Overview of Deployments

Deployments are an exciting new feature that will give schedulers more precision when creating shifts. They will allow those who are scheduling shifts to station staff members in certain areas of a venue and move them around throughout the shift. For example, a staff member might be positioned at the venue entrance in the morning and move to the foyer in the afternoon, depending on scheduling needs.

Deployment Permissions

With this update, you are able to set up separate permissions for how deployments are handled. Under the permissions list, there are four separate permissions for deployments that you can set access to. You can allow someone to have permissions to set deployment permissions, which allows chosen personnel to be able to create, edit and remove positions used within shift deployments. There is a separate permission that, when assigned, allows personnel to prevent staff members from being assigned to shifts that contain specified deployment positions. 

Creating deployment patterns is also a separate permission and is separated so that more senior management might be able to create deployment patterns that can be used again and again for easy scheduling. Managing these deployments and being able to edit them once they have been created is also a separate permission and  grants the staff member permission to manage shift deployments; using patterns or custom deployments per shift.

Deployment Positions

When creating a deployment, you will first need to set up positions. Positions are physical locations and will often be rooms or key spaces within your venue. To make them easy to recognise for other managers, if they are titled something shorter, you can also add a description to your positions so it is clear where within the venue you are talking about.

The same position can also be added to multiple venues. This is helpful in cases where you may have separate venues for different teams that are under the same physical location. For example, if you have a venue that is ‘Museum security team’ and ‘Museum front of house team’ they might both have use the same physical locations so you can assign the position to both venues to be able to be added to shifts.

As the example above shows, once you have created your positions, you can view them as a list. Positions can each be a distinct colour, making them easy to view when printing out deployments. 

You also have the option to add a unique texture to each position. However, it is worth keeping in mind that textures will not print out in physical copies and are mainly useful if you are using digital deployments only.

Deployment Patterns

A key feature of deployments is the ability to create patterns. Patterns can easily be created for regular deployments and used repeatedly. 

  Once a pattern has been created, you can add it to a staff member’s shift. Copy-and-paste options are also available if you want to quickly repeat the same deployment pattern to multiple staff members, which can be especially useful with larger teams.

Managing Deployments

Once your positions and patterns (if using) have been created, deployments will be ready to be used in your regular day-to-day scheduling. Once you have scheduled shifts in a regular way, even if they are still unassigned, when you then go to Shifts > Manage Deployments > Shift deployments, you will see a list of all upcoming dates. To start inputting deployments, you need to go to the date you are interested in by clicking ‘manage positions’. 

From here, you can start adding deployments manually by clicking on the blank time slots or applying a pattern to a staff member’s shift using the select pattern button next to the staff member’s name. You can choose from any patterns you have already created and copy and paste this pattern to other staff members to speed up the scheduling process.

You can quickly adjust times by dragging each deployment in any direction at 5-minute intervals, making last-minute adjustments to deployments simple. You can also create a lunch position and factor that into your deployment plan.

You can also easily adjust the labels at the top of deployments. They will be times by default, but you can rename them to relate more to events, e.g., ‘Doors open’ or ‘interval. '

Deployment Planner

Similar to the shift template scheduling tool, we have introduced a deployment planner that allows you to schedule deployments on a much wider scale for more automatic scheduling. 

The planner works by creating a deployment planner pattern, which can include a certain number of your patterns. Per the example from a theatre below, you could include 3 Front of House 1: Foyer, 2 of Front of House 1: Outside 2 and 4 of Front of House: Circle. This could all be under the pattern planner title of 'Evening - Full House'.

You can then layer this pattern onto your calendar. You can choose to repeat this pattern format and also decide the frequency with which it should be repeated.

Viewing Deployments

Deployments are also specifically designed to be printed out, and various options are available for this. We have three options: print by deployment or print by a staff member. You can separate your printout by having a single position/deployment per page. 

This is helpful if you want to leave a printed-out copy of your deployments at the specified location, for example, so that everyone at the front door can see who is in that position and at what times.