Project Management at Call Centre - Essay Example

Project Management Project Management Introduction The call centre service has been dubbed by some as one of the newest lucrative industries in the United Kingdom, employing around 1.3 million workers as of December 2013 (Cooke, 2006). Even as the United Kingdom feels the impact from the worldwide IT crunch, it has greatly gained from the current cost-cutting trend in an unfamiliar manner – an unexpected boom in the call centre business. For sure, the call centre business has been hailed as the nation’s newest sunshine industry, with the field projected to create another 1 million jobs in the coming three years, according to contact centre industry analyst Babel (Batt, Holman & Holtgrewe, 2009). From the turn of the millennium to 2002, the industry grew over 200% and generated revenues about $289 million in 2002 alone. In 2004, the revenue generated by this industry totaled up to around $947 million. Furthermore, optimism continued to run high as a research group predicated that the growth of ICT-based services would grow to $200 billion by the end of the decade, with call centres enjoying a fair share of $42 billion of the revenue (White, 2014). Reports claim that the United States alone claims over 1.5 million seats and another 1 million waiting to be outsourced and the United Kingdom only has around 500,000 seats only waiting to be outsourced. Keeping in line with this, this paper will discuss the process of creating a new control and call centre that will house the police, ambulance and fire rescue emergency services, which will receive and deal with all 999 emergency and non-emergency calls that will be used by both England and Wales citizens. In detail, it will (1) identify key explanatory aspects/issues/arguments relating to this project; (2) assess the benefits/strengths and problems/weaknesses/shortcomings/pitfalls, applicable, in terms of implementing the pilot; (3) assess the extent to which formal programme and project management would provide cost and/or efficiency savings; and (4) provide a set of good practice/guidance recommendations that can be evidenced and/or supported from the finding of your review. What is a Call Centre? A call centre refers to a centrally-based customer service operation where its agents deal with telephone calls on behalf of a customer/caller (D’Cruz & Noronha, 2006). Customers vary from emergency callers, non-emergency callers, mail-order catalog houses, computer product help desks, telemarketing companies, banks, insurance groups and financial services, transportation and freight handling firms, IT companies and hotels, among others. The size of one centre is judged by its number of "seats." One seat comprises of a station with two/three agents changing shifts to offer 24-hour service. The United Kingdom, U.S. and Australia are among the world’s leading call centre industries (Grol, Giesen & van Uden, 2006). Many reasons aid to the local industrys dazzling development pace such as the rising cost of carrying out business in other developed nations such as the United States, forcing foreign nations to scale back and outsource marginal e-services (Lloyd, Mason, Osborne & Payne, 2008). However, the call centres that will be discussed in this paper are emergency centres dealing with police, ambulance and fire rescues services. These are call centres that one usually dials 999 in order to receive the assistance of a police officer, ambulance service or fire rescue service (Reena, 2010). Stakeholders The key stakeholders identified in this project will include all the three departments: police, ambulance and fire rescue. These include the Police and Crime Commissioner for Eastshire Constabulary, the Chief Executive of Eastshire Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust and the Chief Fire Officer of Eastshire Fire and Rescue Service. Key Aspects/Issues/Arguments Relating to Project Management Some of the key aspects relating to project management include initiating, planning, executing, monitoring and controlling and closing (Cowie, 2007). The initiation process approves the entire project or the following stage of a project. In this stage, a project’s scope is defined, objectives are established and liable parties, as well as the deliverables are identified. Planning refers to defining and refining the best course of action that will enable you to achieve the project’s objectives (Van Jaarsveld, Kwon & Frost, 2009). Planning can be classified into two categories: facilitating processes and core planning processes. Core processes normally have plain dependencies, which agitate them to be performed in essentially the same order on almost every project. Examples include schedule development, scope planning, cost budgeting and resource planning. Facilitating processes are completely reliant on the nature of the project plus are carried out occasionally and as required, but they are not optional (Kennedy, 2003). A number of the facilitating planning processes comprise of staff acquisition, quality planning, as well as risk identification. Executing, on the other hand, entails coordinating all resources, from human to other resources, in order to perform the entire project plan (Bristow, Munday & Gripaios, 2000). Due to the constant role execution plays in project management, its processes are divided into two subgroups, core and facilitating. Monitoring and controlling ensures that not only project objectives are fulfilled, but that corrective action are taken whenever a problem comes up (Bristow et al., 2000). In this stage, risk monitoring and performance reporting and control are core. Finally, closing involves contract closure and administrative closure (Bristow et al., 2000). This means that any open items are rectified plus the contract is settled. Some of the issues concerning project management include assigning the wrong personnel to manage the project, not getting everybody on the team behind the project, not getting executive buy-ins, undertaking too many projects at once, improper communication, frequently changing the scope, unrealistic timelines, lack of a system for tracking or approving changes, micromanaging projects, over-relying on software and lacking a metric that defines success (Bristow et al., 2000). Normally, during resource allocation, a majority of the effort is centered on finding the right resources instead of the right project manager (Bristow et al., 2000). For example, in setting up this call centre, we might think that what we need is a lot of capital and man power, when in real sense a skilful project manager might get us what we want with minimal capital and adequate resources. This will help in avoiding wastage of resource and manpower, which can be used elsewhere for better purposes. Projects normally fail since they do not get enough endorsement from the departments and stakeholders involved in and affected by the project respectively (Batt & Nohara, 2009). For instance, the project manager of the control and call centre might fail to make clear what everybody’s role is or fully classify the personal payoff that workers would get when they finish setting up the control and call centres. According to Batt & Nohara (2009), somebody at the higher levels of the project has to own the entire project from beginning to the end and be individually vested in its achievement. There are two arguments going around the project management discussions. The first is the trite old survey, which basically asks “what are the reasons behind failure of projects?” The second is the arguments about whether or not project management is a profession. Batt & Nohara (2009) also argue that they might seem to be no connection between these two arguments, but there is a big connection between the two. Researchers have been conducting surveys on why projects fail for over four decades and the findings never change. These surveys predictably come up with lists of signs instead of root causes. The main question is, according to Batt & Nohara (2009), is why do so many researchers conduct the same old thing and anticipate for a different result? This question brought the two authors to professionalism, making them argue that project management is, perhaps, not a profession’. They believe that it implies that project managers have to be certified and regularly persecuted incase a project fails. As a recommendation, since this control and call centre initiative seems to be a complicated project, thorough research should be conducted on how to set up such a site and successfully run it. You do not have to be a ‘licenced project manager’ to act professionally. This is because the Royal Charter is about developing the project management practice, and that implies to all those concerned in projects, not only the managers (Batt & Nohara, 2009). Endorsing this Charter by the project management team would be one of many elements, which will help attain the social change we require to stop repeating such old mistakes. The Benefits and Problems as Applicable in the Pilot As of now, there stands three control and call centres in Eastshire side all of them dealing with the same emergency and non-emergency issues. This further proves the claim in beginning of this paper that the control and call centre business is on the rise because one town only has three control and call centres. This provides both benefits and disadvantages to citizens of Eastshire and its local authorities. Some of the benefits include better handling of overflow calls, handling specialised calls, handling after-hour calls, better disaster recovery and appealing to its users (Richardson & Belt, 2001). Having more than one control and call centre to assist one community means that the agents can be able to handle overflow calls in a professional manner in order to enhance customer experience and also ensure that not caller is left behind (Richardson & Belt, 2001). You might find that during some days, the calls exceed the number you expected to get, which might present itself as an overload to the clients, but having these three call centres ensures that the work load is minimal. This is because even the agents are many. It also puts them in a better position to handle specialised calls: emergency calls and non-emergency calls. Since we are dealing with project management, (Holman, Frenkel, Sørensen & Wood, 2009) present a situation such as where one centre is prone to power outages, bad weather or even natural disasters, or simply the control centre’s software and infrastructure is not performing as needed, having more than one control and call centres ensures that even during such times of disaster, work still goes on. Having three control and call centres working for one region means that there will never be a case where phone calls go unanswered, or wind up in the voice mail facility (Holman et al., 2009). Every call will be responded to in three rings at the most. Emergency control and call centre services know that incoming calls, unlike other call centre services, are most likely to be from callers in emergency situations, and possibly in distress too. They quickly wish to talk to an agent who can assist them, and frequently ringing phones is one of the last things they wish to listen to (Holman et al., 2009). However, looking from a project management perspective, the disadvantages of having more than one control and call centre to cater to one community are many, and for this reason, that is why Eastshire is looking to implement only one centre across their region and hope that this will be implemented across England and Wales. First and foremost, it expensive to operate three centres at the same time, which is money removed by taxpayers. It is overly expensive to maintain such IT-based premises and also you require more workforce and labour to handle of the work. It has been projected that having only one large control and call centre that houses the police emergency response team, ambulance and fire rescue will be economical (LLoyd, Mason & Mayhew, 2008). This will decrease the management costs by more than 66% as compared to existing costs and also operational staff by over 25% as compared to existing staff numbers. The purpose of project management, as confirm earlier in this paper, is to complete a project with minimal resources as possible and capital. Setting up one central control and call centre will be working towards this purpose in order to realise efficiency. Establishing one central centre can be a more commercial solution compared to recruiting and maintaining workforces of three call centre. It decreases costs linked to staffing different call centre agents from different centres as erecting one main centre will make it easier when it comes to handling the agents. It reduces, as well, infrastructure and overhead costs as now everything will be based in one specific centre. Doellgast (2008) argues that this turns a considerable fixed cost into a variable cost since skilled labour will be there when you need it. Thus, put together, these can sum up to significant savings. The local authorities involved in this venture will also be able to generate income from the sale of existing building and increase efficiency through closer working relations and shared radio/communication technology. Most businesses that erect their own premises, at times, build other surplus rooms, which they rent out to third party groups in order to earn an extra coin (Doellgast, 2008). We can do the same and build a HQ with more rooms and office space and rent them to willing tenants, which will help us increase our revenue. If it will be a high rise building, we can put advertising billboards and earn money from businesses that choose to advertise on them. According to Doellgast (2008), having these three emergency response teams working under one roof means efficiency. There are times when an emergency might require all three teams to be involved and in such cases it will be much simpler to dispatch the teams to the site where the emergency has occurred by they are working together. It is also less expensive for them in terms of equipment since they can share them, unlike having three different control and call centres. It is also much easier to monitor the progress of the call centres from one central location unlike having three different locals, especially during peak hours, when you want to tell if they agents are service their purpose well or not. Finally, ensuring that agents are in a better position to handle emergency calls during peaks hours will aid in ensuring that clients are fully satisfied about the services offered (Cleveland, 2006). It will work to reduces cases of where we hear clients talking ill about some of the poor customer services that some call centres offer to them. How This Project proves to be Cost Effective and Efficiency Savings? This section will not go deep into financial details, but estimated percentages acquired from scholarly sources that might compared to building one central control and call centres instead of three. Today, organisations of all sizes ca quickly build new call centres in any locals, globally, using the latest technology, as well as cloud-based systems. Research shows that setting up only one station can vary from $2,500 to $10,000 (White, 2014). One group, Site Selection Group, has taken it as its initiative to search cheaper methods of setting up a call centre and also carried out extensive research on how to be cost effective when it comes to setting up one and ensuring that it still lives up to its role (White, 2014). In the UK alone, there are nearly 850 vacated call centres, meaning that they are not operational at the moment, but can be re-used when the need arises (White, 2014). In Eastshire side, there are two vacated call centres in the same neighbourhood, located near the shores of Atlantic, a cool and serene environment. The benefit of using these vacated call centre facilities is that they normally need the least amount of capital, as well as less time to function. And since the Eastshire project will be used to assess whether such a project can be enrolled in different regions all over England and Wales, this vacated centres can serve as a startup of permanent centres for the project. However, the condition of these facilities differ considerable, thus stakeholders need to know that there are hidden expenses like insufficient electrical and mechanical systems, which normally cannot be identified when inspecting the site; this is according to Site Selection Group (White, 2014). You also need to understand why the call centre facility closed. Is the call centre market too saturated? Was there a labour problem? Or did the earlier firm loose a contract? Due to the last recession, there is an exodus of former retail buildings, which are still left vacant and can now be used as a potential call centres, even in Eastshire. This can be estimated to a reduction of building and management costs by 66% as compared to the costs that were used to set up the three different call centres. Also, these facilities normally have abundance of parking, larger floor plates and very good amenities nearby, meaning that it will be easier to accommodate all three emergency rescues teams under one roof and run matters efficiently. Our main purpose is to have the police force, ambulance service and fire rescues emergency teams all operate under one roof. Meaning that the moment you dial 999, an agent will be able to give you real-time assistance whether you need an ambulance, police assistance or fire brigade assistance. Such offices are not for normal businesses because large floor space works well with open place offices such as a control and call centre (Gautié & Schmitt, 2010). You only require adequate planning to turn these spaces into up and efficiently running emergency response centres. However, being an initiative taken by the government, the financial incentives they have can aid in offsetting costs, but this should not much be depended on. Such space is also anticipated to reduce of operational staff by at least 25% as compared to existing staff numbers; this is from having three different managers, supervisors and also subordinate staff, who work in the three different locations bringing them down to one per each department, one manager and supervisor among others. As the need for call centre space has gone up, some call centre construction firms are once again thinking about ground-up, build-to-suit facilities, which are also turning out to be cheaper as there is more competition than ever before (Gautié & Schmitt, 2010). Thus, we have to options, either to make use of the vacated centres or build an entire new facility, both of which are still economical than running three different call centres in the same region for the same purpose. Building a new facility planned purposely to meet the demands of a call centre user will really offer a superior image and environment for its workers. Only government organisations and well funded firms can build their own facilities because of the financial pledges needed by banks to support such capital intensive projects. Thus, build-to-suits call for longer-term leases and will normally draw the greatest amount of financial incentives (Gautié & Schmitt, 2010). As the call centre business continues to grow in the United Kingdom, quality call centre facilities will start to reduce. It is vital to keep in mind that real estate costs merely account for five to ten percent of a call centre’s operating costs whereas labour expenses will be over 80%.  Therefore, it is vital to align some real estate strategies to the labour goals to make sure we are making the optimal location choice for the call centre. Recommendations Most businesses today have the wrong notion that pouring in a lot of capital and also having many resources means that the business with the successfully set and run. Most of these individuals fail to consider the importance of a skilful project manager or even simply the role of the project manager in ensuring the success of the project (Mandelbaum, 2004). We can tell this from the nearly 850 vacated call centres that stand in the United Kingdom alone. There was capital and resources to build these call centres but they did not live up to their roles. A good project manager could tell whether the business they were venturing into would be prosperous or not (Wegge et al., 2006). A strict review should have been conducted on the feasibility of the project before undertaking the venturing and saving the organisations a lot of money before opting to venture into something that will make them run at a loss. For this Eastshire project, certainly running three projects at the same time for one region does not make economical sense. Even the one control and call centre planning to be set up might offer their services to a wider region that only Eastshire at a more economic cost. The stakeholders involved in this project, mostly members from the police department, ambulance service and fire rescues should first know how many personnel they need to deploy to these call centres and the kind of equipment that they require in order to successfully run them. Once such a project successfully hits the groups, such projects can be erected in strategic regions in both England and Wales and used to act as emergency control and call centres for the two countries. The team involved should also conduct extensive research about the location, environment, and workers to be recruited and whether the location will be of profit to the venture. Conclusion In conclusion, this paper has discussed setting up a new and efficient control and call centre housing police, ambulance and fire rescue emergency services, which will receive and deal with all 999 emergency and non-emergency calls that will be used by both England and Wales citizens. With the fast rise in the call centre business and expenses being on the low, at the moment, this is the best time to venture into such a field, especially for community servicing bodies such as the police force, ambulance services and also the fire rescues department, which will make it less expensive for them to set up these centres and the extra funds be used elsewhere for community development purposes. Local authorities should also avoid setting up excess centres to avoid increasing the number of vacated centre due to poor planning of business. They might also make use of these vacated centres and renovate them in order to save them from the cost of building a new centre from the ground-up. Such a situation once happened in the United States, where they had a number of vacated call centres, but they chose to improve them and get them back to business instead of coming up with new centres once more. This saves the both the government and their taxpayers money. As a final recommendation, since a majority of the scholarly sources and literature regarding this topic of call centres that could only be retrieved talk about the engineering of building a call centre, not many focused on issues such as the one discussed in this paper, regarding personnel and floor space among others, it is advisable that researchers also venture into this topic in order for people to understand it more, even if it is not a scholarly subject. References Batt, R., & Nohara, H. (2009). How institutions and business strategies affect wages: A cross-national study of call centres. Industrial & Labor Relations Review, 62(4), 533-552. Batt, R., Holman, D., & Holtgrewe, U. (2009). The Globalization of Service Work: Comparative Institutional Perspectives on Call Centres Introduction to a Special Issue of the Industrial & Labor Relations Review. Industrial & Labor Relations Review, 62(4), 453-488. Bristow, G., Munday, M., & Gripaios, P. (2000). 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