What is Intraday Workload Management?

At its core, Intraday Workload Management is the monitoring of work items on a real or near real time basis to track the achievement of service goals through its most direct proxy – the number of items still left to be completed.  While a relatively simple concept, its execution can take many forms.

Years ago when I was a manager at Citibank, my form of workload management was checking in with my team multiple times a day and keeping a list in my head of all the things that I knew had to be done by the day’s end.  Not very sophisticated, but for a small team it worked.  As managers expanded their span of control, it was often another version of walk around management, using their experience to gauge the state of the department based on the depth of the paper stacks on people’s desks and a gut feel for how much they could do before day’s end.

I have even seen one location where all the work to be done was hung on a hook, so that the manager could do a quick visual check of how much work was remaining. That of course required all the staff to spend a portion of their day walking back and forth to pick up their next transaction– effective for the experienced manager, but not very efficient for the staff!

With the advent of workflow engines and the digitization of work items, employees may be in the same location as the manager, but just as easily could be across the country or the globe. Or, perhaps they’re working from their kitchen tables as remote employees.  Clearly the old ways of managing intraday workloads are no longer effective in our digital world.

Verint’s Impact 360® solution not only gives back a manager’s ability to track current state, but it also helps identify potential missed deadlines and proactively re-optimizes schedules when volumes/staff/circumstances differ from plan. Intraday monitoring through the Pulse screens in the Impact 360 Workforce Management solution lets you identify where your plans have gone astray and where inventory may be building or sinking in work queues compared to your forecast.  The solution enables you to drill down to granular detail to understand the cause and take corrective actions intraday—this is much better than waiting until tomorrow to find out you really blew it yesterday.

Also, the Work Item Tracking (WIT) tool offers intraday visibility into the status of your inventory and allows you to react and redeploy staff to tackle specific work items quickly to save customer outcomes.

Today’s rapidly evolving technology is giving us unprecedented levels of information about our workloads and how well we are planning to complete them.  The Impact 360 suite translates forecasts, true volumes and inventory data into actionable intelligence that enables you to better manage workload and meet customer service goals.

Let me know how you are managing to understand your intraday status and if Pulse and WIT have become part of your management process.