Best Layout for Schedule?
November 4, 2019 4:26 PM Subscribe
I have 12 staff members who are scheduled at any one of 3 locations between 9 am and 11 pm Monday through Friday. What's going to be the clearest, easiest, simplest way to convey this information in poster form? By person? By time? Or by place? Join me as I way overthink this with
I work for a small nonprofit serving survivors of domestic and sexual violence. We have an Advocacy Center and a Shelter. We also have advocates who are co-located - that is, they work one day a week at the hospital or social services, etc. Some people work 9 - 5. Others work completely different hours. Some work only at the Advocacy Center, others only at the Shelter, others work at both. We need to figure out a way to know where everyone is supposed to be at a glance and so I have volunteered to make a poster. Yes there's a shared Outlook calendar but that gets ridiculously unwieldy to use for the day to day - it's useful for exceptions, like off site meetings.
There are two priorities for this poster:
1) if someone calls for X, we need to be able to go out to the hallway, look at the poster, and know that on Thursdays, she's supposed to be at the AC from 10 - 2 and the Shelter from 3 - 6.
2) if clients start arriving in droves, we need to be able to look at the poster and know who is supposed to be in the AC right then, so we know who to assign to who.
I thought of making three separate grids, each grid divided into 7 day columns and 12 people columns: one for the AC, one for the Shelter and one that's just Offsite. That seems harder to use: you'd have to look at three forms.
But then, if I do a daily grid with everyone's names on it and split up each box depending on where and when they are, it becomes very visually confusing very quickly. I guess I could color code each location so it's faster but I keep thinking this is a problem someone else has already solved - any thoughts?
I work for a small nonprofit serving survivors of domestic and sexual violence. We have an Advocacy Center and a Shelter. We also have advocates who are co-located - that is, they work one day a week at the hospital or social services, etc. Some people work 9 - 5. Others work completely different hours. Some work only at the Advocacy Center, others only at the Shelter, others work at both. We need to figure out a way to know where everyone is supposed to be at a glance and so I have volunteered to make a poster. Yes there's a shared Outlook calendar but that gets ridiculously unwieldy to use for the day to day - it's useful for exceptions, like off site meetings.
There are two priorities for this poster:
1) if someone calls for X, we need to be able to go out to the hallway, look at the poster, and know that on Thursdays, she's supposed to be at the AC from 10 - 2 and the Shelter from 3 - 6.
2) if clients start arriving in droves, we need to be able to look at the poster and know who is supposed to be in the AC right then, so we know who to assign to who.
I thought of making three separate grids, each grid divided into 7 day columns and 12 people columns: one for the AC, one for the Shelter and one that's just Offsite. That seems harder to use: you'd have to look at three forms.
But then, if I do a daily grid with everyone's names on it and split up each box depending on where and when they are, it becomes very visually confusing very quickly. I guess I could color code each location so it's faster but I keep thinking this is a problem someone else has already solved - any thoughts?
Best answer: The secret is to color code by location. Do one grid for each day of the week with staff listed in alphabetical order in one direction and the hours in the other. Then and color code by location. If shelter is red, your eye can easily move down the 10:00 column to pick out which people are red at that hour. You can do a separate grid for each day of the week and mount them all next to each other on the wall. (Or one very long grid but the white space of a separate page for each day will help people find the day to start to looking at.)
posted by metahawk at 4:38 PM on November 4, 2019 [12 favorites]
posted by metahawk at 4:38 PM on November 4, 2019 [12 favorites]
My work has a similar set of needs (a bunch of people, a bunch of possible assignments) and what works really well is one page for each day with the names down the side and the hours across the top. So if you go across the gideonfrog row, you'll see that at 9am I'm a station A, 10am, station A, 11am, station B, and then I'm grayed out from 12 till 9 because I'm just working a morning shift. And you can look down the 9am column and see that Jane and Jeff are at location B, I'm at location A, Sam and Jo are grayed out (not working that shift), etc.
Crossposting with metahawk; one thing I like about initials or abbreviations is that you can include things like lunch, out of the office, special assignment, etc. You can add one-off things without needing to code it. So our standard shifts are Circ, Info, CR, YA, and Meal, but you could add Special Project, Meeting, Out, or whatever.
posted by gideonfrog at 4:41 PM on November 4, 2019 [2 favorites]
Crossposting with metahawk; one thing I like about initials or abbreviations is that you can include things like lunch, out of the office, special assignment, etc. You can add one-off things without needing to code it. So our standard shifts are Circ, Info, CR, YA, and Meal, but you could add Special Project, Meeting, Out, or whatever.
posted by gideonfrog at 4:41 PM on November 4, 2019 [2 favorites]
Please take into account that a person looking at a color coded chart may have color blindness.
posted by Sophont at 10:32 PM on November 4, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by Sophont at 10:32 PM on November 4, 2019 [1 favorite]
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posted by gt2 at 4:38 PM on November 4, 2019 [1 favorite]