Getting StartedThe overall goal of the roster system is to mix lists of events and availability into an online roster.Defining TermsAn "Event" is a single time period that people are needed to help perform some function for your organisation. e.g. The morning shift on a particular Monday at the supermarket or a kids soccer match on a given Saturday morning. Lists of Events are called "Rosters" and typically run for a set period of time, 1 or 2 months for example. All the Events within the roster are inside the start and end parameters of the roster. Events have "Positions" that define who is needed at that event. In the case of the kids soccer match, you'd need a referee, someone to run the tuck shop, grounds man and 2 coaches. People in your organisation have "Availability" which defines when they are not available to be rostered on. They also be restricted to a limited set of positions that they can be assigned to depending on their given skills set and role in the organisation.Initial SetupBefore you can create a roster you need to setup the various positions and event types that your organisation uses. This is done in the System Management page. The first step is to start filling out the positions in your organisation. Don't worry if you can't think of them all straight away, you can add more later or edit existing ones. Events can be auto-generated from event types or created by hand. If you have regularly recuring events then you should define some event types for those at this point. Also while you are in the System Management page you can add some accounts for the people in your organisation. Once you have some positions, event types and people in the system then you can begin creating rosters. By creating an existing roster, the people in the organisation can now see upcoming events in the home page. Your users need to login using their own logins and edit their availabilily and what positions they can fill. Now once that has happened, you can go into the assignments page and assign people to actual events. Save this regularly, all previous versions of the assignments will be retained until you clear them. Once the assignments of people to positions for all the events have all be finished you can publish the roster, at which point all the people in the organisation can see it online from their roster home page.Rostering CycleOnce that first initial roster has reached the published phase a cycle of roster creation, availability gathering, assignments and publishing can be established. It's often good to have several future rosters in the pipeline so that people can put in availability information for events that are off in the future. Once rosters have been completed you can delete them from the system using the roster management page. If you have furthur questions on this feature, or the information above is incomplete please contact Matthew. |