Setting up your rotation schedule for next year is one of the more complex and time-consuming tasks you face as an administrator. This is because the choices you make during this process are influenced by a number of predetermined factors that often conflict. These include your program's certification requirements, your learners' previous rotation experience, your learners' rotation preferences, the service requirements for each rotation and your learners' vacation requests. Some of these factors are higher priorities than others (e.g., ensuring a learner meets their certification requirements is far more important than booking their ideal vacation times). But in order to satisfy as many of these factors as possible, you need to juggle this information in an organized, efficient way.
Thankfully, most of this information remains constant throughout the scheduling process. For example, your program requirements do not change as you slot people into rotations, and neither do your learners' rotation histories. But one factor that does change as you go is your staffing levels (i.e., the number of available staff positions on each rotation). Every time you slot someone into a rotation block, the number of open staff positions on that rotation decreases by one. Since many rotations have preset service requirements (i.e., a minimum, maximum and target staffing level) you need to keep a running tally for each rotation to ensure these requirements are met. This makes staffing levels one of the trickiest factors to satisfy and keep track of.
As you slot people in you also need to know how many times each learner has been scheduled for a particular rotation and which time-blocks they are still available to work. Like staffing levels, the availability of your learners is continually changing as you go and must be diligently tracked.
Many administrators create their schedules by slotting learners into rotation blocks throughout the year. But there is another, more useful way of looking at this task. As noted above, when you set up your schedule you are really slotting learners into available staff positions on rotations. Each time you do this you move closer to or further away from the target staffing levels of each rotation. We wondered what a schedule planning tool would look like if it took this new staffing levels perspective into consideration. The result is our new Rotation Schedule Planner (RSP).
The RSP links the old way of thinking with the new. Traditional scheduling methods are combined with a new staffing levels perspective to make planning next year's rotation schedule easier and less confusing. The RSP consists of a series of linked interfaces that automatically provide you with the scheduling information that is most difficult to track on your own. When you enter data into one of these interfaces, the information is automatically updated in the others. Therefore, you can move quickly and seamlessly between them as you go, accessing different groups of information and creating one schedule from multiple points of view.
As you plan next year’s schedule, you will switch between these screens quite often. Therefore, you should become comfortable using them all. To begin learning how to use the RSP, click here.
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