New activities, removal of activities, and changes to existing activities is allowed on any schedule - you would just need to Save & Publish. If you generate a new schedule, then there is no ability to copy over manual edits from a previously generated schedule since they could be vastly different (e.g., different days on/off, different shift start times, etc.).
Once you publish a schedule, best practices would be to not generate a new schedule for the same week and publish it since agents will have already been notified of the previously published schedule (e.g., which days they work, what hours etc.). The closer to the scheduled week, the less changes are typically made - especially if the schedule has already been published.
There might be a natural time period where the short-term forecast is stable/good enough after which point you generate a schedule and start to finalize post-schedule generation edits (e.g., ad hoc meetings, ad hoc shift changes).
As part of scheduling engine updates we are working on this quarter, we will be adding two related improvements:
- Schedule Editor: re-predict predicted values (i.e., service level, average speed of answer, and agent requirement) when changes to the forecast or schedule are detected
- Intraday Monitoring - adding a Predicted sub-column for Agents based on (re)prediction of agent requirement
Also, semi-related:
- We will be offering a feature first-half of 2018 that will have the ability to re-optimize meals, breaks, etc.
- The ability to do intraday re-forecasting is also something on the longer-term product roadmap.