How do I plan a day with activities?

Shift plan or day plan

Both belong to the same module and require the same things: the Professional plan, a module that has not been switched off, and a completed setup. The business decides once which of the two modes it plans in, and the application then shows the matching navigation.

The difference is the question being asked. A shift plan answers "who works when", a day plan "who does what when". That is why day mode has no shift definitions but an activity catalogue instead.

The setup wizard brings a ready-made activity catalogue with abbreviations and staffing rules for five industries: veterinary practices, doctors' practices, dental practices, pharmacies and physiotherapy.

The grid

The day is planned as a grid, one axis time, one axis people. The orientation can be switched, and the grid size and time window are configurable.

A block is created by dragging it out in the grid. It can be moved, changed in duration, duplicated, created as a linked pair, and deleted individually or as a selection.

• Two blocks for the same person must not overlap in time.
• A demand block carries no person and is exempt from this check.
• All of one person's blocks can be reassigned to another person at once, for instance when someone drops out at short notice.
• One day's plan can be copied to another day as a starting point.
• A block is not a time booking. It is planning; the recorded time comes about separately.

Undo

Every change to a block writes a line into the change history, with the previous state, the new state, the fields that changed and the person who acted. That is why the success message offers an undo, and it hangs on exactly that line.

Undo applies to the last action. It is not a history with an arbitrary number of steps, and it is not a restore of a whole day.

Activities and staffing rules

The activity catalogue holds the plannable activities with colour, abbreviation and properties. An activity is archived rather than deleted, so that past plans stay readable.

A staffing rule says how many people with which qualification have to be present at which time. The demand row of the day plan comes out of it.

• The rule creates demand, it does not staff. Unmet demand appears in the demand column.
• An activity can require one pool or several. Whoever is scheduled must be in one of them.
• A pool cannot be deleted while it is still needed as a requirement.
• Two people can be linked to each other for a day. If the shared time falls away, the link counts as broken and appears among the open items.

Publish

Only with publication does the workforce see the day. The log entry hangs on the day and the area, not on the individual block: a day can be published area by area.

Republishing is counted, and the log line is not replaced. The state of the occupational safety violations is recorded as well. That makes it possible to show later which violations were known at the time of publication.

A retraction does not delete the line, it adds the time and the person. And it is reported explicitly: staying silent would mean people planning around a day that no longer exists.

1. 1Planners work on the day; for the workforce it is invisible.
2. 2Publishing writes the log line per day and area and notifies those affected.
3. 3Later changes to the published day trigger bundled change notifications.
4. 4A retraction takes the day away again and is reported separately.

• No scheduled publishing.
• No sign-off by a second person.
• No partial publication within an area.

Why not every change triggers an email straight away

If a block of an already published day changes, those affected are informed. The notification rests for a fixed number of minutes so that the further steps of the same replanning end up in one message. Moving five blocks does not trigger five emails.

Two triggers make sure nothing is left lying around: every change nudges the dispatch itself, and a scheduled run clears up the last change of a session. Without it, exactly that one would sit there until someone touched the plan again.

Bundling happens per business and quiet period, not per person and day. There is no preview of what is about to be sent, and no recall of a notification once sent. Only published days trigger anything at all.

Reminders

There is one reminder per person and day, not per block. Eight notifications a day is something everybody switches off immediately, and then the useful one is gone too.

The first comes the evening before at a fixed time, by default at 18:00, and names the coming day. The second comes after the last block with a prompt to record the times.

• Reminders go out only for a published day and only to people with blocks on that day.
• The reminder names the day, not the individual blocks.
• Unsubscribing is shared with the shift reminders. Anyone who has unsubscribed from those does not want these either.

What the workforce can change about their own day

Three routes concern individual blocks. They run independently of the planning of the whole day and are decided by the configured approvers.

Viewing and output

Besides the day grid there is a condensed week view with an hourly grid, the time in every occupied cell and a totals row per day. One click jumps into the day in question.

For narrow screens there is a list view and a dedicated view in the app. Printing goes through a separate print layout.