Using Queuing Theory to Help with Resource Challenges

"We need more people!"

How many times have you heard that? This refers to an imbalance - specifically, demand > capacity. It is one of the most common challenges that our clients and participants talk about when we first engage with them and is at the heart of many business performance issues. The reality is many things can be done before hiring more people (which may still be required but perhaps not as many as first thought).

The first step is to estimate (or model) the imbalance using numbers. We are surprised at how poorly this is done in many businesses. It is analogous to a manufacturing business that does not know the maximum hourly production rate of its equipment. There may be a central workforce planning team however we believe that every leader needs to understand and know how to do this as they are managing it on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis.

To turn the imbalance from words into numbers, you need to understand the demand (the work being performed), a typical effort for one piece of this demand, and how many are needed for a period of time. (Contact centres are the masters of this with the volume of calls and 'average' handling time per call to work out resource requirements.) Any type of work can be expressed in numbers although there are some things to consider such as high variability - for example, it could take 5 minutes or 5 hours. In this case, we would recommend breaking the demand into 'types' such as simple vs complex. The team capacity is then overlaid against the demand, taking into account losses such as absences, leave, breaks, development etc. Yes, there are assumptions to be made but you can apply a sense check. For example, if your demand is double your capacity, are you seeing complaints, lots of unfinished work/backlogs, unhappy people etc? The maths is simple although there are some traps for the inexperienced which could lead you to draw incorrect conclusions. This is where our coaches help participants to build a reliable model.

Now you have this, you are bound to have some periods that are busier than others (peaks and troughs) - can you 'shape' your capacity to match demand? For example, if Mondays are one of your busiest days, why do you have your 45min weekly team meeting on a Monday? If March is quiet, wouldn't this be a good time to plan annual leave or invest in training?

Next we can turn to queuing theory for further ways to solve this challenge.

We are not going to bore you with formulas (but reach out if you want it!) but will focus on the application. Can you:

• anticipate the peaks and troughs in demand to make capacity decisions? Just remember that forecasts are going to be lucky or wrong, so think about your plan B!
• reduce the skill variation between team members starting with bringing everyone up to a minimum skill level? Once this is done, then uplift all, especially for capabilities/skills that have a large impact on your demand.
• identify differences in how team members are doing the work and find best practices that can be leveraged - in other words, standardisation (although we prefer 'sensible uniformity')?
• allocate work based on skill (a competency pathway)?
• streamline the work such as templating, and reducing unnecessary complexity?
• reduce errors and rework: 'make it hard to get wrong and easy to get right'?
• reduce the demand coming in especially 'failure demand' (demand created because something went wrong)?
• Can any demand be self-serviced (this is often preferable for the customer as well)?

There is a lot that can be done and whilst it isn't that hard, we would recommend an expert from our coaching team. Even better, speak to us about our program and you can solve these challenges whilst earning yourself a qualification and two MBA credits. Our experience is that the gains will far outweigh the program costs.