Rotation patterns¶
A rotation pattern is a repeating personal rota: three mornings, two days off, repeat, or one week of mornings, one week of afternoons. Unlike the schedule stability settings, which tell the scheduler what to avoid, a pattern tells it what somebody actually works.
Patterns are useful where the roster is agreed with the employee rather than derived from demand - a small crew on a fixed rhythm, a driver's shift plan, a two-shift operation where two people cover each other.
How a pattern is put together¶
A pattern has two parts, and they are edited in two places.
The template - the cycle itself¶
Go to Settings > Rotations and open or create a template.
| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Name | What the crew calls it |
| Workplace | Which workplace the pattern belongs to. It also decides which shifts the blocks below can choose from. |
| From Date / To Date | How long the pattern is in force. The start date is also where the cycle begins. |
Below that is the cycle, written as a list of blocks. Each block says this shift, for that many days in a row:
| Repeat | Shift |
|---|---|
| 5 | Morning 6-14 |
| 2 | Day off |
| 5 | Afternoon 14-22 |
| 2 | Day off |
Read top to bottom, the blocks form one turn of the cycle - fourteen days here - and the cycle then repeats from From Date until To Date. Choose Day off in the Shift column for the days somebody does not work; days off are part of the pattern, not a gap in it.
Warning
Changing From Date moves the whole cycle, for everybody on the template. Extending a pattern into the next month is a change to To Date.
The assignment - who runs it, and how¶
Go to People > Users, open a person and switch to the Rotation tab. Add a row and choose the template, then set two things:
| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Shift by (days) | How many days into the cycle this person starts |
| Pattern is binding | Whether the rota is an agreement or a preference |
Click OK on the row and then Save on the person - the row on its own is not saved yet.
Shift by (days) - the reason a shared template works¶
Two people on one template with this left at 0 run in lockstep: the same shifts on the same days, and the same days off. In a round-the-clock operation that is the opposite of what the pattern is for, because coverage collapses on exactly the days it was meant to organise.
Setting the second person half a cycle further along is what makes a pair cover each other. On the fourteen-day example above, Shift by 7 gives one person mornings while the other has afternoons, every working day.
Pattern is binding - the setting to get right¶
This one decides what happens when the pattern and the rest of the plan disagree, and the difference is bigger than it looks.
| Unticked (a preference) | Ticked (an agreement) | |
|---|---|---|
| The prescribed shift | The scheduler prefers to give it to that person | Goes to that person or to nobody |
| Their days off | Not protected - other work may land on them | Kept free |
| If they are on leave | Somebody else takes the shift | The shift stays empty, visibly |
Warning
A pattern that is not binding will often lose. It competes with the scheduler's workload balancing, and a full-time rota asks for far more days than an even share - measured on a four-week plan, twelve of one person's twenty-one prescribed shifts went to colleagues while the plan still reported full coverage. If the rota is an agreement, tick the box. A preference is the right setting for a partial pattern, not a full one.
When a non-binding pattern does lose, the plan says so: "N shifts prescribed by a rotation pattern went to a different person." Nothing else would reveal it - the day is covered, just not by the person whose rota it was.
An empty shift left by a binding pattern is the intended outcome, not a failure. A hole is a question somebody can answer; a rota quietly reassigned is not.
More than one pattern for the same person¶
Patterns that follow each other are fine and are the normal way to change somebody's rhythm: one template until December, another from January. The date decides which one applies on any given day, and outside every template's window the person is scheduled like anyone else.
Patterns whose date ranges overlap are refused when you save, because there would be no way to tell which one governs a given day.
Things worth knowing before you start¶
- A shift template used by a rotation cannot be deleted until the rotation stops using it. Allowing it would shorten the cycle and move everybody's days along by one, silently.
- A block must repeat at least once. Zero would remove it from the cycle while still showing on screen.
- A template with no workplace is skipped by Smart Schedule, which is why the field is required.
- If the pattern prescribes a shift that cannot run that day - a holiday the shift does not cover, or a day its own template excludes - no shift is created for that day.