Plan work operations
Part of the output can be produced by software today.
An agent can propose the plan, chase the replies and keep the record current. To actually change anything it needs write access to a calendar or work system, and a person still owns the tradeoffs when two plans collide.
| How automatable | Partly automatable |
|---|---|
| Kind of work | Scheduling, planning and resource control |
| Jobs that do it | 7 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Tools and auth, Builders |
| O*NET activity | Organizing, Planning, and Prioritizing Work (4.A.2.b.6) |
What this looks like on the job
Not our paraphrase. These are real task statements recorded against this activity, spread across the 7 occupations that perform it.
- Plan, organize and direct activities of seasonal staff members.
- Plan work schedules and assign duties to maintain adequate staff for effective performance of activities and response to fluctuating workloads.
- Create or manage recycling operations budgets.
- Plan work assignments and equipment allocations to meet transportation, operations or production goals.
- Plan and coordinate airfield construction.
- Establish procedures for street closures or for repair or construction projects.
- Plan movement of products through lines to processing, storage, and shipping units, using knowledge of interconnections and capacities of pipelines, valve manifolds, pumps, and tankage.
- Provide assistance in balancing books, tracking, monitoring, or projecting a unit's budget needs, and in developing unit policies and procedures.
What we would actually use
One recommendation rather than a shortlist, because a shortlist is just your problem handed back. This is what we would buy for scheduling, planning and resource control, and what it costs.
Scheduling is a connector problem rather than an intelligence one, and $9 a month of Make covers both the calendar and the chasing. An agent platform priced per seat adds nothing you would notice here.
Chosen for the cheapest thing that does the job, not the best funded. Nothing on this site is sponsored, and the full landscape is there when you want to disagree with us.
The rest of the category
Context, not alternatives to weigh up. We name the layer rather than promise a named product does your specific task.
Matched from the kind of work, not from vendor marketing. Check any of them can reach the system your records actually live in — that connection, not the model, is where these projects stall.
How people actually do it
No workflow names this activity yet, but these automate the same kind of work, with the prompts to paste and what to keep for yourself.
Who does this work
7 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
Work that goes with it
O*NET groups these under “Plan work activities”. In practice they tend to be done by the same person, in the same sitting.
Method. The activity, its taxonomy placement and the occupations that perform it come straight from the public-domain O*NET 30.3 database. The automatability band is ours: we map each of O*NET’s 41 generalized work activities to how much of its output current software can produce, assuming a person still reviews and owns the result. It is a coarse three-way judgment on purpose. A precise-looking percentage here would be invented.