The Metro subway ride from DC Public Schools to the Walter E. Washington Convention Center (DCCC) was slick, excepting only that the fare system is a little too complex.  I ride the bus in 4 days a week at home, as does most of the Shiftboard crew.  So I take a critical look at other city’s public transit systems.  DC has nothing to be ashamed of (although our new Seattle light rail trains purr like kittens compared to the DC Metro trains).

At the convention center, I met up with a number of good folks who run the Centerplate food and beverage operation.  Centerplate DCCC has been a customer for just about a year now.  They put our system through its paces.  I love to see it.

–Managers complete their “schedule requests” right in Shiftboard templates.  This used to be a completely non-standard process via email in all different formats.

–Their scheduling team, led by Patrick Thelwell, loads all the schedule requests, and Shiftboard auto-assigns all their shifts based on union seniority.  No one is auto-assigned any overtime shifts or double-booked.  Additional shifts are assigned to temp agencies.

–Each person in the system has an assigned paycode or individual hourly rate, so the controller Curtis McDonald and his team can look out 2-3 weeks to see a very accurate labor cost forecast based on exactly how many folks are scheduled by department.

–Our system interfaces with their Attendance Enterprise (AE) time tracking system, so all schedules can be immediately compared to actuals.  Curtis calls Shiftboard and AE to key “controls” they employ to manage to the numbers.

Near the end of the day, I sat down with the GM Vince McPhail.  As with any good customer, he and Curtis always have a couple of requested enhancements, and we aim to please.  But it sure feels good to see an operation like his that not only produces a great finished product in terms of culinary delights for national and international events, but also uses systems like ours and AE to run the business by numbers and manage the P&L carefully.

Heck of a day.  By the time I made it through security at Reagan National, I was exhausted.  The only downer of my DC tour, not a bar stool open in the terminal.  I could have used one beer to wind it up, but still a very positive visit.  Some things are going right in DC.

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From the Treasury meeting, I did a rushed cab ride over to the headquarters building of DC Public Schools (DCPS) in the northeast section of the city.  We have been working jointly with a survey and data collection partner, WorldAPP, to facilitate the enhanced process DCPS is implementing to evaluate nearly 8,000 new teacher and principal applicants. Shiftboard is happy to be a part of the effort, facilitating all the applicants self-scheduling along with the associated scheduling of nearly 200 interviewers.  As usual, our API and open platform is saving everyone time by allowing WorldAPP to populate applicants directly into Shiftboard from the survey portal.

DCPS is breaking new ground here nationwide.  Among other things, all teacher applicants that reach the 2^nd round are required to do an “audition”, providing a 30 minute lesson in their area of expertise to a live classroom of kids.  Doesn’t that sound like the type of rigorous evaluation process you would want your local school system’s teachers put through?

Here was my main takeaway from DCPS: This ain’t your standard big city public school system. These folks are on a mission to make a step change improvement in the outcomes of a lot of kids’ lives and opportunities through public education. I got a sense in three hours there that they were the real deal.  Let me provide just a few indicators:

–The HR recruiting team is led by Sheila Sarem, a bundle of positive energy and urgency who is about as far from a pencil-pushing bureaucrat as I could imagine.  She worked in sales for Cisco Systems in Europe for 6 years before coming to DC to work for the Obama campaign.  She said she then decided to stick around because the city needed help.  Amen.

–Lizzie, their main Shiftboard system administrator, just happens to have a masters in public health from the University of Texas.  I tried not to act surprised.  She was instructing me on the system after the first few minutes of our meeting.

–Sheila’s team is out to find the most talented teachers in the country, including every Teach for America veteran they can get their hands on.  The email signature of the entire 10 person group is the same: “Be a part of public education’s greatest turnaround story.  Apply now.”

Focused.  Aligned.  Motivated.  As I left after 3 hours to catch a metro train, I was thinking “BRING IT, DCPS.  Make it happen!”  Not only that, but as a parent of 3 Seattle Public School elementary students, I want it to happen . . . and soon.

-Rob

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How many of you out there read the paper and shake your head at what is going on in Washington, DC?  Evidently a small victory (very small) may be scored this week as it appears that both parties will agree to an extension of 2 weeks so the federal government doesn’t shut down.  So it goes.  I’m not celebrating.

But as I sit here on a return flight to Seattle crunched in a middle seat with my elbows pinned to my rib cage, I’m pretty jazzed.  I had a whirlwind day in DC meeting with Shiftboard customers who are pushing to make a difference.  And the news was good, so it’s worth recapping in a little three part series.

I arrived yesterday evening after a drive in from Richmond.  I was pleasantly surprised that my sister had chosen an excellent beer bar, the Meridian Pint, for dinner on the north side.  How can you go wrong with 30 beers on tap including a number of Belgian ales?  We caught up over a number of excellent pints courtesy of Stoudt’s Brewing Company in Lancaster, PA.  Give their beer a try.  You won’t be disappointed.

This morning started with an interesting discussion with a human resources and IT manager Steve at the Treasury Department. A massive cup of dark French Roast coffee from Au Bon Pain helped significantly.    Treasury has implemented a standard 360 review process for nearly a thousand top officials.  Shiftboard provided the self-scheduling of all those sessions.  Most importantly, the new review process appears to be very well planned and sounded to me like one of those feedback loops that should improve performance of officials and generally improve the return on our collective tax dollars.

-Rob

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Staffing a venue is tough.  There are so many different jobs that need to be filled, qualifications that need to be met, union rules (deep breath), seasonality, and not to mention a less-than-regularly repeating scheduling.  Getting organized and staying connected are two huge challenges that a venue manager faces.

PPL Park in Philadelphia

I recently read a Venue Insider blog post about the 10 Best Ways to Improve Your Event Staff and based on our experience with venues I would say that all ten of those things are on point.  But I also believe that having a superior, organized system to get your staff scheduled on the back end will make for a happier, more productive staff output.  Curtis McDonald, CFO for Centerplate at the Washington DC Convention Center put it: “We used to receive staffing requests via email, or spreadsheet, or handwritten on a napkin for that matter.”

Having a scheduling software that allows your employees to always know what the schedule looks like and while also having a consistent means of communication with the scheduler will be greatly appreciated by not only management, but the staff members as well.  Employees can login and check their schedule every night if they’d like.  If you allow employees to sign up for their own shifts, you can also very quickly weed out who wants to show up to work and add to the value of your team and who doesn’t.  Managers have access to powerful reporting tools that pull data directly from the calendar.  Which means that when managers make those last minute changes they can have peace of mind knowing that all changes will be reflected on the calendar in real time – crucial for accurate reporting purposes.

We’ve been lucky enough to work with many different venues, some large and some small, and we have come to learn a thing or two about what a venue manager needs to keep things simple, organized, and effective to make sure that come game day/event/concert, their employees are ready to go.

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