1. The Staff are the key resource and flexibility is their greatest advantage.
An obvious one but always important to remember, sometimes you can achieve the biggest gains by increasing your flexibility. As I am sure most people in the planning world are aware of, productivity increases with employee satisfaction and the small things you can do can help this.
2. Make sure all the stakeholders understand the impact of their absence on planning?
It is not important if it is a call centre agent, an employment advisor or an IT specialist, it is important that everyone understands the true impact of his or her absence.
The effect can be added to by Managers/Leaders who change their team meetings or training without using the designed scheduling mechanisms at hand. This can all lead to devastating results on Service Levels or Key Performance Indicators.
If you can implant this understanding your life in planning is going to be much simpler.
3. Confidence
Planning is not wizardry it is based on defined methodologies that you know well, the volumes you are planning for are usually provided as well as the process map, which means any errors that do occur 99 times out of 100 will be due to someone else's input.
Though the blame game is never healthy, you can take a huge amount of confidence in this fact and the truth that people who understand planning will understand this element.
