About this site
Fifty notes on shift scheduling and rota planning, written for the people who actually build and defend a rota: ward and line managers, operations and resourcing leads, workforce planners, and whoever ends up holding the spreadsheet on a Friday afternoon.
What it covers
What fixes a rota in place before anybody opens the calendar: rest and qualification requirements that genuinely do not move, contractual hours and the promises that sit beside them, skill mix and single points of failure, the physical constraints made of rooms, vehicles and keys, and the large category of constraints nobody imposed on purpose. Then what it takes to test one, price it, and measure whether relaxing it changed anything.
What it leaves out
What the law requires in any particular place — rest periods, notice of a change to a shift, what may be asked of whom, what a contract may be varied to say. Those differ by jurisdiction, by sector and by agreement, they change, and they are a question for somebody qualified where you are.
This is also not a guide to scheduling software. Which system to buy is a much later question than the one here, and buying one before the constraint list exists is how organisations end up automating a set of rules nobody can justify.
About the figures
Every number on this site is an illustration of what one employer recorded for itself, and is labelled as such. None of them is a benchmark, a survey result or a statement of what any rule requires.