Planning Ahead
My Kura Journey
Well, about seven years ago my girlfriend told me to get a job. I was fresh out of university at the time, studying counselling part time and pouring drinks at the local watering hole. I started out (like many others) on the phones. Since then, I have grown and gained a lot of experience doing a number of jobs; from TM to Realtime, then Resource planning. And the girlfriend is now my wife!
What do Real time and Resource Planning do?
In short it’s our job to make sure that we have the right people in the right place at the right time to answer calls for our clients. Resource planning look at the big picture – we are given requirements from clients (how many calls they are expecting in the day/week) and need to build everything around that – staff requirements, shifts, holidays, even offline time. We look at things further out in the future and do our best to get a solid plan in place for the Realtime guys. Realtime do much the same thing – but they react to what is happening right now. By making quick changes and decisions they make sure that the plans we send them actually work. For example if the phone lines are quieter than expected they can plan in more investment time for our people and potentially look at releasing additional holiday hours. At Kura the two teams are really close, which is essential for smooth operation and the feedback that we need to make things work better.
What does my Day Involve?
There is a lot of admin work involved in my role, and you need a high attention to detail. The first thing I do every day is to check through and organize our emails and make sure that all of our staff details are correct. Next I look through the holidays that agents have requested and the My Day requests that have been sent to us. Afternoons, I import details of new people joining the business onto our systems and plan investment time for the advisors. This is very different to when I was in Realtime. In Realtime we still work emails and we still approve holidays, but everything was less structured for me and much more immediate. Realtime cover the full opening hours in order to provide support throughout the day, and spend a lot of time checking absence and adherence, using availability to get extra offline time and doing everything they can to help when things get busy.
Overall
All in all I have grown with Kura. Starting off on the phones I have developed within the business and I now work as a planner, I have had the opportunity to do what I enjoy most – learn! If you have managed to read this far then I would like to sign off with a little advice – take accountability for your own development. Kura is a great place to pick up new skills and experience, and the best way to do this is to ask. If you have a genuine question no one is going to turn you away, and nothing ventured, nothing gained. Who knows where you might end up?
Phil Francis- Junior Resource Planner