MSHR 6610 Week 10 Schedule Change Rollout Plan Example

Changing the Schedule While the Phones Keep Ringing: An Implementation Plan Moving a Utility Contact Center to Staggered Start Times in Four Gated Waves So No Evening Loses Coverage

Student Name

Walden University

MSHR 6610: Aligning Human Resources with Business Operations

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Changing the Schedule While the Phones Keep Ringing: An Implementation Plan Moving a Utility Contact Center to Staggered Start Times in Four Gated Waves So No Evening Loses Coverage

The Change

Northfork Power & Light's contact center currently schedules agents in three fixed shifts starting at 7:00 a.m., 10:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m. That pattern was built when evening volume was low, and it leaves too few agents in the after-work evening hours, where the demand analysis found substantial, growing volume. The change replaces the three fixed starts with staggered starts every half hour across the six hours that begin at seven, so that the number of agents on the floor rises and falls with the demand curve. Agents bid for start times in order of seniority, within limits set by the staffing model. Koole (2013) describes this kind of shift design, many start times matched to forecast demand, as one of the main levers a call center has once total staffing is right.

Why Waves

The risk is that the change itself disrupts service. If every agent moved at once, supervisors would be managing a schedule nobody had tested, and any errors in the bid would show up as gaps on the floor. The plan therefore moves the center's four teams one at a time over eight weeks. Each wave starts only after the previous team has completed a full two-week schedule cycle and the evening intervals have met a gate. Armenakis and Bedeian (1999) note that the process of implementing change affects its success as much as the content; waves make the process testable.

Wave Calendar

Team C moves third, not first, because it holds most of the evening agents. Moving it early would put evening coverage at risk before the new pattern had been tested. By the time Team C bids, two teams are already on staggered starts and supervisors know how the new schedule behaves.

Table 1

Four Waves Over Eight Weeks

Composite utility. Agent counts total 132 positions; gates use the interval measures from the metrics note.

Responsibilities

Table 2

Who Does What

Composite utility.

If a Gate Fails

If a gate fails, the next wave waits. The workforce planner identifies the intervals that failed and adjusts the bid limits for the team that just moved, for example by requiring two more agents to start at 12:30 or 1:00 p.m. The team runs another two-week cycle before the gate is checked again. If a gate fails twice, the operations director decides whether to pause the rollout for a month. The plan builds in up to four weeks of delay, so the full change may take twelve weeks instead of eight.

Communication and Hardship

Agents care most about their start times, and some have fixed commitments such as childcare or second jobs. The plan announces the change to all agents before Wave 1, explains why evening coverage matters with the interval data and sets a hardship process through HR for agents who cannot work later starts. Henly and Lambert (2014) found that schedule unpredictability contributes to work-life conflict, so the plan publishes each team's new schedule at least three weeks before it takes effect.

Training Supervisors

Supervisors will manage a floor where agents arrive and leave every half hour instead of in three groups. Breaks, coaching sessions and team meetings must be rescheduled around a moving roster. Before Wave 1, each supervisor will spend two hours with the workforce planner learning to read the new schedule and plan breaks so that no interval loses more than two agents at once. This step is easy to skip and is often where staggered schedules fail in practice, because supervisors fall back on habits built for fixed shifts and send too many agents on break at the same time.

What Success Looks Like

After the final wave, evening intervals should meet the 80/30 target on most weekdays without routine overtime. The interval service measure from the metrics note will show whether that holds, and the ninety-day attrition measure will show whether the new schedule affects early departures.

References

Armenakis, A. A., & Bedeian, A. G. (1999). Organizational change: A review of theory and research in the 1990s. Journal of Management, 25(3), 293-315. https://doi.org/10.1177/014920639902500303

Henly, J. R., & Lambert, S. J. (2014). Unpredictable work timing in retail jobs: Implications for employee work-life conflict. ILR Review, 67(3), 986-1016. https://doi.org/10.1177/0019793914537458

Koole, G. (2013). Call center optimization. MG Books.