Our aim here at Three Rings has always been to help streamline your organisation’s administration whilst enabling you to keep doing things in the way that works for you. We want organisations using Three Rings to find it makes their current practices simpler, rather than changes those practices to suit itself. But one of the practices where the system hasn’t always helped as much as it can is where helplines are using a ‘managed’ rota, and one or two volunteers assign shifts to everyone based on their availability.
If your organisation uses a ‘managed’ rota (as opposed to the ‘self-signup’ model Three Rings has traditionally worked better for), you probably find that it’s the best way to ensure your volunteers get the shifts that suit them thanks to the Rota Secretaries in charge of matching the shifts to individual’s availability. Which is great for your volunteers, who don’t have to worry about unfair allocations, but can be a serious headache for your rota managers when they try to work out who fits where! That’s where Milestone: Iridium comes in.
This small purple button represents one of the biggest changes we've ever introduced.
Iridium’s flagship feature is Rota Autopopulation. A lot of the features we’ve already looked at, such as the New Rota Rules, the ability to Order Rotas, and, crucially, the Improved Availability Functions have all grown up around the changes we’ve made to enable automatic population of the rota based on the preferences of your organisation and the availability of your volunteers. This has been an incredibly complicated bit of software to implement, but as far as we can tell, Three Rings now provides the most sophisticated rota population tool of its kind anywhere in the world.
That’s because the Autopopulator doesn’t simply assign people at random, or even cycle through volunteers and sign people up to the first shift they can do. Instead – just like your real rota secretary – it tries to sign people up to the shift that’s best match for both them and the rest of your branch.
There are two key parts to this process: the setting of ‘preferences’ which enable you to tell the Autopopulator more about your organisation’s culture, and the way your rota secretaries work, and the Scorer/Allocator, which matches your volunteers to your open shifts based on those preferences. Strictly speaking, your preferences are a small part of an Autopopulation Ruleset, because you can have multiple Rulesets (so if you want to Autopopulate the Day Rota according to one set of preferences – such “It is very important that people do shifts at the same time” – you can keep that separate from your preferences in your Night Rota Ruleset – where one preference might be “It is very important that volunteers do not get lots of shifts close together”).
Setting up Rulesets, and specifying your preferences for that Ruleset is simple enough, but to actually understand what the Autopopulator does behind the scenes is a bit more tricky. That’s mainly because it does a lot of things all at once, which is excellent for big computer servers like the one behind Three Rings, but harder to explain to humans, who are used to thinking through problems one step at a time! So to take a closer look at how Autopopulator fills a rota, let’s image you’re Pat, a dedicated Rota Secretary at a fictional Samaritans branch in the small town of Nantway.
Autopopulation rulesets can be accessed via 'Your Rota' in the Admin panel
We’ll imagine you’re setting up Autopopulation for the very first time after the Iridium release on Saturday November 26th. Your first step is to create a Ruleset for the Day Rota. Nantway always plan shifts six weeks at a time, because that fits everyone’s commitment, so your first step will be to tell the Autopopulator to calculate six weeks at a time.
At Nantway, the Rota Secretaries have always tried to give people the shifts they’d most like to do, so you’ll want to set a preference for that, by checking the appropriate checkbox and moving the slider most of the way up. Equally, you doesn’t want anyone to have to do a lot of shifts all bunched together, so you’ll make some adjustments to the slider for ‘Shift Count Weighting’. Finally, your Branch policy in Nantway asks that volunteers try to vary which shifts they do, so you’ll also want to change the slider for ‘Favour Variable-Pattern’. (Of course, when your counterpart at the neighbouring branch in Gedstow comes to do this, she’ll make different choices – for a start, she’ll be populating up to 30 days at a time, rather than six weeks – but this setup is what works for your branch, and that’s the pattern Three Rings is going to work to.)
Once the Ruleset is in place, the Autopopulator can get to work. Just move to a date on the rota that you want to Autopopulate, and click on the purple Autopopulate button to get the magic going.
Now you’ve set it going, the Autopopulator starts to assign shifts, working in ’rounds’, giving all active volunteers one shift per round. Firstly, it examines every shift, and works out all of the people who have said they are available to cover that shift. Then it scores volunteers by how available they are to do a shift, with higher scores meaning ‘more available’. At this point it also considers the preferences in the Ruleset, meaning a high availability might still result in a low score on a shift immediately after a shift that volunteer is already doing, or which they did the week before. Of course, volunteers prevented from doing a shift by Signup Rules – such as New Volunteers, or Probationers, or volunteers signed up to another rota with incompatible Exclusivity Rules – are also going to be scored deliberately poorly at this stage!
Once the Autopopulator has scored each person’s availability to work out which shift is best for them, it then works out if there are any other shifts for which they are a better match than anyone else. So if Bob is a 99% match for the Thursday afternoon shift, he’ll probably get it… But if Alice and Colin are 90 and 85% matches for that shift, and if Bob is also the best match for the Thursday overnight shift, then he’s still the best person to cover the Thursday overnight (even if he only matched at 70%, it’s better to give Alice the afternoon shift than to let Bob do it and make Colin cover the overnight with his very low score of 20% for night shifts).
This diagram clarifies the situation described above: Green represents the best match, Yellow a possible match, and Red a bad match. You can see Bob is the best match for the Thursday Overnight, and this makes him a worse match for Thursday afternoon (because otherwise he'd have two shifts in a row). Click for a bigger version.
Once every volunteer has got the shift that’s the best match for them (matched, like Bob, against everyone else’s scores), the scorer goes round again, and gives each volunteer the shift that is their next best match. This part of the process can be thought of as being similar to picking teams for games at school: if you imagine every volunteer is a ‘Team Captain’, and all the shifts are ‘players’, the system is automatically giving each Captain the shift they most want on their team. Once each Captain has a player, they go round again until their team is full, and there are no shifts/’players’ left to pick from! That’s not quite right, of course, because some volunteers aren’t allowed to pick certain shifts, and most shifts can be picked by more than one volunteer, but it’s a good way to think about what’s happening.
Once the Autopopulator has worked through each shift – and saved you some serious number-crunching – it will have created Nantway’s rota for the next six weeks, and given everyone shifts they can do. There might be a few quirks – it’s possible Bob will complain that he has to put off his trip to the cinema on Thursday! – but there shouldn’t be any major problems.
Of course, no system is perfect – not even a real live Rota Secretary! – but we’re confident that Three Rings’ autopopulator is as close to perfect as we can make it. Sometimes people’s availability will change, or they’ll have to pull out of a shift at short notice, and that’s fine: you and your organisation’s Rota management team can resolve that internally the same way you always have.
We’re not going to deny that it’s been a massive effort, but we hope this powerful new tool will make life substantially easier for your rota secretaries to keep your volunteers listening. And for us at Three Rings HQ, that’s what really matters.