Barry Jones, Product Director at QStory, shares his thoughts on the critical shift from reactive intraday management, to proactive intraday control – adapted from his ‘Tip of the Week’ for the Society of Workforce Planning Professionals (SWPP) on Monday 30th March 2026.
Let’s be honest: Much of what the industry calls “intraday management” is actually just expensive spectating.
If your team spends the day staring at red dashboards and playing whack-a-mole with staffing gaps, you aren’t managing, you’re officiating a crisis.
So what does intraday management look like in your operations?
- Reactive firefighting: A frantic, high-stress scramble to react once a queue has already formed and service levels are already beyond breaking point.
- Limited to hall-monitoring: Analysts and supervisors watching dashboards and nudging agents who are two minutes late from lunch.
- A cold cost-cutting exercise: Designed to squeeze every drop of productivity out of staff until their morale hits zero.
- All of the above.
The Reality: It doesn’t have to be this way.
Most operations are just surviving the chaos. They treat intraday as a fire department when they should be acting like a flight crew. If your forecast and schedule are the flight plan, intraday management is steering the plane to handle turbulence and stay on course.
Effective intraday management is about proactive re-forecasting. It’s about spotting a 15% workload spike at 10:00 AM and presenting solutions before the collapse happens.
It’s also about protecting your people. Instead of “squeezing” staff, proactive management uses quiet windows to automate the delivery of coaching and training sessions.
If this sounds like a lot of plates to spin, it’s because it is. To truly stop officiating the crisis, modern operations are moving toward intraday automation. By using a tool like QStory, you can automate manual adherence tasks and constant re-forecasting. This allows your team to focus on high-value strategy rather than just keeping their heads above water.
Stop watching the crisis happen. Start taking control of the day before it takes control of you.
To find out more about QStory’s Intraday Automation capabilities, get in touch or book a demo today!
About the author: Barry has spent almost 20 years in various contact centre roles from small vendors to large, multinationals and brings a passion and advocacy for empowering people, at all levels, to be their best to support their customers and colleagues. If you have any questions for Barry he can be reached at barry.jones@qstory.co.uk or via LinkedIn.