time to create a schedule?

[Cecily Bailey]

Has anyone kept track of how long it takes to create a schedule? Like from. the time you ask for changes to available Tims to producing and distributing the schedule?

thanks in advance

[richard...@gmail.com]

Yep.

I keep a timeline.  Just started this yesterday.  Total time 4-6 weeks.

1. One month before the current schedule expires, I send out an email to remind people to update their profile for cant serve dates, with a deadline in two weeks.
2. One week later I send out a reminder to do that.
3. One week later I create the skeleton with the preassignments on it.  I then check this against a separate spreadsheet I keep on individuals requests and comments.  I make changes as necessary to this skeleton and/or the preassignment schedule with any one time services needed.  During this time I turn off profile changes to make sure I don’t get tangled up with people making changes to their profile underneath me. 
4. I then commence scheduling.  This is the hard part.  It seems that too many times there are individuals are scheduled very often while others are hardly scheduled at all.  It takes me a couple days to figure out why for each one.  Most of the time I can’t figure it out and simply manually substitute someone else in their place who is available that day.  I get it closer to even.  Then I let my co-leader look at the schedule and she makes even more changes.  That process takes about a full week since two of us go thru it for two ministries. 
5. Then, about three weeks after I start, I’m ready to distribute the schedule.  This is if everything works out.  I would like to distribute the new  schedule with about two weeks left in the current schedule, but sometimes I don’t get to.  Sometimes I start with about 6  weeks left of the current schedule so I can distribute the new schedule earlier.
6. After distribution I turn back on profile updates.  I make sure there are no important scheduling conflicts.

-Richard Brehove

St. Margaret Mary, Lomita CA.

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[Lynn Pechiney]

Ours is about the same, but we have about 20 individual ministries in the system. Thankfully, we also have 12 or 13 ministry leaders who help with editing! 

The current schedule ends on June 8 and our timeline is pretty much as follows:

• This weekend, I will go through the service times to change dates on any annual service that need to be changed for the upcoming schedule and add any that are not there already. 
• By Monday, I will let the ministry leaders know to reach out to their volunteers and have them update preferences and time away for the summer by May 19. 
• On May 20, I will create the skeleton, make any adjustments that need to be made either to pre-assignments or number of volunteers at a service, and then let the ministry leaders know they can begin editing.
• Any corrections or changes to the schedule should be complete by June 3, when the schedule will be made live.

For the schedule that we are in now, since it included all of Lent and Easter, we allowed three weeks for editing rather than two and a half.

Richard, I have found that the volunteers who accept sub requests a lot often get scheduled more often on the next schedule. The system seems to learn that their serving frequency is increased and adjusts accordingly. That may at least partially explain those situations that you don't see an obvious answer to.

In Christ,

Lynn

Lynn Pechiney

Program Coordinator

All Saints Youth Ministry

571-516-3162

"You aspire to great things? Begin with little ones." ~ St. Augustine

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[richard.brehove]

Thanks for that tip Lynn.  How do you keep that from happening?  Is this information about substitutions cleared when you clear history?

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[Lynn Pechiney]

We pretty much do what you do, unfortunately. If anyone has any ideas as to how to keep it from happening, that would be great! I don't want to clear too much history because it's helpful in other ways, though. 

Lynn Pechiney

Program Coordinator

All Saints Youth Ministry

571-516-3162

"You aspire to great things? Begin with little ones." ~ St. Augustine

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[Dorothy DeLuca]

I also have trouble with uneven assignments.  I tried a number of things to get the auto-schefuler to even it out but could never get an even distribution.  I found it harder to manually move people around to even out the schedule, than to manually place people to begin with.  

We only have 3 ministries to schedule, 5 Masses/weekend, 10 positions to fill for each Mass, with 125 ministers.

Since COVID we moved from a quarterly schedule to one per month.  When I send out each monthly schedule, I ask for people to submit their "Can't Serve" dates.  I alternate creating the schedule with another person, so we each create 6 schedules a year.  We start the schedule 2 weeks before the current schedule ends.  It takes 1-2 days to manually fill out the month including running distribution and conflict reports.  And the other scheduler does a quick review before we mail it out.

We will likely go back to a quarterly schedule at some point.

We use MSP for Adoration as well, but that schedule is completely pre-assigned.

Daily Mass Assignments I handle differently.  I mark all of those positions as sub-requested that I have then set to auto-process.  Ministers pick up those Mass assignments themselves.  It is a small set of people and they follow the rules of only picking up two or three Mass Assignments per month to give everyone opportunity to serve.

D

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[Cecily Bailey]

Thank you so much for your input. Are any of you paid to do this? I am a volunteer. I find similar issue and do quite a lot of manual adjustments. 

Have you ever guessed how many hours you spend on each schedule. I do for 3 months and feel like I spend a lot of time!

[Hspirit]

I’m glad to hear everyone’s feedback on scheduling because I’ve done it for about 15 years. I create schedules once every 3 months. We have 3 Masses on the weekends with 9 liturgical ministries and 5 other ministries (communion to nursing homes, the Information Station, Raise Right sales, etc) that are auto-scheduled. From start to finish, it takes me at least 2 weeks. I go through every step that Richard described below but with a tighter timeframe. I send out the request for Can’t Serve dates approximately 1.5 weeks before I run the schedules. The part that takes me the longest is after I run them, I print them and compare them to my roster to see if the distribution is fair. I often find that a person will not get scheduled or even show up as a possibility if they have been scheduled for a ministry within the last week or so. This has been incredibly frustrating. I have the parameters set correctly, scheduling certain ministries autonomously and making sure each person is set to “schedule normally”, but I end up having to manually type in their name because they don’t show on my list of “Fill positions”; instead I have to click “Place volunteer”.

 

Thanks again for this group!

 

Lisa Jessen

Communications Specialist

Holy Spirit Catholic Church

5455 50^th Ave NW

Rochester MN  55901

(507) 280-0638

www.HolySpiritRochester.org

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