Bill Canady warns against zero-up capacity reallocation too early. If you cut a customer-service team from 14 to 9 and move five people to inside sales, the original workload doesn't disappear. Calls from small accounts keep coming because the contracts and pricing that generated them never changed. Eliminate the old work first, then reallocate.
Now, let me name the cost of getting this wrong, because there's a version of this that fails badly. The failure isn't running zero-up. The failure is running it too early, and I want to give you the exact mechanism. You cannot reliably reallocate capacity until you first freed it. Run a zero-up exercise on a quad-forward-laden organization, and you'll discover that your redeployed people are still doing the old work. Here's what that looks like on the ground. You run the exercise. It says your customer service function should be 9 people instead of 14. And the 5 freed up people should go to a new inside sales motion covering your Quad 2 accounts. Well, that's great. You moved them. You announced it. There was a slide. And then the phone rings. It's the same tell of the small accounts placing the same $400 order, needing the same expedite, asking the same questions because you never changed the terms, the minimums, the pricing, or the service model that generated those calls. The work did not go away just because you moved the person.
