About ccplanning.net
What this site is
ccplanning.net is an independent, single-author resource for contact centre workforce planners, team leaders, and operations managers. It exists because most of the published material on workforce planning is either vendor-led marketing, generic management content, or written by people a long way from the operational reality. There’s a gap in the middle — serious, opinionated, practical writing for the people who actually do the work. This site is an attempt to fill it.
Every piece is written from a planning-practitioner perspective. The articles are the kind you’d want to send to a new analyst, the briefings you’d hand to a team leader, the maths you’d defend in front of finance. The calculators are the ones used in real planning, with the corner-case behaviour you actually need. The site doesn’t sell anything and isn’t affiliated with any vendor.
What you’ll find here
Articles. Long-form pieces on forecasting, scheduling, real-time management, quality, MI, leadership, and the workforce planning career. Updated regularly. Every piece is opinionated and walks through the reasoning, not just the conclusion.
Calculators. Erlang C, Erlang A (with abandonment), Erlang X (with blocking and redials), shrinkage, cost-of-attrition, cost-per-contact, EBITDA impact, and team-leader business case. Working models with the corner cases — built to be defensible.
White papers. In-depth, free guides — from forecasting and scheduling masterclasses to the technical “From Erlang to Excel” paper with its live companion workbook.
Resources. Templates, a workforce-planning maturity assessment, a curated jobs and knowledge-sources page, and a vendor directory across workforce management and quality assurance.
A glossary. Plain-language definitions of the workforce planning terms that get used loosely — AHT, occupancy, adherence vs conformance, FCR, shrinkage, and the rest.
About the author
The site is written and maintained by John Casey, a contact centre workforce planning practitioner with more than 30 years in the discipline across regulated UK and Irish operations. He is the founder of ccplanning.net and currently works in a senior workforce-planning role in UK financial services.
His career spans the operational, the academic, and the community side of the profession. He has been an Operations Director at the Forum, has taught workforce planning at Ulster University, has worked across large multinational outsourced operations including Stream in the EMEA region, and currently works in workforce planning at AXA. He is based in Derry, Northern Ireland.
The writing draws on building planning functions from scratch, running real-time operations, managing analyst teams, and the steady stream of leadership conversations that come with the discipline — deliberately distilled so the lessons travel across operations. What works for a 1,000-seat regulated operation also tends to work for a 50-seat in-house service team, with the obvious adjustments.
You can find ccPlanning on LinkedIn, where most of the discussion happens.
Independence & disclaimer
ccplanning.net is a personal project, created and run by John Casey in an entirely personal capacity, in personal time and on personal equipment. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or representative of any current or former employer.
Nothing on this site is written on behalf of any employer, uses any employer’s confidential or proprietary information, or reflects any employer’s views, data, systems, policies or practices in any way. Considerable care has been taken to ensure every article, calculator and template reflects only general, widely-applicable industry experience and publicly available knowledge — never the specifics of any single organisation. Examples and figures are illustrative.
All views expressed are the author’s own. If anything here could be read as representing an employer, that reading is mistaken — and the author would welcome the chance to correct it.
Editorial principles
Practitioner first. Every article is written for the planner who has to do the work tomorrow morning. Theoretical-only pieces don’t earn their place.
Independent. No vendor pays to be featured. Vendors mentioned in the technology directory are listed because they’re part of the real market, not because of any commercial arrangement.
Opinionated. The articles take positions. Where there’s a defensible “most operations should do X,” the site says so, with the reasoning.
Open to correction. Workforce planning is a discipline where reasonable people disagree on the right answer. If a piece is wrong on the facts, please say so — it’ll be updated.
How to get the most from the site
New to the discipline? The planning cycle article gives the operational overview, the glossary covers the vocabulary, and the beginner’s forecasting piece walks through the maths foundations. The maturity assessment is a useful way to identify the areas of your operation that would most benefit from focus.
Running a planning function? The resources page, the calculators, and the longer articles on MI, QA, and leadership are designed to be reference material — the kind of thing you bookmark and come back to.
To keep up with new pieces, follow ccPlanning on LinkedIn, subscribe to the email list at Buttondown, or use the RSS feed.
Get in touch
Spotted something wrong, want to discuss an idea, or have a topic you’d like to see covered? Email john@ccplanning.net, or reach out on LinkedIn — both get a quick reply.
ccplanning.net is an independent publication. Views are personal and don’t represent any employer. No vendor pays for placement; no article is sponsored.