Shiftboard does not operate on a one way street. Our clients provide us a wealth of intellectual power and perspective to improve our product. We provide schedulers with a service, they use it and respond, and we incorporate their feedback.  Recently we received enough input regarding a certain feature that we escalated it on the development list. When assigning a shift, you can now assign it to multiple individuals in the same step. Clicking ‘Pick Multiple’ will give you a list of workers who can take the shift. Simply toggle multiple members and click “assign”. Don’t worry, the options to individually assign, bulk assign, auto assign, check availability and enforce seniority still exist.

Our developers are sharp, but our clients’ insight is invaluable. Please keep us in the loop. Share your ideas and suggestions, we are all ears and your thoughts are heard.

- Alison

Recognizing that Shiftboard is not the only calendaring system our clients use, we have rolled out an iCal integration feature. Now with any iCal compatible calendaring, such as Google Calendar or Outlook, you can synchronize your Shiftboard schedule to your other calendars. By selecting to Publish iCal/Google Outlook, your Shiftboard schedule and any changes you make will syndicate with the other iCal compatible systems associated with your account’s email. When you make a change in your Shiftboard calendar, you will also see that change in your Google Calendar.

We live in a rapidly evolving and fickle world. With the help of Shiftboard, you can now diversify and weave together your calendaring, making you a more adaptable agent in a sea of change.

- Alison

Download (PPT, 300.5KB)

-Nahid

Updates to our SMS/TXT feature make it easier than ever to communicate schedule changes to your workers.  Until recently workers had to add their SMS/TXT email address to Shiftboard.  This caused quite a bit of confusion, as most users don’t know they have an SMS/TXT email address, let alone what theirs actually is.  We did our research and now track each provider and their SMS/TXT email address.  Users (or their managers) simply select the correct service provider (Sprint, AT&T, T-Mobile, etc.) and enter the cell number.

The number of text messages being sent through Shiftboard has exploded thanks to this recent update. Thousands of workers are staying connected 24/7 via text messaging.  Users always control which messages they wish to receive and can make updates to their preferences at anytime.  Text messaging is just one additional way Shiftboard makes online scheduling and communication an excellent match for many different types of organizations. To find an organization similar to yours, check out our Case Studies.

- Alison

Let’s just say, for example, a CIO of a big manufacturing or services business led a committee that decided to buy SAP as an ERP system.  He and his team commit the company to a 7 figure purchase price and 2-3x that again in consulting fees.  Something like a year passes, and this company is rolling out SAP.  Finally going live.

What do you think that CIO says to a couple of operations-types from the warehouse or manufacturing floor who knock on his door and complain that the screens are quite busy and complex, that the work-flows are unintuitive, that they can’t figure out what to do even with the user manual (roughly the size of phone book) right in front of them?  He tells them to pack sand, only not so nicely.  He says, “Suck it up and figure it out.  We just spent $7 million on this package.  Either that, or try not to let the door slam your gluteus maximus on the way out.”

The times they are a changin’

I remember as a CRM sales guy in the late 1990s Siebel Systems touting 135 screens in their marketing literature.

Oh, what a great software concept – confuse the crap out of your user community.  Can you imagine any software-as-a-service (SaaS) company marketing like that today? It wouldn’t just be slitting the company’s throat.  It would be the VP of Marketing filling entire office building with jet fuel and then grabbing a smoke.

What has changed?  Seven million handcuffs were removed, that’s what.  The massive upfront lock-in costs are gone in SaaS.  The business buyers pay as they go, a month at a time.  The software has to perform its function well, very quickly, and it has to be extremely intuitive.  If it’s not, the user community really does hit the road.  They vote with their feet, and fast.

Online scheduling driven by the user base

A couple of years ago, I was preparing to meet Shiftboard’s founder, Bryan, for the first time.  I was doing my homework on the online scheduling market which was new to me.  I have studied a fair number of markets in my day, and I figured I had the big picture of this one.

Somewhere in the first 15 minutes of that meeting, Bryan says, “Most scheduling software is built from the scheduler out.  But Shiftboard was built first and foremost for the users, the workers checking schedules and picking up shifts, in other words designed from the worker in.  Because in online scheduling software over the next decade, the users will ultimately have the biggest collective say in what software is used.”  I was off my game.  That nugget of information got under my skin.  I thought about it a lot over the next couple of days.  I met him a couple of more times, talked to some customers, laid awake at night chewing on it.

Here was the product manager of the future, not the past.  Here was a guy who designed the product around ease of use above all things.  It didn’t take me too long.  I decided to get on the train . . . pushed all my chips to the middle of the table . . . because I knew from more than a decade in the business that his kind of software product design was where the whole software industry was going.

See what you think about our online scheduling software – literally tens of thousands of users who have logged in for the very first time and figured out what to do without a lick of training.  There ain’t no 135 screens, I can promise you that.

– Rob E

Shiftboard paper cuts are almost always small and generally a quick fix.  Daily gathering customer feedback and questions allows us to prioritize and fix the most frustrating paper cuts in our system.

Here are just a few of the paper cuts finished this week:

•  Providing the option for managers to switch between a 12 hour and 24 hour time clock.  This is particularly useful for our international customers as well as security scheduling, nurse scheduling and police officer scheduling.

•  Adding the ability to send a text message from three different locations instead of one. Managers can now text message everyone, a specific group, or an individual

•  Adding a tool to turn off Referrals.  Not all organizations want their users sending referrals to their friends and family. A manager can decide if this tool is helpful and simply turn off referrals if they are unwanted noise.

We love knocking paper cuts off our list.  Scheduling software has to be simple. Our goal is to alleviate all the bumps and hick-ups that make you want to scream!

-Alison J

Employee scheduling is now simpler than ever.

Managers can’t accidentally schedule employees during conflicting hours.  It is is no longer your responsibility to schedule around every doctor, dentist and hair appointment, parent-teacher conference, or a family vacation.  If Jane doesn’t work Fridays the system won’t allow you to schedule Jane on a Friday.  Of course, managers always have the ability to override availability and can schedule any employee whenever necessary.

Sharing this new tool with current Shiftboard customers is fun.  From medical scheduling to event management scheduling, our customers are astounded by the value provided and shocked when I promise there is no additional cost to their monthly fee.

-Alison J.

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Links in this post:

http://www.shiftboard.com

http://www.shiftboard.com/web-based-scheduling-case-studies.html

A little background information is in order.  It starts with the one person in the US Navy more important than all the ships, equipment and weapons systems . . . a chief petty officer.  A chief petty officer is a senior enlisted sailor, normally with 12-20 years in a specific area of expertise (or “rate”) like radio & communication or sonar systems.  The Navy doesn’t hand out the rank easily.  It is earned.   In many respects, if you have met one chief, you have met every chief.  Besides keeping each ship in the Navy afloat and operational, there is a chief somewhere stopping a wee JO like I was from making a catastrophic mistake – literally – every minute of every day of every week.  And so it has been since John Paul Jones sailed the USS Bonhomme Richard into harms way nearly two and a half centuries ago.  If you are somewhat “getting the hint” impaired, the lesson I am about to relate came from a chief.  Because those lessons you can take to the bank.

Engine Rooms and LEDs

My boat was the USS Batfish, a fast attack submarine sailing out of Charleston, South Carolina (a great sailor’s town for 3 centuries).

Roughly half of the 300-foot length of the boat is the reactor plant and engine room. The engine room is dominated by 2 turbine generators, which generate electricity for the ship’s systems, and 2 main engines, which turn the screw.  All four are driven by very hot, very high pressure steam running through pipes big enough to swallow my 70 lb yellow lab.  Needless to say, my lasting impressions of the engine room are a lot of NOISE, like yelling to be heard noise at 10 feet, and HEAT, like 105-115 degrees Fahrenheit between those main engines.  It is also a place with incredibly little margin for error, where lives and the ship itself depend on split-second decisions from highly trained sailors.

For those of you who don’t remember (or more likely were too young to remember), the late 80s and early 90s was a time of technical innovation like today.  One of those innovations that said “modern” in every way was the light emitting diode (LED) digital display.  Every high tech thriller movie had computers and digital displays (Here’s one that might take you back – Matthew Broderick in “WarGames”).  I remember a ride in a family friend’s new Corvette back in the late 1980s, and the entire dashboard was digital – no old analog dials for the speedometer or battery charge.  Cool.  Modern.  Cutting edge.

The Lesson

I told you all that to tell you this.  One day aboard the Batfish, I was having my qualification card initialed in the engine room by our grizzled machinist mate chief.  I was being quizzed on the turbine generator (TG) control panels, which contained 14 analog dials and gauges displaying critical information to diagnose that piece of equipment:  steam pressure, lube oil pressure, RPMs, etc.  In order to qualify on the system, I had to be able to recite immediately from memory what the average reading was for each gauge, what problems would cause them to peg high or low on the meter, and so forth.

In the middle of that Q&A, I was thinking about that cool Corvette dashboard and for some unknown reason blurted out, “Hey Chief, why aren’t the TG control panels digital instead of these old analog gauges?…”

Chiefs have an uncanny ability to make you feel small and unimportant and downright stupid at times without moving a muscle.  It seemed like much longer, but within seconds Chief’s face was saying a combination of “where do these idiots hatch?” and “why do I even bother?” in a more explicit manner than I can write here.  I was feeling like a Dr. Seuss animated character, shrinking quickly from full size to miniature right in front of him – soon to go “pop” and disappear into anti-matter.  But half of a chief’s job is to pass along tradition and learnings generation to generation.  It is an irreplaceable piece of the institutional strength of the United States Navy that can’t be bought, and every chief takes the responsibility seriously.

“Do you have any idea why we don’t change the way we do things often in the submarine force?  Because things are the way they are based on lessons paid in blood and lives on the fleet boats of World War II, on the Thresher (which sank on its first test dive out of the shipyards with the loss of all hands in 1963), and for 30 years since.  Do you know that anyone with experience can look at those gauges from 25 feet away and immediately know if something is wrong with that vital piece of gear.  Your brain has to process digital readings one at a time, but your brain remembers the normal positions of analog gauges inherently.  There are 14 and only 14 readings, no more and no less, because more would add extraneous information and fewer would leave out a critical parameter.  Those displays were developed because the chiefs in the Pacific 50 years ago needed to read them in a split second in an engine room full of smoke.  That’s why they are not digital.”  Despite his obvious exasperation with me, he had never even raised his voice.  He didn’t have to.

User Interfaces also Matter in Online Scheduling Software

I won’t pretend that our online scheduling system here at Shiftboard has life-and-death design requirements.  But more than likely, if you are looking for more efficient ways to schedule your workers, then scheduling is a mission critical business process for you.  It certainly is in healthcare and nurse scheduling, hospitality scheduling, law enforcement, and event management scheduling among many other market segments we serve.  So hopefully it makes you feel better that our product managers spend an immense amount of time working on clean, intuitive, highly functional user interfaces for our software.

And yes, we incorporate some of the US Navy’s user interface lessons:

•    Our application’s screens minimize clutter and non-critical information, both of which add to an average user’s confusion.
•    Custom-designed icons are used to complement or replace text, because the eye can distinguish differences quickly with pictures.
•    We use simple, meaningful graphs and bar charts to display reporting data and make it the information immediately apparent.

All of those design lessons and more get rolled into this objective: any worker who can use an email system can use our software without receiving training.  Sure we have training guides, video training, and so forth.  But for the vast majority of our customer base, our ease-of-use focus saves them immense amount of money and time avoiding training costs.  More importantly, our easy-to-use system receives quick buy-in from their user communities.

What are you driving?

Ever since that day twenty years ago, I have despised digital displays, especially on automobile dashboards.  They came to represent form over function for me, trendy over steady and competent.  I am just guessing that you might look more closely at the dash of the next couple of cars you climb into.  Want to know a little secret GM won’t tell you?  All the US automakers scrapped digital displays in the 1990s and went back to analog dials.  I drive a 2003 Ford with an all-analog display that is far more usable than the same vehicle’s digital readouts a decade prior.  To my knowledge, the German and Japanese automakers never made the mistake in first place.  Maybe a few other engineers had a heart-to-heart with a chief.

–Rob E.

With List View, users toggle various opportunities and with ONE additional click assign themselves to each of the selected shifts.  If enabled by managers, users can also unconfirm themselves from multiple shifts.

Among others, this feature is ideal for EMS scheduling, security scheduling and call center scheduling.  These workforces don’t generally pattern the typical 8 hour workday.  Shifts tend to be extra long or super short, ad hoc, unpredictable and ever changing.  In one sweep workers can schedule themselves for multiple shifts on different teams, at various times, across all locations. Users are only capable of double booking themselves if previously enabled by a manager.

According to one volunteer scheduling manager “list view saves workers valuable time, when it’s easier to pick up shifts, volunteers pick up MORE shifts.”  This is just another reminder that employee scheduling software doesn’t need to be complex or cumbersome.  Shiftboard’s ease of use and intuitive design keeps things simple.