Generating and publishing a schedule

From forecast to published rota. Check three things before you publish, because after that it is people's plans.

From forecast to published rota. Check three things before you publish, because after that it is people's plans.

Generate it

1. Approve outstanding time off and confirm team membership is current. Your organisation structure has to be in place before a schedule can be generated at all.
2. In Workforce Management, click the calendar icon for Scheduling and select Schedule.
3. Click Generate, select the date range, and click Run. You can generate up to 90 days ahead.
4. To generate for part of the roster instead, hover over an agent, group, location or team and click the plus sign.
5. Review coverage, particularly at the peaks, and adjust by hand where needed.
6. Publish, and tell the team.

Unpublished shifts are highlighted and carry a yellow dot next to the agent's name, which is the quickest way to see what is still only yours.

Publishing is reversible for 90 days

Check this before the pressure of publishing feels absolute. The revert icon returns the schedule to the last published version, and it covers up to 90 days at once.

That is a safety net for a bad generation, not a licence to move published shifts around. What agents were told still happened, and reverting does not untell them.

What agents get

Publishing is what lets agents see their schedule at all. They receive a push notification when changes are published, and another five minutes before the scheduled start of a new task.

That five-minute nudge is useful and it is not a substitute for telling people about a change. It arrives too late to rearrange anything.

Check one: the peaks

Not the daily totals. A schedule can look fully staffed for the day and be short at eleven o'clock, which is exactly when it matters.

Check two: the edges

Opening and closing. Under-covered starts mean a queue before anybody is on, and that queue shapes the whole morning.

Check three: does it look humane

Read it as somebody working it. Split shifts, a late finish before an early start, a week with no consistency. The optimiser does not know any of that is unpleasant.

This is the check only a person can do, and it is the one that keeps people.

Publish on a rhythm

The same day each period, as far ahead as you can manage. People arrange childcare and appointments around this, and predictability is worth more to them than optimality.

Ninety days is the generation limit, so a quarterly rhythm is the furthest ahead the tool will build for you. Publishing is not capped the same way: Zendesk states no specific limit on how far ahead a schedule may be published, with the caveat that going beyond two years may cause performance problems. What stops you mapping out a whole year, then, is the generating and not the publishing.

Tell the team it is out

Publishing puts it in the system. A message is what puts it in front of people, and it is what surfaces problems while there is still time to fix them.

Then leave it alone

Every change after publication costs somebody their plans. Adjust for genuine need, not to improve coverage by a percentage point.

See also

• Editing the schedule for one agent
• How the Zendesk WFM schedule works
• Viewing your active forecasts