule and resolution staff views.
Example five: Organizational leadership
An organizational leader starts their weekly analysis of the organizational performance across their key metrics (including scheduling).
The leader pulls a set of visual DMS reports on the current wait times, organizational volumes and future capacity. They see that all of the metrics are in line and send a quick commendation message to the schedule manager for their good work.
The leader pulls a second set of reports on the comparative performance of team staff by manager and identifies one manager with two staff members that are underperforming. The leader books a performance discussion session with the manager to learn more about the underperforming staff member and to create an action plan for improving their performance that they can monitor together.
The leader views a report on utilization and observes that the coverage staff has been too high recently and they are not being well utilized.
The leader contacts the organizational schedule manager and is told that they have already viewed this information and that the managers have committed to better allocating coverage staff going forward.
The leader then views a report on the total time spent by staff for resolution sessions and the assocaited work and sees that the complexity of their dispute files has increased by almost 5% in the past 6 months.
The leader contacts the data analytics team and asks them to verify the increased complexity information to see if they can provide contextual information.
The analytics team provides the leadership with contextual information on the types of disputes and other factors that are correlated to the increase in complexity.
The leader notes that these dispute files align with a recent change in legislation.
The leader checks in with the managers in a weekly meeting and learns that staff have been complaining of increased workloads and difficulty hitting targets - and that staff are citing the recent legislation change as the cause.
The leader plans an appropriate reduction in the resolution schedule to offset the increase in legislative complexity and communicates this to the organizational scheduler so that it can be implemented in the next round of schedule generation.
The leader sends an email to the managers so that they can communicate the workload changes they are making and ask them to thank their staff for their good work dealing with the unexpected impacts of the legislative change.
I hope these 5 examples help demonstrate how an organization with mature processes and solutions (including integrated scheduling) can achieve greater control over their schedule, performance and service levels. With the right approach and designs these advanced tools can bring proactivity, business intelligence, and automation to scheduling processes that were previously reactionary, labor intensive, and chaotic.
In Closing
This is a very complex subject that is probably better suited to a book or series off full-day lectures - but it is so high value I felt it warranted a targeted article. I hope this article has provided you with insights and ideas for the automation and control of your workforce management and scheduling solutions. If you enjoyed this article and would like to learn more about our other solutions, check out our designing the future blog. Until our next article, keep on innovating and sharing your working solutions!
Mike Harlow
Solution Architect
Hive One Justice Systems, Hive One Collaborative Systems
©2022
Where can you get more information?
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If you are interested in the open source feature-rich DMS system that is the basis of the innovation in this article, visit the DMS section of our web site.
If you want to learn more about this solution, we offer live sessions and lectures that provide much greater detail (including diagrams, statistics and feature demonstrations) and allow breakout discussion around key areas of audience interest. To learn more about booking a live session, please contact us through our web site.
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