Smooth Planning

The planning profession is full of capable people who were never given a proper starting point. This book is that starting point.

If you've just been handed responsibility for workforce planning and aren't sure where to begin - or you've been doing it for years but couldn't fully explain your numbers if someone senior asked - Smooth Planning was written for you.

Over twenty years in contact centre resource planning, across organisations ranging from a handful of advisors to hundreds, author Ben Heslop kept encountering the same problem: talented people in planning functions with no real grounding. Handed a spreadsheet or a folder of screenshots, they figured it out through trial and error. This book exists to shortcut that journey.

What you'll find inside:

A complete, practical guide to every stage of the Smooth Planning Cycle - forecasting, capacity planning, scheduling, tools, channels, telephony, real-time management, storytelling, and review. Not heavy theory. Not academic detours. The things that actually work, explained in a way that actually makes sense.

The results are real. The same planning principles in this book dropped an operation's abandon rate from 35% to 3% in three weeks - same staff, same technology, same customers. A single scheduling change cut attrition almost in half.

Topics covered include:

How to build a forecast you can genuinely defend - and why operations must be in the room when you do

The headcount formula, the percentage trap, and how to check your own work

Scheduling as a retention tool - and how one change dropped attrition from 14% to 8% in a single month

When Excel is the right tool and when it isn't - and how to make the case for a WFM system

Multichannel planning, telephony and routing, real-time management, and how to turn data into decisions that actually get made

Why everything eventually gets blamed on planning - and how to handle it with credibility

For anyone building a career in workforce planning - this is the guide you should have been handed on day one.