Optimisation is being talked about all across the workforce management industry. The benefits, some of which Axsium CEO Bob Clements has outlined, are clear. If technology has improved and your business has changed, the way you use your WFM platform should change too—and that means optimisation.
The Lift and Shift Problem
WFM platforms are rarely short-term tools. Once in place, they often become part of the operational fabric of the business for many years. Old assumptions can remain embedded long after the operation itself has changed.
This becomes a problem when taking a “lift and shift” approach to implementing your new system. Lift and shift essentially refers to moving the configuration of the old system over into the new one.
Organisations often go for this option because it feels lower risk, and can be easier to explain and quicker to deliver. On paper, lift and shift looks entirely sensible. In the short term, it limits disruption, protects continuity, and gives stakeholders confidence that the programme will remain manageable.
For a recent client, that decision was entirely rational. Lift and shift made sense at the outset of their implementation project. Their priority was to move onto a modern platform with as little disruption as possible. They needed to protect business continuity.
For the project team and the board, taking a lift and shift approach was a sensible and defensible choice. A pragmatic one, in fact. It recognised the realities of budget, time and organisational capacity. In-depth process and configuration redesign can be a costly business, particularly when there is pressure to replace legacy technology, reduce risk and keep the business running.
The Axsium team recommended against taking the lift and shift approach, but the client’s situation made taking any other option prohibitive. We do see this situation occur and have best practices in place to ensure the end result is the best it can be.
The Challenge of Moving What You Have
The problem with lift and shift only became clear to our client later. The design our team was migrating was already around seven years old. It had been built for a different operating environment. It had been built before the pandemic, before major changes in working patterns, and before many of the newer capabilities in today’s platforms were widely available.
The organisation itself had changed: customer expectations had shifted, new services had been introduced, and labour markets had tightened. Crucially, compliance demands had increased and managers’ days were different to those the original solution had been built around.
By recreating that design in a newer environment, the organisation preserved complexity that no longer reflected the reality of the business. Essentially, they brought everything that no longer worked or was no longer required along with what did and missed opportunities to take advantage of better technology in the process.
It’s important to say that the result was not a failed implementation. But it wasn’t the success originally imagined. The client had spent a great deal of money doing what seemed to be the right and simple thing. And yet, the end state felt adequate rather than transformative.
The platform was newer, but the experience for managers and colleagues was still shaped by decisions made years earlier. Old assumptions had been transferred into a modern environment without being challenged. Lift and shift may have been the right decision at the time, but it has not passed the test of time.
This is a moment in which optimisation can make a real difference. It is not an admission of failure—it is a recognition that a sensible decision made in one moment may need to be revisited as the context changes over time.
Optimisation in the Era of Change
In a recent report, McKinsey highlights that organisations have seen more change to people operations in the past year than in the previous decade. This has been driven largely by technology, hybrid working, and new workforce expectations. As shown by CIPD, technology, hybrid working, compliance, and employee expectations are all reshaping HR operating models.
With so much changing in so many ways, optimising the design of your solution is vital. Years-old assumptions just won’t cut it. You need to simplify where possible, modernise where useful, and make better use of new capabilities.
Organisations also need to ask straightforward but important questions. Which use cases still matter? Which process steps still add value? Which rules exist only because the old system required them? And where has technology moved on enough to make a better employee or manager experience possible?
Let’s look at some practical examples.
Mobile Functionality
One optimisation approach is to use mobile functionality to put employees at the centre of your planning process. This provides them with agency rather than treating them as passive recipients of schedules. Instead of relying on managers to act as intermediaries for every change, colleagues can swap shifts, request overtime and manage time off through tools that are designed for that purpose.
It sounds like a small improvement, but it changes the character of the system. It reduces administrative effort, removes friction from everyday tasks, and gives employees more control over how they interact with the operation.
In many organisations, those small changes make all the difference between a system people tolerate and one they actively use.
Optimising Your Labour Model
Revisiting your labour model will allow it to reflect new products and services, different ways of working, and changes in the technology you use to serve customers. If that base data is wrong, your forecast will be wrong too. That means your schedules are likely to be misaligned with demand and payroll spend will be less effective than it should be.
This is one of the clearest examples of the impact old assumptions can have. A labour model built for yesterday’s operation may quietly distort investment and customer service decisions every single week. It could create overstaffing in some places, understaffing in others. Your team will quickly develop a general sense that the system never quite matches what is happening on the ground.
Optimisation and Compliance
Compliance analysis can also show where your current design is failing certain parts of your team. In many cases, people do not fail to comply because they are unwilling. They struggle because the system is too difficult to use consistently and easily.
If a process feels cumbersome, confusing, or overly dependent on manager intervention, compliance will suffer. Once those gaps are visible, you can use root cause analysis to simplify the experience and improve the functionality.
The Benefits of Optimisation
The biggest benefit of all is return on investment. When a workforce management system is easier to use and better aligned to the operation, it stops feeling like something the business has to tolerate simply to get people paid. It becomes a tool that managers want to use because it helps them run the business better, improve service, and make more confident decisions.
Optimisation projects can appear modest compared with large-scale implementation programmes. In reality, they often target the assumptions and friction points that most directly affect your organisation’s day-to-day performance.
This matters even more as employment costs continue to rise and the cost of not optimising grows alongside. A relatively small project to revisit core assumptions about use cases, process steps, and the technology required can pay huge dividends.
Optimising for the Future
As I’ve outlined, the returns are not only financial although the ROI can be significant. Stronger employee engagement, a better experience for managers, and improved customer satisfaction are all clear benefits.
And that is why optimisation is so important after completing a lift and shift WFM implementation project. It’s not because it was the wrong decision—you need to ensure the assumptions and configuration you’ve brought over to your new system are still right today.
And optimisation isn’t just for organisations who have taken the lift and shift path. It doesn’t matter if you’ve recently upgraded or implemented or not. Lift and shift or ground-up implementation? Either way, optimisation will take your WFM practice to the next level.
Implementation is about getting an up-to-date configuration and process in place—one which reflects market realities and customer service practices. Optimisation is about reaping the benefits of ensuring that system reflects the business it is meant to support.
Is it time for you to think about starting an optimisation project of your own?