At most contractors the workforce plan that actually works lives in one person’s head, and everyone in the office knows whose. Jamie Miller, Director of Engineering Development at Sellen Construction, described the spreadsheet version. She spent hours building forecasts and then explaining to everyone how to read them, “because it’s only in my brain”. Getting a process like that out of one person’s head takes about an afternoon per decision.
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Ask Miller to write her process down and she can give you the rules, the inputs, and a clear description of a good staffing call. The steps in between come out as half a page, because most of what happens there is judgment she has never had to explain. An AI agent needs those steps spelled out. Writing them down means building the process in more detail than anyone at the firm has ever needed before.
A staffing call leaves nothing behind
Most of what a contractor does leaves a record you can work backwards from. An estimate carries its assumptions. An RFI log shows what was unclear and when. A rejected change order preserves the argument. That is why the usual advice for documenting expertise works: sit the expert down with the estimate or the RFI log, walk back through it, and the reasoning comes out.
A staffing call leaves only the assignment. Four people were qualified, one name went on the job, and the reason is gone by Tuesday. Nobody had a reason to write it down. The experience behind the choice sits in someone’s memory, or nowhere at all. There is no document to walk back through, so the usual advice does not apply.
What your workforce planning process already covers
You almost certainly have a documented planning process, and it probably works. Â鶹´«Ã½ publishes a version of it: five steps that make planning systematic, from evaluation through forecasting to a monitoring loop. Contractors with ISO certification have considerably more.
That process tells you that you will be two superintendents short in Q3. It does not tell you which two people to move. The documented steps stop where the judgment starts, and the judgment is the part an agent needs. Anyone who has run a Lean program knows a process map is something you build deliberately. What is new is how fine-grained an agent needs it.
One objection came from the audience at a : “I do think you need to start with a clean or an optimized process before automating, because the last thing you want to do is automate a bad process.” Hugh Seaton, managing director of the AI consultancy AI Edge, agreed. A bad process handed to an agent becomes a faster bad process. You can learn your real process by watching an agent fail at it, but an afternoon with a whiteboard finds the same gaps as three months of bad assignments.
Where the steps go missing in a workforce planning week
Follow one routine staffing call through the week. A project manager comes free in six weeks, and a healthcare fit-out needs a PM in eight. Four things happen, and only the first and last leave a record.
- The request gets written down: a PM for the fit-out, by a set date.
- Somebody builds a shortlist by checking who is coming free, dropping anyone who hasn’t run this kind of job, then dropping anyone without history with this client or architect. It takes seconds, feels like a single step, and none of it is recorded.
- One name goes forward, based on build type, who the owner already trusts, who has worked with the superintendent, and who is ready for a bigger job. David Pimuskarn, on Â鶹´«Ã½’s product team, described what the team found when it tried to break this step down: “It takes a ton of human judgment, a ton of context that just lives up in people’s heads.”
- The name goes into the plan. The system keeps who was assigned and loses why.
Steps two and three are the ones an agent needs written down, and nobody has ever had a reason to record them.
How to document a workforce planning process for an AI agent
This takes an afternoon and one decision.
Start with one recurring staffing decision
A whole workforce planning process is too big to describe and changes too often to hold still. It is also rarely one process. Before Rogers-O’Brien consolidated, three operations leaders planned resources across four regions on three separate spreadsheets. That is three processes with one name. A single recurring decision holds still long enough to finish. Assigning a PM to a fit-out, filling a superintendent gap on a running job, and staffing a pursuit you have a real chance of winning are three different decisions with different inputs. Pick one.
Write down the inputs and what good looks like
Seaton’s test for whether a task can become an agent is two questions. Can you list every input the task uses? Can you write down what a good output looks like? Both can be answered for a single staffing decision. Neither can be answered for workforce planning as a whole. The exercise pays off even when the answer is no: a decision you cannot define is one you should not hand to an agent yet.
Spell out the reasoning behind each choice
Seaton is direct about the cost: “you may have to break it down further than a human would, because we’re doing stuff in our brain or we’re just applying experience and so on.”
“I know Marcus is right for it” is a judgment. “Marcus has run three healthcare fit-outs, two of them for this owner, and has worked with this architect before” is the same judgment, spelled out so an agent can act on it. Getting from one to the other means writing down criteria the person applying them never listed. Â鶹´«Ã½ stores the result in Internal Resumes, which is the easy part. The experience only stops living in people’s heads once somebody has decided what counts as relevant experience.
Have a person check anything a model drafts
Asking a model to write the procedure for you is the obvious shortcut, and it produces the most confident version of the wrong answer. The FDA has written to a drug manufacturer that meant to satisfy federal requirements. The firm skipped a validation step before shipping product and told investigators it had not known the step was required, because the AI agent never mentioned it.
A model writing your staffing procedure will produce something clean and plausible that describes a firm that does not exist. The same goes for the workforce planning procedures you can download in ninety seconds. runs to ten steps of capacity arithmetic, tells you to multiply pipeline resource needs by probability of award, and never once covers who staffs what.
What to write down and what to leave alone
Everything that goes into a staffing decision belongs in one of two columns.
| Worth writing down | Leave with the people |
|---|---|
| The inputs a specific decision uses, listed to the end | Whether this is the right year to stretch somebody |
| What a good answer looks like, in enough detail that somebody else could grade one | The conversation with the owner that changes the shortlist |
| The narrowing steps that happen in one move, split into the three or four they actually are | Anything that depends on a call you have not made yet |
| The criteria behind “right for it,” named as build type, client history and prior teams | The final say on the name that goes forward |
The left column is an afternoon per decision, and it is the whole of the preparation. The right column is why the work still belongs to a person. An agent that quietly takes those calls over is failing even when its answers look right.
Â鶹´«Ã½’s calls the right column institutional knowledge: which superintendent works best with which project manager, the right team for a sensitive client. It says plainly that agents cannot replace it. What they can take on is the pattern-recognition and data-gathering underneath it, which is the left column.
Start with the decision you make most often
Do not try to document workforce planning. Document one staffing decision: the inputs, what a good answer looks like, and the three or four narrowing steps you currently do in one move. That takes an afternoon, and at the end of it you have something you can hand to an agent, or a clear reason not to yet.
Software across the category now asks you to upload your procedures and teach an agent how your company works, and most contractors have nothing to upload. Â鶹´«Ã½’s Team Builder asks a narrower version of the same question when it lets a firm configure the team types it prefers. Write your definition down first. The configuration is the easy part.
