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Free white paper · Opinion

As Much Art as Science

The perils of over-trusting the numbers in contact-centre workforce planning.

Planning wears the lab coat — Erlang, forecasts to two decimal places, optimisation engines — and we have been happy to sell that image, to the business and to ourselves. This paper is an argument against the last step, where precision gets mistaken for truth. The science is real and the paper defends it; but the best planners treat the number as the start of a judgement, not the end of one. It covers the five ways models quietly mislead, the judgement the spreadsheet can’t supply, and a working discipline for holding both. Read it, and tell us where we’re wrong.

Cover of the ccplanning.net white paper: As Much Art as Science

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What’s inside

  • The seduction of the number — why precision feels like truth, and why that’s the trap
  • First, give the science its due — this is no licence for gut-feel planning
  • The five ways models quietly mislead: false precision, broken assumptions, Goodhart’s law, garbage-in, and the things numbers can’t see
  • The art — judgement, override, reading the operation, pattern memory, communication
  • Why both extremes fail: brittle all-science and unaccountable all-art
  • A working discipline for holding the maths and the judgement together
  • The planner’s stance — trust the numbers enough to use them, distrust them enough to think

An opinion piece in the ccPlanning series. Pair it with forecast with ranges, not point estimates, the point estimate and the false-certainty trap, and composite metrics that hide the truth.