Field notes
Workforce planning, one layer at a time.
Essays on forecasting, capacity, scheduling and real-time, and what each layer costs when it's skipped. Every other Sunday.
From November 15, new essays are published here first. The archive below links to the original editions.
- The Boring Superpower On one program I ran, shrinkage fell from about 45% to about 28% and no model changed. What moved it was governance, the part of the architecture nobody draws on the diagram.
- The Thesis Nobody Wrote In 2007, Ric Kosiba asked for a better way to grade a forecast and figured some student would get to it eventually. Nobody did. Nineteen years later he answered it himself, in one line, in an email.
- Occupancy Is a Loan The most-watched number on the floor gets set two layers away from it. Ask who set it, and the room goes quiet.
- AI in the Architect Seat What AI-native workforce management actually is — and the seat most orgs are seating it in by mistake.
- The Four Numbers Your Staffing Model Never Re-Checks Erlang C is eighty years old and correct. What breaks a staffing model is never the formula.
- Carl's Twenty Seconds The most-cited standard in workforce management started as one engineer's patience running out. Ric Kosiba heard it from the people who were in the room.
- The Assurance Gap Payroll gets audited. Invoices get audited. The forecast that drives both has no control layer at all.
- Finance Has a Contact-Center Problem and Doesn't Know It What WFM does that nobody outside the call-center world realizes can be done almost anywhere.
- Who Checks the Assumptions? Your forecast gets graded on accuracy. Nobody grades the inputs it was built on — and that's where the money leaks.
- The AI Failure Modes Five ways AI deployments fail before the model does — and the pre-mortem that prices the risk.
- The Dead Room The Operator's Arc, Part 1 of 4 — start here
- Three Numbers Nobody Had Refreshed The Operator's Arc, Part 2 of 4 — the diagnosis
- When the Number Reached Finance The Operator's Arc, Part 3 of 4 — what the turnaround produced
- Why I Build These Tools The Operator's Arc, Part 4 of 4 — what this list is for
- The 90-Day Notice A healthcare contract was 90 days from cancellation. The fix wasn't more agents. It was three assumption inputs that hadn't been touched in years.
- Run Your Number You downloaded the Engine. This is the 15 minutes where it stops being a file and starts being your number.
- Can your CFO name one WFM metric you track? Issue 02 of The Compounding Brief — free to the whole list this week.
- The Margin Lens Your WFM is invisible to Finance — and the reason isn't the numbers. It's the language.
- The Five Failure Modes The compounding architecture, layer by layer — how to spot which one is leaking before it hits the P&L.
- The Compounding System Why most WFM operations leak 50% of their potential — and what the architecture looks like when they don't.
- 20 Years on the Floor Why I'm finally writing — and what I want this newsletter to be.
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Free, every other Sunday. No pitch, just the architecture.