Job Description

The Workforce Forecasting and Scheduling Lead is responsible for volume forecasting, long-range capacity planning, short-range demand planning and scheduling activities associated with both internal and external resources supporting products globally. This person leads a team to accurately predict workload and staffing requirements, both long and short-range, and scheduling staff to deliver an optimized plan that achieves our support objectives. 

In this role you will ensure that the team - consisting of forecasting and scheduling specialists - creates and maintains statistical forecast models that incorporate business intelligence gathered from sales, marketing, finance and other sources. You will oversee building and maintaining staffing models that predict the staff required for internal and external resources, and you will manage the scheduling of those resources. You will handle requests for what-if analysis and lead your team in presenting it to senior leadership. You will be the leader responsible for team strategy and metrics (KPI) performance, overseeing decisions across infrastructure, personnel, process and work prioritization. Additionally, this role would represent Forecasting and Scheduling at a senior level within the organization, and be the subject matter expert within the company for Forecasting policies, best practices, and data. 

You will:

• Hire and lead the Workforce Forecasting and Scheduling team - You will develop their skills, helping them grow in their roles, while ensuring the team provides high quality work
• Set the Workforce Forecasting and Scheduling team strategy and roadmap in collaboration with the Workforce Analyst team. Contribute to OKRs (goals and essential results), prioritization and sequencing of projects, and ensure important projects are delivered
• Take overall responsibility for achieving the Workforce Forecasting and scheduling team KPIs (Forecast Accuracy, SLAs, Capacity)
• Manage the forecasting approaches and models both within workforce tools and outside with excel to address specific growth
• Lead world-wide rollup of forecast deliverables and scheduling
• Contribute to overall channel optimization strategy, including segmentation and redundancy
• Implement clear line of communication and expectations between workforce forecasting and scheduling and partners
• Contribute to Workforce Management projects - Network Realignment, redundancy, design and reporting realignment
• Design new processes where needed, and improve existing processes to make the team more efficient and consistent
• Design and present a state of the business address to senior leadership regularly, being able to speak to our strategy, challenges, and influence decisions on workforce and partner related asks
• Maintain detailed records of call/workload statistics and arrival patterns to maximize forecasting accuracy capability, ensuring cost-effective labor use. +/- 5% forecast accuracy for volume, handle time, and headcount needs

Qualifications

You Have:

• BA/BS degree in an analytical field
• 6+ years of work experience in Workforce Forecasting with 3+ years in a leadership role - hiring and developing great people, and establishing a collaborative and positive team culture
• Understand annual planning cycles and can contribute to overall strategy development
• Experience with Workforce Management tools (Teleopti, NICE IEX preferred), or experience with scheduling or analytical software
• Responsibility for delivering on challenging Forecasting KPIs (stretch goals)
• In-depth knowledge of call center statistics and technology
• Experience with statistical forecasting models, such as time series and regression analysis
• Advanced Excel (can perform complex functions)  and/or GSuites skills and ability to build logical forecast models
• Design and present a state of the business address to senior leadership regularly, being able to speak to our strategy, challenges, and influence decisions on workforce and partner related asks
• Experience with Looker, or similar BI tools

Preferred

• MA degree in an analytical field
• Experience using R and/or Python to forecast
• Proficiency using SQL