Disruption in employee schedules

People get sick. They do. Especially my colleagues with kids. They run around with snotty noses, what feels like, every other week. (Whether I'm talking about my colleagues or their kids, I'll leave up to you.) For a software developer like me, that's not much of a problem. But in jobs where employees are carefully scheduled, one sick person can destroy a whole schedule.

# Schedule disruption

When someone falls ill, you need to reshuffle the schedule. The difficulty here is that employees make plans around their original shifts, sometimes days or weeks in advance. 

Changing someone's shifts the day before they have to come into work isn't uncommon, but can easily lead to annoyances. If my dad's shift gets rescheduled and he can't go play cards with his buddies because of it, he'll be moping about it for at least a week.

So what if we can keep schedule disruption to a minimum? That's where our disruption rules come in.

Disruption rules let you define what counts as a disruption in your operation. Not every schedule change is equal, replanned shifts seven weeks from now, or seven hours from now have vastly different impacts. Disruption rules give you a way to draw a line, so you're not treating every small tweak as a crisis, and you're not letting real disruptions slip through the cracks either.

# Replanned or disrupted

Generally speaking, any shift whose employee changes during replanning, can be counted as a replanned shift. But that replanned shift isn't necessarily disrupted.

That may seem counterintuitive, so here's an example. Say you have 2 overlapping shifts:

• Shift A requires Skill 1 and Skill 2. Ann is originally assigned to this shift.
• Shift B requires only Skill 1. Ann gets reassigned to this shift because a colleague called in sick.

The shifts run at the same time. Ann has the skills for both. Should this count as disrupted?

1. No, because from Ann's perspective the shifts start and end at the same time, and she's fully qualified to do either shift.
2. Yes, because Ann's doing different work, because Skill 2 isn't needed in Shift B.
3. Yes, because Shift A and Shift B are two different shifts and any reassignment is a disruption.

All three answers can be right, it just depends on your own operation or understanding of what "disruption" means.

# More control over how you count disruptions

That's exactly why we recently added new configuration options to our disruption rules. You can now define whether shifts that overlap, or start/end within a set amount of time (e.g. 30 minutes) of each other should be counted as disrupted.

You can read more about that in our documentation.

If you have a specific use case in mind, reach out. We're always happy to extend the feature to fit your requirements.